THE '80S UNDERGROUND CULT FILM THAT TOOK A TOUR OF METAL FANS AT THEIR PUREST
Last summer, at a small film series at Renwick Gallery in Soho, artist Meredith Danluck screened an underground cult film called Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Shot DIY-style on community television cameras on May 31, 1986, by two friends, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, in Maryland’s Capital Centre parking lot, the short reportage-style film captures the hard-core heavy metal fans hanging out with their friends before a Judas Priest concert.
Video: Heavy Metal Parking Lot trailer
Krulik and Heyn brilliantly managed to record the hilarious attitude and style of the mid-’80s hard-rock set without ever rendering the men and women underneath the tiger-striped one-pieces, muscle shirts, and permed hair as anything less than young and sincere in their love of a band in town. Before YouTube or Netflix, the film moved through the circulatory system of pre-Internet cult interest—passed around, often taped off of a tape of a tape—making Heavy Metal Parking Lot a beautiful secret between friends that still survives today. While the two upstart filmmakers went on to produce a Neil Diamond Parking Lot and a Harry Potter Parking Lot, the original film serves as a valentine to music worship in, maybe, its most sincere and unaffected days. Meredith Danluck talks to Krulik about the lessons of the parking lot.
MEREDITH DANLUCK A few weeks ago I held a screening of some films—Crispin Glover on David Letterman on acid, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and Lucifer Rising. The audience loved your film so much that they asked to watch it twice. JEFF KRULIK Did you have a VHS copy? MD I have an old VHS copy, that was like, a copy of a copy of a copy. JK That’s the best way to see it. MD Well, that was one of the things that was so great about Heavy Metal Parking Lot—that you had to get turned on to it by a friend so by the time you saw it, it was most likely some super-degraded grainy quality VHS copy. It’s grown into a real cult film. How did the whole thing come about? JK I made Heavy Metal Parking Lot with John Heyn in 1986 on a total lark; I ran a community television channel outside of Washington, D.C., which was kind of an extension of my college radio sensibility. John and I became fast friends because he worked for John Waters. We shared the same sensibilities. He had the idea to do this, and I had all the gear. We went out to the Capital Centre, which was where all the concerts were, and it was pure luck that it was Judas Priest and that it was a Saturday night—it could’ve been any band. We weren’t metalheads so we weren’t following it, but Judas Priest was the music of the day so we knew who they were. We spent two hours in the parking lot and let the people speak for themselves. It was a novelty because nobody had cameras back then. These were big, clunky ¾" cameras from community television, so we only got about an hour of footage. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have turned the camera off. It’s great to have footage from a period of time where there were no cell-phone cameras or digital cameras anywhere. We got the footage, it percolated, I came up with the title, John edited it, about six months later in the fall of 1986 we premiered it in a nightclub in D.C., and it grew from there.
MD How did it become this viral piece of culture? JK As far as it being passed around? We gave it out like water. There were no video projections at film festivals and very limited opportunities for screening it, so we just did it as something fun. We aspired to be documentary filmmakers so we gave it away. People taped it and traded it, and then around the mid ’90s we got word that it had traveled out to the West Coast and you could rent it from a store called Mondo Video, and a lot of people in the entertainment industry were really into it. That’s when we decided we should make a sequel, which was the Neil Diamond Parking Lot. We tried to turn Heavy Metal Parking Lot into a feature film, which didn’t go anywhere, but it’s still possible.
MD One thing that I imagine would be different was the way people reacted to the presence of a camera then versus now, when cameras are so ubiquitous. JK Yeah. People are used to cameras now—they’re completely desensitized and blasé about them. It’s nothing to have a camera shoved in your face. People knew what a television camera looked like, but nobody thought to bring a camera to a heavy metal concert and tape the fans. MD Today there’s so much documentation of the minutia of life, with reality TV. With Heavy Metal Parking Lot, you really feel the presence of the filmmaker. It’s not patronizing or completely voyeuristic. JK We didn’t want to separate ourselves from what we were filming, and we wanted to find humor in it but not be patronizing. I think because we were so influenced by vérité filmmaking—Frederick Weissman, Errol Morris—or fly-on-the-wall filmmaking like the Maysles Brothers, we just let the people speak for themselves. There’s a really mundane quality to it. Nobody was documenting places like this. Now I’ve just started to mine my archives from that time period. I’m actually working with someone else’s footage right now. A full year before Heavy Metal Parking Lot, this guy went to a big party in a field with hundreds of metalheads without any police—just a giant bacchanalian party with local doom metal bands. He took a camera and a stolen mic from CBS News and basically made a home movie. We’re calling it Heavy Metal Picnic. It should be on the festival circuit next spring. MD That sounds awesome. JK You see, I don’t have any hobbies. I don’t go camping or play golf. I like to make videos. The trick is how to keep that going. The Internet has changed everything. Now you can screen whatever you want whenever you want. It’s amazing. But if you’re not careful, you’ll just stay up all night on YouTube watching stuff. It’ll consume you.
