I’ve heard it said “This is Spinal Tap” was the first mock rockumentary or rock mockumentary. I disagree and think it was a black and white film from 1964 called “A Hard Day’s Night”. What do you Dopers think?
Ooh, that is intruiguing. Listening to the director (Richard Lester) and his crew, once they spent time in Liverpool they got to know that sense of humor, and wanted to feature it.
They also wanted to exaggerate (“parody” if you will…) the crowds of screaming fans chasing the lads and decided to begin the movie with that.
Was that biography, or a send up?
Was it really a documentary of the Beatles, or more a… mockumentary?
In defense of the latter, I submit Paul’s grandfather. (“He’s a very clean old man…”)
Wilfrid Brambell, the actor who played Paul’s grandfather was the star of BBC’s “Steptoe and Son” which US tv turned into “Stanford and Son”. Throughout the series, the father was called and referred to as “a dirty old man”.
Definitely A Hard Days Night.
Wasn’t there a movie parody of the Beatles? Maybe the Buggles or similiar.
The Rutles. A combination of Monty Python and SNL cast. Predates Spinal Tap by several years.
Yes, that’s it. Thank you.
They lent each Beatle a copy of the movie to see before it was released. Lennon liked it so much he wouldn’t return it.
I’d nominate The Kids Are Alright. It’s legitimate concert and documentary footage, but it’s definitely a very light-hearted and not at all serious film, between the clips of John Entwistle skeet-shooting with his gold records and Keith Moon talking about how he’d never officially been hired and such.
I can believe that (it’s still funny!) but…what did he think of Nasty’s (his analog) father in law being Hitler? That’s taking Yoko hate to a new high (low?).
Maybe he thought Dirk was him? 
Who claims that Spinal Tap was the first?
To me, “mockumentary” implies a specific style of moviemaking, and A Hard Day’s Night is not an example of that style. (For one thing, The Beatles were very much a real band.)
But The Rutles’ All You Need Is Cash may well be; I haven’t seen it myself so can’t give a personal opinion.
Regarding The Rutles…before “All You Need Is Cash” there was their original appearance on Rutland Weekend Television.
It depends on whether a "mockumentary’ has to be made up from whole cloth. You can enjoy the Rutles knowing nothing about the Beatles, and it is still funny. But most of the characters are direct parodies of real people (it took me decades, until the internet, to know who “Ron Decline” was) so it is parodying the Beatles, and events from their lives, directly. Spinal Tap is borrowing some real stories for a fake band.
Now. given that, people asked me in, all seriousness when the movie was new, if it was real. I’m like, didn’t you see Billy Crystal? Patrick Macnee? And that guy that looks like Lenny (or was it Squiggy?)
Rob Reiner and the band members say this throughout their recent book, A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap.
I think several people are missing the point. A mockumentary is not just a parody or a comedy. A mockumentary is a comedy movie that it shot as if it was a documentary. There are scenes with the “director” and “crew”. There are scenes where the “subjects” are interviewed on camera. There are scenes using “historical footage”.
As far as I recall, there was none of these scenes in A Hard Day’s Night. It was shot as a straight narrative movie.
Exactly this.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night, but I don’t think that it’s constructed in that way; it’s just a funny, tongue-in-cheek depiction of a somewhat fictionalized version of the Beatles.
OTOH, though I’ve never watched All You Need is Cash, it sounds like it might be truly a mockumentary.
I’ve seen All You Need is Cash and I agree it’s a mockumentary that predates This Is Spinal Tap.
Wasn’t there there a 1950s rock and roll movie that centered around some made up band? Or maybe I’m thinking of one of the many beach movies.
Say that you’re a teen in the 1950s. You like rock and roll music; rally you love rock and rock music. It’s your - teen - music. Your parents hate it, Congress wants to suppress it, and the devil’s name is tossed around lightly by people who have let religion eat their brains. What could be more appealing?
But you can’t see the music. Well, an occasional television appearance or a Murray the K caravan. What a niche. Hollywood Hucksters dove in. Out came Rock Around the Clock in 1956, the fictionalized story of Bill Haley and the Comets triumphing over all odds, starring Bill Haley and the Comets.
The plots grew thinner, the set pieces more farcical. Rock, Rock, Rock, The Girl Can’t Help It, The Big Beat, Don’t Knock The Rock, Go Johnny Go.
All four of the fabs watched these movies when they could and absorbed the structure: tons of hit songs, a flimsy plot, and lots of yucks. So they made one. Their way.
While all these movies and the future This Is Spinal Tap had the groups buffeted and harried by smarter adults, The Beatles reversed that.* They made themselves the center and revealed the adults as the ones who existed at a lower level of understanding. They were irrelevant, the boys were irreverent. At the same time they were lovable scamps, clean, intelligent, gifted, and physically unthreatening with their girl’s length hair. The language was coded, but clear. Like it or not, adults were outdated and obsolete.**
Director Richard Lester saw long before Rob Reiner (and Zucker Abrahams Zucker in Airplane!) that playing the gags absolutely straight made them far funnier. What became mockumentaries all followed his path.
But AHDN wasn’t a mockmentary; it didn’t spoof rock music or rock music movies. It was a A-level version of earlier B-level and Z-level forgettable nonsense, now dredged up only for the chance to see some historic acts.
Eric Idle - a close friend to George Harrison - understood that soonest. All You Need Is Cash (1978) is a true mockmentary, meant to be one from the start, with songs by Neil Innes that weren’t just funny but so close pastiches of The Beatles they could easily be confused with the real thing, just like Spinal Tap music precisely pastiched the decade of rock music the band had supposedly been through. Nothing about Tap is first and since Reiner had seen AYNIC, it’s a rewriting of history.***
*Technically, AIP’s beach party movies - Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, and Bikini Beach - all released before AHDN - also had the teens as central with the adults as idiots. But their world was a bubble in the real world. Still, playing the “first” game is like snatching the right goldfish from a large aquarium.
**Mick Jagger sang it in a different context.
You’re obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said, “baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time”
***So what was the first movie mockmentary? People who know film better than I do cite Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread.