Guest List

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the master of the mockumentary, Mr Christopher Guest

By Si Truss

Big bottoms, big bottoms, talk about mud flaps, my girl’s got them.

Supposedly when Liam Gallagher first saw Christopher Guest’s best known project This Is Spinal Tap he believed he was watching a documentary about a real band.

This proves two things, firstly that Liam Gallagher is, as we always suspected, an idiot and secondly that Guest has an incredible knack for writing dialogue that is not only hilariously funny but also dangerously close to reality.

In fact it wasn’t only Liam who was befuddled on the film’s release; director Rob Reiner was reportedly amazed by the amount of people who’d come up to him telling him they loved his film but thought he should have made it about a better known band.

For Guest, who co-wrote Tap as well as starring as the band’s rather dense guitarist Nigel Tufnel, the film’s mock documentary style (or mockumentary if you will) was to become something that would act as the trademark of his career.

It wasn’t until several years after the success of Spinal Tap that Guest would return to the mockumentary genre. In the meantime he worked as a writer on American comedy staple Saturday Night Live along with several Spinal Tap spin-offs. He even directed his first full length film The Big Picture; a humorous if slightly unsuccessful look at indie film making.

However in 1996 Guest returned to the genre that would make his name with the much overlooked and hugely underrated Waiting for Guffman. Guffman, which parodied the world of amateur dramatics, saw Guest assemble for the first time members of what would become his ‘team.’

Most importantly it was the first time Guest would write with Eugene Levy (that’s right Eugene ‘Jim’s dad from American Pie’ Levy), who would play a major role as a writer and actor in all of Guest’s films to come. In fact it’s hard to imagine that the brilliantly funny Levy seen in Guest films is the same man who’s appeared in such dismal films as American Pie: Band Camp and The Man.

Guffman also set the mark for the way Guest’s films would be made. Supposedly Guffman had less than 12 pages of script, most of the dialogue being improvised.

The next film to appear in Guest’s mockumentary canon would be Best In Show, a film which explored, in a typically oddball manner, the already slightly strange world of the dog show. Best In Show which saw a lot more success than Guffman, was followed fairly rapidly by A Mighty Wind.

For the third of his self directed moc-doc’s Guest did for folk music what Tap did for heavy metal. He even gathered together the actors who played the aforementioned band to play folk trio ‘The Folksmen.’

For his new film For Your Consideration, Guest directs his team in the direction of indie film making once more, parodying what happens when the sniff of an Oscar gets on to the set.

This time round Guest adds Britain’s own Ricky Gervais (who hails Guest as one of his biggest influences) to his collection of actors, Gervais taking the role of a big film executive interfering in the making of ‘A Home For Purim,’ the fictional film about a ridiculous Jewish family returning home to the American deep south to gather around their dying mother.