Kudlow said the band was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties by record companies he would rather not name. Reiner have kept Anvil together, entertaining hope that the band might return to its brief mid-1980s glory, though even that never involved big paydays. Anvil never achieved fame and fortune, but it never stopped playing either.įor three decades Mr. As the tongue-in-cheek title “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” implies, Anvil takes itself less seriously than Metallica, Iron Maiden, Anthrax or any of the other heavy metal bands for whom blinding guitar speed, studded leatherware and general bombast proved a route to success.
#Anvil band 1980s movie#
Given Anvil’s snake-bit history its original lead singer was killed in a highway accident when a shipping container fell off a truck it’s unwise to speculate about where the movie will take the group. (Later he worked for Ted Hughes, the British poet laureate, as an assistant.) “It’s already a success in terms of achieving what we wanted to achieve.” Gervasi, who worked as an Anvil roadie when he was 15. “Whatever happens with the movie from here on in is sort of irrelevant,” said Mr. The film wasn’t sold in a Sundance price war and hasn’t yet made anyone’s career (although traffic and CD sales have increased on the band’s Web site, anvilmetal.tk).Īnd yet for everyone involved, it has been a success. Kudlow, the drummer Robb Reiner and their long slog through a morass of record company rip-offs, incompetent management, under-publicized tours, changing tastes, a reunion with the former producer and the creation of a new album.
Summarized by some as a real-life “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Anvil!” tracks Mr. Gervasi said, “that there was a movie here.” After all those years of lugging in the snapper and cod, this was the first time he had sat in the dining room. Kudlow made a melancholy admission: During one of his many less-than-glamorous, non-rock ’n’ roll careers, he had delivered fish to that same restaurant. “In the ’80s I was listening to the Go-Gos.”Īt some point during their meal Mr. Yeldham’s eyes glazed over at the Anvil idea. Yeldham had been looking for a project to do together, but as Mr. At that dinner was an unusual trio: Sacha Gervasi, a suave British screenwriter (“The Terminal”) Rebecca Yeldham, a producer attending the Toronto Film Festival in support of her film “The Motorcycle Diaries” and the lead singer-guitarist for the largely unheralded Canadian heavy-metal band Anvil, Steve Kudlow, called Lips, who in the 1980s liked to appear onstage in a bondage harness, playing slide guitar with a sex toy. Like the vapor trail of a rock-arena smoke machine, uncommon fellowship has followed “Anvil!” since its germination in a Toronto restaurant four years ago. And the film and band land in Brooklyn on May 31, as part of the Sundance Institute at BAM series. The story of a 30-year-old unheralded heavy-metal band (and a few of its fans see above), “Anvil!” has been chosen as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Film Festival next month. If movies are supposed to bring people together, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” was fulfilling its mission, working pan-cultural magic on the Hot Docs crowd, just as it had in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was an out-of-competition hit and the talk of the shuttle buses. And that guy over there, wasn’t he in the film drinking a beer through his nose? But there were also what appeared to be members of a biker gang.
City bigwigs, nonfiction filmmakers, Canadian academics, programmers, the press. AT the opening night party of the recent Hot Docs film festival in Toronto the crowd mostly consisted of the usual suspects.
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