Interview by Lisa LeeKing & Tanya Richardson
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
We contacted filmmakers Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, most recently directors of Harry Potter Parking Lot, at the federal government’s Dept. of Veteran’s Affairs (John’s day job) to talk about the legendary film they shot nearly 15 years ago. Also, Krulik has a fine website, www.planetkrulik.com, where you can sample his/their many other short projects, including Neil Diamond Parking Lot, Meet Fanboy, King of Porn and I Created Lancelot Link.
Tanya Richardson: This is my friend Lisa, who’ll be interviewing you guys too.
John Heyn: There’ll be four of us? It could get confusing.
TR: We’ll give one of you a Southern accent or something.
Lisa LeeKing: When you shot Heavy Metal in 1986, did you think it would turn into such a cult icon?
Jeff Krulik: No. Absolutely not.
TR: I’ve been having an awful week, so I watched Heavy Metal Parking Lot today and it made me feel like everything was going to be all right. Do you guys still get a kick out of watching it?
JH: Believe it or not, yeah.
JK: And since we’ve both seen it about a million times, I get a kick out of looking at what’s going on in the background [of the video].
TR: I’ve seen it around 25 times now, and you find yourself saying things like, "Look! That guy in the background is saying ‘pussy’!" That’s priceless stuff you don’t pick up on at first.
LL: Whose idea was it to shoot the video?
JK: John, you had the idea. We’d just become friends a year before. We’re both from around here. John’s from Baltimore and had worked with John Waters. I was a huge John Waters fan, and was running a public access channel in the suburbs of Washington, DC. There was equipment at our disposal, so John and I started fooling around at the station.
TR: It’s great to do it in a parking lot, because that’s when people are the most pumped for any kind of event. I went to see the Boss recently and in the bars around the Garden everyone was doing shots and yelling, "This one’s for Bruce!"
JK: I’d been to rock concerts, but I had never hung out in parking lots before. I wasn’t a tailgate kind of person. And I never went to metal shows. We were expecting bikers to smash our camera equipment or beat us up.
LL: So you guys didn’t set out to do this because you were Judas Priest fans.
JK: Not in the least. By sheer luck it happened to be Judas Priest playing that day. I mean it could have been...
LL: Scorpions.
JK: Well, actually Iron Maiden might have worked.
TR: Except instead of "Living After Midnight" you’d have stoners singing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." But what I found interesting about the video was that people seemed to know even then there was something a little non-metal about Rob Halford.
LL: He was the leather boy.
JK: I guess the reason he survived was that Halford had the ultimate heavy metal...
LL: [sings] Aaahhhhh!!
JK: He really had the chops.
TR: Were you ever threatened? Is there anything that happened that’s not on the video?
JK: No. How long can you stay in the parking lot?
TR: It’s strange you put it that way, because you had a movie centered around something that seems very peripheral. Yet people who watch this film always say they wanted it to go on for hours.
JK: We found the outtakes about 10 years later.
JH: But these people [in the parking lot] embraced us, either because they were high or drunk or whatever and were willing to let it all hang out.
JK: We used three-quarter-inch video–
JH: [interrupting] –in a tube camera.
JK: It was state-of-the-art back then. And just the two of us went. We literally paid parking and then never saw the show.
LL: The cars there are so 80s. T-tops, Camaros, revved-up Chevys. And I see guys going to Slayer shows now wearing the same black-sleeve rock shirt and cutoff jeans. That guy is always going to exist. Has anyone in the film contacted you?
JK: Yes. Jay Hughen. He was in a group from Ruxton, VA.
TR: Which one is he in the movie?
JH: He doesn’t have any speaking lines.
JK: Well, he says one word.
TR: Is it "pussy"?
LL: He works at A&M records, right?
JK: Now he’s at Atomic Pop.
LL: I know Jay Hughen!
JK: He contacted us immediately after finding out he was in it, which was only a couple of years ago. He watched it because he had always heard of it. All of a sudden he saw himself with high school friends, people he had completely lost touch with. He’d sobered up and put all of that behind him. Not that we wanted to pass judgment on anybody. I hope everyone in the video turned out okay.
JH: I think most of them, if they’re alive, are roofers now.
JK: It’s definitely a working-class thing.
LL: Do you have any idea how many bootlegs of the video are out there?
JH: A lot.
LL: What about Marilyn Manson Parking Lot and Neil Diamond Parking Lot?
JH: The Marilyn Manson one was on Canadian television, just someone paying homage to us, which happens frequently. There’s one called Heavy Metal Sidewalk.
JK: And there’s Raver Bathroom.
TR: Sweet Christ.
JH: But Neil Diamond is ours. We went to the same parking lot 10 years later and did a diametrically opposed concert.
TR: I noticed the common dominator between the two, as you said, diametrically opposed audiences of Diamond and Priest, was sex. I didn’t think I could see anything more surreal than those two girls in Heavy Metal saying they wanted to "fuck Glenn Tipton’s brains out," but even more upsetting was the women in their 50s saying they wanted to screw Neil Diamond! Especially that heavyset woman who just looks at the camera and says, "Go for it!"
JK: I love her, and I love that line.
LL: Didn’t you try Monster Truck Parking Lot?
JH: I wasn’t happy with the way it turned out.
TR: I remember going to a party in high school at these guys’ house whose parents owned a junkyard. Real white trash. And at one point I looked up from my drink or my bowl or whatever and everyone was gone. I went outside and they were all there shouting "Go! Go! Go!" Except for the only other girl at the party, who was screaming, "No!" She was standing in front of a kid in a monster truck who was halfway over a VW bug. And I will never forget the look on that kid’s face. It was just, "Oh yeah!"
JK: The people at the parking lot were definitely white trash, but the interviews were condescending. Just shots of people with enormous butts.
TR: What about trying to have a reunion with the cast? And tell us about the feature film you want to make based on Heavy Metal.
JH: That’s when we want to do a reunion, at the end of the feature film. I know it’s a little audacious, but I think it could be kind of a cross between Animal House and Schindler’s List.
TR: Pitch it to us.
JK: John has a good pitch.
JH: It takes place in Washington and chronicles the heavy metal subculture. There was something going on in DC then called the PMRC hearings, the [music censorship] hearings spearheaded by Tipper Gore. They were trying to censor records, particularly heavy metal records. The movie is kind of heavy metal meets Capitol Hill.
JK: But in the spirit of Rock ’n’ Roll High School.
TR: Films like American Movie and Dancing Outlaw have huge followings. Isn’t there money to be made selling copies of Heavy Metal over the Internet?
JK: There’s not a lot of money to be made, and it’s not easy doing it yourself.
TR: Have you ever gotten laid for making Heavy Metal Parking Lot?
JK: No. How about you John?
JH: No. I can say no.
TR: Maybe the bigger question is has anybody in Heavy Metal Parking Lot gotten laid for Heavy Metal Parking Lot?
JK: Unfortunately, most of these people don’t know they’re in it. Maybe they just don’t read papers.
TR: They probably don’t surf the Web too much when they’re roofin’.
JK: There’s a roofer in it, the one who looks like a bear.
TR: The big guy!
JH: [yells in deep voice] "Priest!" Hey, are you two metalheads?
LL: I bought a Skid Row t-shirt last week in Tennessee, if that counts.
TR: I wasn’t a Priest fan until after I saw the DC 101 guy do "Living After Midnight." I almost went out and bought the album.
JK: In 1988 Priest came back [to DC] and we wanted to show Heavy Metal Parking Lot before they played. We talked to the promoters and they got us [imitating girl in video] "backstage passes!" We set up a meeting with the band, although it was mainly the road manager and the accountant. I remember the caterer. We were backstage so I thought, "Hey, we get to eat!" I asked if we could have some and he said, "No." Anyway, we showed the video to these guys and said, "Look, this is our tribute to the fans." They said we could show it before the opening act, which was Cinderella.
JH: We went out to the show that night and they didn’t screen it. They said they couldn’t risk the owner of the arena seeing it. I mean, here’s this crazy bacchanal in the parking lot.
JK: There’s a store in L.A. called Mondo Video A Go Go, and they were the ones who really started helping to promote Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Hollywood types like Belinda Carlisle and Sophia Coppola started renting it. A guy from the store called me and said they’d just gotten in a Judas Priest documentary called Metalworks the band put out, and that there were clips from Heavy Metal Parking Lot in it. That’s great. We stole from them and they stole from us. A friend who was working on a VH1 thing with Rob Halford asked him if he’d heard of Heavy Metal and Halford said he loved it.
LL: I had a friend in college who would go in his room and get high and watch Heavy Metal Parking Lot over and over again for months.
JK: Goddammit! Why can’t these executives in Hollywood hear this stuff!
TR: You’ve made something that touches people. And it’s been that way for 15 years. It really saddens me movies like this and American Movie and Dancing Outlaw, which are far and away a million times better than stuff like Detroit Rock City, are doomed to a certain amount of obscurity.
JK: Making a narrative film is so different than making a documentary.
TR: Documentary is much hotter now than ever before. Narrative films like Blair Witch are having to pretend to be documentaries.
JK: They’re not that commercially viable.
TR: I encourage anyone who reads this to go to your website and buy a copy of this film, because it’s one of those films you have to see over and over again. And who knows? The last time I checked the Coven meter it was at 2600.
JH: I saw someone recently with a Coven t-shirt.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot screens with Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years at Anthology Film Archives as part of the "Sound & Vision" series, this Fri. & Sat., Aug. 4 & 5.
