“Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadvanture” is a documentary about audio verite: the art of capturing and reproducing audio from day-to-day life without commentary. It centers around two young men, Mitch Deprey and Eddie Lee Sausage, who live in a cheap, run-down apartment in San Francisco in the late 1980s. Their neighbors, Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman, are two old drunken men who belt out profane yet oddly comical arguments nightly. Mitch and Eddie record these arguments and begin sharing the resulting audio with friends. Although the circumstances around the arguments are disturbing and even mildly frightening, the material is also weirdly compelling and sometimes amusing as Raymond and Peter exhibit a unique and intricate style of verbal abuse. Over several years, the tapes are circulated via underground networks throughout the country and become a viral phenomenon that inspires songs, plays, comic books and essays by artists and writers as varied as Kevin Peaty, Daniel Clowes and Devo.
The film explores how the tapes spread so widely and the impact of the material’s popularity on the lives of both the recorders and the recorded. It also examines the thorny legal, artistic and moral issues around developing commercially successful projects from material that the artist found and recorded, but did not create.
It was directed by Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate who kindly answered a few of my questions about the film.
Follow this link to read our discussion.
Q: The movie discusses various challenges that have defeated other efforts to make this material into a film. How did you overcome those obstacles and become involved in making this project?
A: Well, I came across the recordings quite late – about three years ago – in a record store. A friend of mine told me about them. He was a maven of culture, one of these older guys who knows about very obscure things. He wrote the name down on a record bag for me. So I went home and Googled it and listened. And that was it – I was hooked. Hearing it in its purest form, devoid of context, the tapes provide this peek through an audio peephole into this very strange world that you would never be a party to. From there, my documentary instincts took over.
And at first it was quite difficult. As you saw in the film, there had been a lot of backstabbing and betrayal associated with past attempts to make a film about “Shut Up Little Man!” So Mitch and Eddie were very wary. It took quite a few Skype calls to convince them. I also sent them a few of my early films – which they really liked, luckily. They liked the style. Then we got on board.
Q: Your style does seem like a perfect match because I know that you’ve described yourself as a collage-style filmmaker. Do you think that background influenced your desire to make a movie that is, essentially, about art made with found sounds?
A: Absolutely. I have made a few films in the past which used that style. Part of it comes from having been a collagist and playing around very early on – before stencils became a popular street thing – doing a great deal with stencils and cut-outs. Physically cutting up old magazines. The type of thing that many angry young men seem to do! (Laughs). And making a couple of films where the pragmatic nature of the story forced me to be a collagist. They were not films where you could sit people down in a room and interview them. It forces you to use archival or do things with motion graphics or old photographs. And yes, you’re right, “Shut Up Little Man!” lends itself perfectly to that style of filmmaking. It was definitely a natural evolution for my work – that beg, borrow, steal attitude suits this project. And I love it. I love punk music and this film has a punk ethos – which I love.
Q: Without giving too much away, at one point in the film, Eddie and Mitch go back to find the people that they recorded. Was that your idea?
A: Well, they had gone to find Peter in the 90s. Before I was involved. They did try to talk with him, give him money and tell him that he was famous. Tony (a third man who had occasionally stayed with Peter and Raymond during the period when the recordings were made) was another story. I definitely wanted to find him and had made inquiries to try and locate him – with no success. He was the only witness – the only person who had been in the belly of the beast. Eddie was then subsequently contacted by someone who had found where he lived. And we were in San Francisco because I had taken Eddie and Mitch back there to revisit the old apartment. They were very keen to find him, to go and talk to him. So they went to go interview him – I didn’t do it. Which I thought was very interesting because I thought it showed something about them and their desire to keep this mythology alive. So I stepped back and let them follow the trail. We went as a group to his apartment.
Q: It seemed Eddie and Mitch had a keen interest in understanding the nature of the relationship between Peter and Raymond. Is that true?
A: Well, yes. That is also something that I had asked them to follow up on. It’s something we were all interested in. If I had gone and done the interview myself, that’s what I would have wanted to know; so I asked them specifically to inquire about it. What light could he throw upon this very bizarre and seemingly unlikely friendship – or whatever you want to call it – between a gay man and a rampant homophobe. Why did they live together?
Q: The audio tapes of “Shut Up Little Man!” have maintained a strong underground following for many years now. Why do you think their popularity has endured?
At the time when these tapes were created, viral spread was slower – a drip feed. They were handed around physically or through the mail or swapped at parties or distributed through ads in a zine. The slower word-of-mouth process does impact how long an item stays around. But even now – in the age of digital recording and You Tube – new people are still being turned on to it. So I think its enduring power comes from many factors. For example, many of the most popular You Tube hits are only two or three minutes long. The “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes are an epic work – fourteen hours of material that you can completely lose yourself in.
And it reveals itself in a strange way. For me, for example, I first found the tapes truly hilarious. But then, after I had been listening for some time, I thought “[W]hy am I listening to this? Should I be listening to this?” It feels wrong somehow. I wondered “Who are these guys? They sound tragic and sad.” But I am compelled to keep listening because they say things that are so outrageous. Twenty Hollywood script writers could sit in a room for a year and never come up with this dialogue. It’s so illogical. Such genius. “If you want to talk to me, then shut your mouth.” How could you write that? It has a certain stickiness about it. Once you get the bug, you are sucked in for life.
Q: Your film doesn’t suggest whether you think the audience should feel voyeuristic or guilty for listening. You interview fans of the tapes (including some famous ones) who discuss their own thoughts and reactions, but those opinions are all treated equally. What do you feel – personally, not as a filmmaker – about the tapes?
A: I don’t like films that preach, so I didn’t want to suggest an answer. I just wanted to spin the viewer’s moral compass. Where do I stand? I’ve been asked this several times recently. I’m still not sure – I’m still trying to work it out. There are elements of the whole commercial effort – selling the death certificates and things such as that – which do seem exploitative. But on the other hand, when people question me about Eddie and Mitch and their right to record this material and then exploit and sell it… Look, I live in a co-joined house. And if my neighbors were that loud, I would fucking hate them. I know that I would. And if I had to turn to recording them as a kind of revenge, then I could see myself doing that. Certainly if I was only 20 years old, as Eddie and Mitch were. So I see both sides of the fence.
And I do see it as art. We have the right to put a frame around this and call it art. Eddie says that he is a folklorist. He has come up with the website, the myth. He has edited and packaged the material. So it is an art form, but it comes at the expense of the privacy of these two men. So I’m still not sure whether it’s right or wrong or both. And if it’s both, maybe that’s more interesting.
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“Shut Up Little Man!” is available for rent from Amazon, Vudu and itunes. It is also available through the video-on-demand service of many cable providers and will be playing in theaters around the country this fall.