Michael McKean Says Making Original ‘Spinal Tap’ Was ‘A Long, Long Chore’

This Is Spinal Tap might just be the funniest mockumentary ever made, but no one said it was going to be easy. In fact, Michael McKean told People, “It was such a struggle to get it done.”

Part of the problem, McKean says, is that the comedy was breaking new ground. “There weren’t a lot of features like it at the time,” he noted. “What we had was 20 hours of film, and we got it down to 85 minutes. It was a long, long chore.”

Before it got to its final running time, there were several iterations as the film was whittled down from its initial 20 hours. A four-hour workprint has leaked online from time to time, revealing what amounts to the original times two and then some. Deciding what to remove must have been painful, especially for comic actors like Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby whose best work ended up on the cutting-room floor. 

McKean hasn’t always complained about the difficulty of the work. He told Stephen Colbert in 2017 that making Spinal Tap “was a fun gig. The idea of not writing a screenplay and saying, ‘Let's make this up as we go along.’”

So, pondered Colbert, essentially laziness? “Yes, absolutely,” McKean responded. 

Creating the film on the fly was always the design. “Initially, we were given a small chunk of money to write a screenplay, and we said no,” McKean told Colbert. Instead, McKean and his co-stars “made a demo version of what we wanted to do. We got a lot of our friends who improvised, and we made a 20-minute version with our own bucks, kind of hawked that around and eventually landed a sale.”

McKean told People that he always had a feeling the final product would endure. “Once we started showing it to people and knowing that the audiences who were there for the film really dug it — it was never going to be Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters was that year,” he said. “It wasn’t going to be Splash, it wasn’t going to be one of the big, big money comedies — but we also knew that the people who liked it would like it very much and would keep it alive.”

Proving the point, McKean and friends filmed Spinal Tap II earlier this year, with director Rob Reiner promising a release date in 2025. “We got everybody together, and we added a couple of surprise guests,” Reiner told Deadline in July. “We have Paul McCartney and Elton John and Garth Brooks. It’s fun.”

“If you think those guys were sad when they were young...,” McKean teased. “It’s tragic in the funniest way — hopefully.”