Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure Review

Documentary exploring two young roommates, who in 1987, made tapes of the hilarious arguments of their neighbours, inadvertently birthing a pop culture saga

The Story
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is an essential documentary and one of the finest films of 2011 so far. It can be viewed as a treatise on the nature of privacy, intellectual property ownership, memes, and the dubious moral power plays that come to fruition when corporations get their mitts on something lucrative. What is more it takes such concepts and makes them both hysterically funny and tragic in equal measure.
The two camp, alcoholic buddies at the centre of everything, Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman, subside in a run-down garishly-coloured San Francisco apartment complex in the 1980s, dubbed the ‘Pepto Bismol Palace’ by their twentysomething neighbours Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D.

The two friends take to recording Peter and Raymond’s rants surreptitiously, and though eventually discovered, the raving pair remains indifferent, allowing them to continue until they have amassed a sizable collection of compressed rage.

As they create, collect and collate their tapes among friends, word spreads of this quirky pair whose quotes (‘Don’t call me ‘goodnight!’’, ‘If you wanna talk to me, then shut yer fuckin’ mouth!’) turn them into cult underground figures among West Coast hipsters, and eventually, the whole US, in an era before the internet made such things both quick and quickly passé.

The Style

Shut Up Little Man!, which is directed by Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate, makes the most of its brief running time carefully cutting the usual talking heads-style interview footage with comic vignettes, animations, puppet shows, and lively re-enactments.

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Interview highlights include renowned Ghost World comic artist Daniel Clowes, who turned the pair into a series, Greg the Bunny director Mike Mitchell, who wished to adapt the tapes for the big screen, and an obsessive SULM! fan for whom the tapes symbolise an important part of his youth. Vignettes of Clowes comic art, stage shows, puppet adaptations and a prominent arc surrounding legal wranglings for a Hollywood adaptation of Pete and Raymond effectively shows how the tapes grew beyond their creators.

The Legacy

While undeniably comical, the film presents serious underlying themes – footage of an inebriated and somewhat destitute Peter Haskell approving expansion of the ‘Shut Up Little Man!’ brand for a measly $100 cheque is as effective a display of corporate greed in action as anything Michael Moore could come up with.

Any debate regarding the pair’s privacy rights are not explored in depth, but a salient point is made that the volume of Pete and Ray’s arguments were loud enough that they fell squarely within the realm of the public sphere. Focus in the second half of the doc turns to the tug-of-war between three parties vying for film rights (which never came to fruition, although it was eventually adapted into the little-seen Shut Yer Dirty Little Mouth! in 2001).

It is a documentary so well-crafted it should with any justice reach an audience beyond the festival circuit, with an appeal that plays equally well to both the art cinema and college circuit.