Sydney 2011 Review: SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! AN AUDIO MISADVENTURE

by Oliver Pfeiffer

When two college grads, Mitch Deprey and Eddie Lee Sausage, move into a dingy San Francisco apartment and tape the drunken profanity-fuelled quarrels of a couple of noisy neighbours, then pass the hilarious recordings onto friends, the knock-on effect creates a pre-YouTube age underground 80s sensation.

rating:3.5

The fact that the abusive alcoholic old men next door, (one homophobe the other homosexual) were completely oblivious to the cult attraction their banter, which included the titular often repeated phrase €˜Shut up Little Man!€™, had acquired adds to the sly sense of fun and misadventure. Not only does the ten or so hours of audio recordings provoke intriguing speculation about the mysterious curmudgeon pair (were they gay lovers? Why did they live with each other if they loathed each other so much?) but it invites audiences and comedy writers to speculate their own back-stories and develop Old Couple style characters for stage plays and film projects. There are plenty of other amusing clips which contextualise proceedings, including outtakes from a radio commercial that the great Orson Welles recorded for frozen peas, where he noticeably gets irritated with producers. You realise there was a craze in the 80s for candid material of people talking which offered revealing insight into their real personas. Aussie director Matthew Bate delivers a scathingly good documentary that catches up with the now matured Deprey and Sausage, to explore the misadventure in all its fascinatingly profound voyeuristic detail. We learn how the pair acquired subsequent copyright and mass marketed the footage, which brought up all sorts of convoluted ethical and legal issues €“ especially when they worked with a comic book artist to expand the comedic potential of the footage and come unstuck when the talent claimed ownership. Although it begins to get a little repetitive around the half way mark, Shut Up Little Man! is boosted by a few nice surprise cameos and an exploration of some of the ethical consequences that the recordings have unearthed. Here€™s hoping a similar cult sensation will spark from this thoroughly entertaining documentary too.
Contributor

Oliver Pfeiffer is a freelance writer who trained at the British Film Institute. He joined OWF in 2007 and now contributes as a Features Writer. Since becoming Obsessed with Film he has interviewed such diverse talents as actors Keanu Reeves, Tobin Bell, Dave Prowse and Naomie Harris, new Hammer Studios Head Simon Oakes and Hollywood filmmakers James Mangold, Scott Derrickson and Uk director Justin Chadwick. Previously he contributed to dimsum.co.uk and has had other articles published in Empire, Hecklerspray, Se7en Magazine, Pop Matters, The Fulham & Hammersmith Chronicle and more recently SciFiNow Magazine and The Guardian. He loves anything directed by Cronenberg, Lynch, Weir, Haneke, Herzog, Kubrick and Hitchcock and always has time for Hammer horror films, Ealing comedies and those twisted Giallo movies. His blog is: http://sites.google.com/site/oliverpfeiffer102/