May 25, 2012

Matthew Bate Documents an Audio Misadventure in Shut Up Little Man!

by Matthew Bate | Published August 24, 2011

Eddie and Mitch in the Pepto Bismol Palace, c. 1987

I used to hang around a friend’s record store, and one day another loiterer, a maven of obscure pop-culture knowledge named Ron, told me about this bizarre recording of two old men fighting called Shut Up Little Man. I went home and started listening to it, and it was so shocking and compelling that I couldn’t stop. As I researched the recordings I found that the writer Dan Clowes (Ghost World) and Devo, among others, had used Shut Up Little Man to inspire their art. I knew quite quickly that I wanted to make a film about the recordings. That film would become my first feature film, the documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure.

The story of the recordings began in 1987 when two young students named Eddie and Mitch left the Midwest for San Francisco, where they rented an apartment in a bright pink slum they nicknamed the “Pepto Bismol Palace.” The boys were quickly “introduced” to their next-door neighbors Peter Haskett (a flamboyant gay man) and Raymond Huffman (a rampant homophobe), the ultimate odd couple whose drunken fighting terrorized the students. Fearing for their lives, Eddie and Mitch began to record the arguments coming through the paper-thin walls. One of the tapes accidentally leaked out into the world, where it went “viral” in the pre-Internet era, making Peter and Raymond underground pop culture celebrities.

When I first listened to Peter and Raymond’s vitriolic arguments, their foul-mouthed insults and the absolute, pure hatred they had for one another took me into a world most people never have access to. There’s a Beckett-like horror to their situation and a genius illogic to the dialogue that even Hollywood’s greatest scriptwriters could never make up (at one point Raymond shouts “If you wanna talk to me, then shut your fuckin’ mouth!”). They argue about inane things--like cutting toenails or stealing vodka--but their unique and violent diatribes rise above trivialities to become a matter of life and death. Their situation--a gay man living with a frothing homophobe--is such a bizarre dramatic conceit that their tiny apartment becomes the stage for an existential drama, and the tapes allow us to spy in through an audio peephole.

Listening to the tapes is voyeuristically captivating, like traveling past a bad road accident: You can’t help but look. It also presents similar moral questions. Should I be fascinated? Should I listen to this? Should I be laughing at their banter? Is this even legal? The recordings hover on the boundary between art and exploitation; Eddie and Mitch call them art, but they also sell Pete and Ray death certificates and assorted merchandise to their fanbase. There’s an interesting moral murkiness about the whole thing.

As a moviemaker, I’m interested in the kinds of grey areas this story exists in, and I wanted to make a film that walked the same precipice between art and exploitation that the tapes balance upon. I like the idea of spinning the audience’s moral compass and asking them to think about where theirs lands. It’s the same question that faces us, the moviemakers: Are we exploiting Pete and Ray by making them even more famous than before? Are we as morally guilty as anyone else?