Listening to celebrity rants has turned out to be one of the great pleasures of the Internet. Mel Gibson threatening the mother of his child, Christian Bale taking apart a director of photography on the set of a film, Alec Baldwin calling his daughter a “pig” on her voicemail — these are the audio clips played again and again, months and even years after they were recorded. But Americans have enjoyed listening to people go off the deep end far longer than the Internet has been around. And the windbags don’t have to be celebrities, either. Case in point: the subjects of the documentary “Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure.”
In 1987, Mitch Deprey and Eddie Lee moved from the Midwest to San Francisco’s heady Lower Haight and rented what they describe as a “dumpy little apartment.” Little did they know that the sickly pink building they dubbed the “Pepto Bismal Palace” would make them famous. They signed the lease, and immediately their new landlady turned to them and said, “One more thing. Next-door neighbors — sometimes a little bit loud.”
| On screen |
| ‘Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure’ |
| 3 out of 4 stars |
| Stars: Peter Haskett, Raymond Huffman |
| Director: Matthew Bate |
| Rated: Not rated (pervasive profanity) |
| Running time: 90 minutes |
That was an understatement. Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman were the next-door neighbors from hell. But it sounds like it would have been even worse to have to live with them. Night after night, fueled by alcohol, the two would argue, every word of their profanity-laced tirades perfectly clear through the paper-thin walls. “You shut up, little man. Little man, you shut up,” Haskett would often yell at Huffman.
If you can’t beat them, laugh at them — and then record them. The tapes Deprey and Lee made were audio verite sensations in the early 1990s. Members of Devo even sampled the selections in a side project.
We don’t hear much from the men who were recorded, though. Haskett died in 1996, just a few years after his voice made it to CD, and there are clips from an interview he gave shortly before his death.
