Kate Berlant’s Mom Made the Stonehenge Prop for ‘This Is Spinal Tap’

Kate Berlant is the saddest kind of nepo baby. Sure, her parents kinda sorta worked in show business but their jobs were too obscure to give her a leg up. “I didn’t have a producer in the family or a director,” she told Stavros Halkias on his Stavvy’s World podcast. Her father was a sculptor, and “my mom worked in like set design, made props.”

In fact, the only help she ever got landing an acting job was from a friend’s mother who finagled her an audition for the Disney Channel kid show Lizzie McGuire. “I booked it,” Berlant said of her part as Student #2, “and I have never booked a role since from an audition.”

Halkias, though, wanted to get back to the whole prop angle with Berlant’s mom: “Did she ever work on anything cool?”

“She actually has one, I have to say, really fucking cool cred,” Berlant replied. “It’s why they call me a nepo baby.” 

“She made the Stonehenge prop that's in Spinal Tap,” Berlant humblebragged.

“Whoooooaaa!” exclaimed Halkias. “That is fucking cool!”

Maybe even more cool: The actress who plays the Stonehenge prop designer in the movie is a young Anjelica Huston. Berlant’s mom could have had worse on-screen doppelgangers.

Incredibly, the Stonehenge prop may have been based on a real-life band with their own onstage disasters — in reverse. This Is Spinal Tap, the Official Companion, excerpted in The Guardian, says the mockumentary’s Stonehenge fiasco might have been inspired by Black Sabbath’s “Born Again” tour. Lead singer Ian Gillan recalled meeting with designers for the extravaganza, suggesting a set that reflected “something earthy, maybe.” The designers knew just the thing: Stonehenge.

But while Spinal Tap’s replacement prop was problematically small, Black Sabbath had a different problem. The overexuberant designers constructed a monument three times the size of the actual Stonehenge, requiring the band to rent a massive venue simply to rehearse. The assumption was that its size would be no problem in America: “All the places are bigger over there.”

At the band’s first U.S. gig, of course, they couldn’t fit the prop through the door.

Like Spinal Tap, Black Sabbath also had a dwarf interacting with its Stonehenge stand-in. “When we do the dress rehearsal, the dwarf emerges in a red leotard, long yellow fingernails and little yellow horns. He’s going to be (the diabolical baby featured on the cover of the Born Again album),” remembered Gillan. 

No one told the band exactly how this was going to go down. During the rehearsal, they heard a horrendous recorded scream, “and suddenly we see this dwarf crawling across the top of Stonehenge. He stands up as the scream fades away and falls backward off this 30-foot fiberglass Stonehenge onto a pile of mattresses. Then — dong, dong — bells start tolling and all the roadies come across the front of the stage in monks’ cowls, at which point ‘War Pigs’ starts up.”

Ludicrous — and it almost sounds funnier than the tiny Stonehenge that Berlant’s mom built.