Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure

2011 documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: In 1987, a couple of friends fresh out of high school migrated to San Francisco from the Midwest and signed a lease to stay in a cheap pink apartment building. On the way out, their new landlord warned, "Oh, by the way: The neighbors can get loud." Those neighbors--two old men named Ray and Peter and their occasional guest Tony--would bicker loudly at all hours of the night. One of the kids confronted the men and was subsequently threatened. They decided to record the two's arguments, eventually making taped recordings of the spirited and drunken conversations to give to their friends. And long before the word "viral" ever became a thing, the tapes were exchanged enough times to make the arguments of Ray and Peter a cult phenomenon. This documentary takes a look at the phenomenon and the ensuing arguments when people tried to make a buck from it.

This is the sort of thing that I have an interest in. I've had the recordings for a long time, and I was excited about the documentary coming out. After watching, I think I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, the audio documents themselves are fascinating and frequently hilarious. But it for sure crosses the line into exploitation, and watching the pair who recorded Ray and Peter attempt to strike it rich with their "art" rubbed me the wrong way. It's not just them either; there's a pretty big group of people who have illustrated Ray and Peter's fights for comic books, remixed the recordings, or attempted to have movies made. Most telling in this is when Eddie Sausage and Mitchell D. change the liner notes of their cassettes to include copyright information. There are also some things about this that kind of annoyed me. The reenactments were on the goofy side, and their attempts to get an on-screen interview with Tony, the only surviving voice from the recordings, made me a little uncomfortable. I might feel a little dirty the next time I pop in my Shut Up Little Man! recording, but it won't stop me from enjoying it anyway.

My favorite line from those recordings remains the same: "You always giggle falsely. You don't have a decent giggle in you."