Penelope Spheeris’s home, near Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, doesn’t look like it belongs to a punk icon. It’s airy and minimalist, with grey tiled floor and white carpet. We’re sitting on white sofas in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and three small dogs are running around.
Spheeris bought the place in 1974, then completely rebuilt it in the 90s with the money she made from directing a string of box-office-friendly comedies. But she’s in no mood to reminisce about the likes of Wayne’s World, The Beverly Hillbillies or Little Rascals. “The only movies I could get released were movies that I basically just sold out on and took the money,” she sighs. “And the only reason they released them was because they had thrown money at it and they had to get their money back.” Then she apologises for being so “Hollywood-jaded”.
She’d rather talk about the rough-edged films she made about social outsiders in the 80s and 90s. Punks and metalheads still revere her for The Decline of Western Civilization, a trio of documentaries about underground music culture in Los Angeles. The first Decline film, which offers shockingly intimate looks at pioneering punk musicians like X, the Germs, the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, instigated a riot when it was first screened in Los Angeles, and its legend has only grown after decades without an official DVD release.
That long hiatus is largely the director’s own fault. As well as refusing to sell the video or DVD rights to her documentaries, Spheeris dragged her feet on rereleasing them herself. Things only changed when her daughter, Anna Fox, insisted it was time to get serious about a reissue – and promised to work with her on it. “Anna kept telling me, ‘Mom, you’re not selling out,’” Spheeris recalls.
With the films finally out on DVD, Spheeris says she has been genuinely surprised at how excited audiences are to see them again. “Put it this way,” Fox says: “Every screening that we’ve gone to, she’s like, ‘I don’t think anyone’s gonna show up,’ and then it’s sold out.” Spheeris has now set her sights on making a fourth Decline film, although she won’t disclose what it’s about.
“I think the reason I never rereleased ’em is because it was gonna be so much work,” Spheeris says. After she found a distributor, she realised just how right she was. “It was brutal,” she says. She and Fox went deep into “the vault” – a storage facility in Hollywood where Spheeris keeps all of her film and photos and the other detritus of a multi-decade career making movies. It’s freezing cold – Spheeris wears a huge coat every time she goes in – and it smells like vinegar, the distinct scent given off by ageing film reels. “It feels like you’re going to some morgue-y prison – cement, metal doors,” Fox says.
With Fox taking the lead, they spent three years combing through footage from all of the Decline movies, which was stored in a hodgepodge of outdated formats. Some of the interviews were on VHS tapes so old that the wheels didn’t turn any more and had to be unwound with pencils. Throughout the process, Fox sat downstairs at Spheeris’s house with the editors, poring over the interview outtakes and hours of performances. When she needed Spheeris to identify someone or explain something, she’d call upstairs, “Hey, Mom! Come look at this!” Spheeris says her main role was to make everyone a hearty breakfast – eggs and hash browns, or sometimes grilled ham and cheese – each morning.
“I knew she needed to do it before she died,” Fox says, although Spheeris is only 69 and seems to be in perfect health. The pair have an easy rapport these days, even dressing alike in head-to-toe black, but for decades their relationship was strained. Fox was busy with three kids of her own, and she became addicted to prescription drugs. Spheeris viewed her as a teenager in a state of arrested development. Fox saw her mother as overbearing, and she felt as if she was walking on eggshells every time they were together.
Spheeris had a difficult relationship with her own mother, Gypsy, a mentally unstable alcoholic who performed in a travelling circus. Spheeris shows me a black-and-white photo of herself, no more than eight years old, standing in the middle of a half-dismantled circus wearing nothing but her underwear. When Spheeris’s father was killed in a knife fight when she was only six, Gypsy shook her awake in her bed at midnight to tell her the news. Spheeris has been a light sleeper ever since. In later years, Gypsy had a string of awful husbands and boyfriends. Spheeris not only raised herself, but was a de facto mother to her siblings. Gypsy, she says, was either absent or abusive, depending on the day. She was also a hoarder – which is why Spheeris’s house is spotless.
“I interpreted my mother’s lack of interest in my life as a lack of love,” Spheeris says. “For me, I want to show my daughter I love her, I’m guiding her.” She was strict with Fox – although Spheeris’s definition of strict might be a little different than most. When her daughter was a teenager, Spheeris was in the midst of filming Decline I and II and embracing the punk and metal scenes. Spheeris and Fox hung out at the same clubs, and Fox became used to having one of her friends tap her and warn, “Hey Anna, your mom’s here”. She would quickly get rid of her beer and cram some gum into her mouth. When Fox was 17, she dated Nikki Sixx, then the 28-year-old bassist of Mötley Crüe. Spheeris made him come to the house and meet her, “just like any other boyfriend”.
Fox is now 46 and raising her own teenagers. “Rock’n’roll karma!” Spheeris says, laughing. Fox has taken her kids to clubs and embarrassed them, just like her own mother used to do – though Fox says she’s a bit more hands-off than Spheeris was. For her next project, she wants to make a documentary about her grandmother Gypsy, whose name is tattooed on her forearm.
“The best thing to come from [the Decline reissue] is my relationship with my daughter,” Spheeris says. “We actually like each other now.”
The Decline series remains her most important work, both creatively and in terms of how it has affected her life. While filming the third documentary, which chronicles the lives of LA’s homeless punks, she met the man who has been her boyfriend for the past 18 years. Today she’s packaging up a birthday card (he just turned 50) and some socks to send to him because he’s locked up in an institution in Florida, more than 2,000 miles away.
“He’s extremely intelligent, but he’s schizophrenic and bipolar,” she explains. About a year and a half ago, he went to visit his ailing father in Florida, stopped taking his medication and ended up in jail.
“Now he’s stuck in the Florida mental health system. And it’s ugly.” Aside from the Decline reissue, getting him home has been one of Spheeris’s primary preoccupations. Someday, she says, “I would love to do a documentary on the sad condition of the mental health system in the US.”
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