Thundering Anvil makes some noise
PARK CITY, Utah -- The lead singer wears a dog collar and plays his guitar with a sex toy. One of their first songs, "Thumb Hang," is about the Spanish inquisition. And the amplifier knob actually goes to 11.
In so many ways, the heavy metal band Anvil is indeed Spinal Tap (did we mention the drummer's name is Robb Reiner?).
But "Anvil! The True Story of Anvil," tracing the Canadian band's resolute determination in the face of countless setbacks, isn't really a rock 'n' roll comedy. Instead, this documentary, which premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival, is an alternatively moving and hilarious love story -- a tale of two people hopelessly devoted to playing heavy metal music.
Guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow met drummer Reiner in 1973, and four years later they formed Anvil. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a gold rush of hard-core rockers: Scorpions, Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, Metallica, Anthrax and Motorhead among them. With its outrageous stage antics and pulsing rhythms, Anvil was right in the mix too, its album "Metal on Metal" envied by the band's head-banging brethren.
As a teen living in London, screenwriter Sacha Gervasi saw one of Anvil's first British gigs. "I was blown away," he recalls. "It was heavy music with really funny entertainment."
After meeting the band at an after-concert party, Gervasi showed Lips and Reiner around London the next day and soon thereafter was invited to be a roadie for Anvil's Canadian tour. "I would sit behind the drum kit every night, watch Robb play, and he taught me how to be a drummer," says Gervasi, who would later play with (and drop out of) the band that became Bush.
Gervasi went to college, his musical tastes evolved and he eventually came to Hollywood (where he co-wrote Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal"). But he never forgot the band -- "I wondered what happened to my old friends" -- so in the summer of 2005 he looked them up. Anvil had never made it -- yet nearly three decades after they first joined forces, Lips and Reiner were still making music, trying to sell a few albums here and get a live gig there. "I thought they had split up," Gervasi says. "But I found out they were still going."
Lips was working at a food service company, Reiner in construction. They were in their 50s, their hair thinning, but their passion for music hadn't dimmed over the years. Having seen all of their contemporaries make it, Lips and Reiner weren't bitter -- they were hungry. "I just kind of felt, 'I think there's a movie here,' " Gervasi says.
