Jeff Krulik Loves the '80s The genius behind Heavy Metal Parking Lot returns to his favorite subjects: Mulleted Marylanders

Considering the severity of Krulik’s problems—it’s now three weeks before the premiere, and the film is nowhere near done—I arrive in Brooklyn expecting a top-notch editing HQ. A place with a receptionist, a modern art aesthetic, and free vending machines.

Instead, I find DeLiso. He doesn’t look like someone you’d trust with five years’ worth of your life’s work. He wears a black San Jose Sharks T-shirt and sports a reddish-brown pompadour haircut. He edits next to his bed in the living room of the apartment he shares with three other people. There’s a bearded dragon laying under a heat lamp across the room. Near where the group of us will eat pizza later, there is a taxidermied rooster and a lava lamp.

Krulik gave him the gig, site unseen, based on Pickett’s recommendation, mailing off a hard drive crammed with all the footage he’d collected in the course of the movie: Rudy’s, his own, a news story about the event, random clips of Ronald Reagan, and some footage by the lead singer of the Blue Rockers, which Krulik retrieved from California. Have at it, he said.

That was a month ago. Now they are tweaking scenes and debating what kind of pizza to get for lunch and whether to buy one 2-liter or two. Krulik doesn’t seem to mind the college atmosphere. He’s too busy arguing about a scene in which the cameraman zooms in on a woman’s breast while supposedly interviewing her significant other about the concert.

“When it happens, you’re automatically inside the cameraman’s head at that point. You see that he’s chosen to zoom in on the woman’s breast instead of like, the guy talking,” DeLiso says. In short, he wants to keep the cut. Krulik thinks it’s tacky.

“The problem is your editing,” Krulik says. “It needs more room. The scene needs more room.”

And on, and on, and on, for about 10 minutes until the two reach a reasonable if subtly testy compromise.

DeLiso has also put the film on a diet: It’s now down to 60 minutes from 98. Because DeLiso isn’t from Maryland—he’s from Michigan—and because until two months ago he had never heard of Krulik, he felt no obligation to preserve the lengthy scenes. Among other things, the trims leave less material to argue about. In DeLiso’s mind this has made the film leaner, faster-paced, and slightly funnier than Krulik’s first and second cuts. It has also, however, irritated the living daylights out of Krulik, whose take is that DeLiso went into Krulik’s kitchen, dumped out all the drawers, and put everything back in the wrong place.

Incidentally, this is exactly what Krulik said he wanted.

After eight hours of scene-by-scene nitpicking, I need to catch my bus back to D.C. and Krulik seems like he’s ready to blow off some steam. He seems happier than at any point since November 2009, when he first told me about Heavy Metal Picnic. He’s not ready to talk money or a return to the spotlight, but he’s not trashing his own efforts anymore, either. It’s hard not to root for a guy who’s devoted his life to making nobodies feel like somebody, if only for 90 minutes of running time. I tell Krulik I like what DeLiso’s done, and that I have high hopes for the premiere. Before I can hop on the subway, Krulik asks me if I want to test my luck at the off-track-betting parlor. At long last, he’s feeling lucky.

After four years, 12 hours of raw tape, and a deus ex machina in the form of Greg DeLiso, Heavy Metal Picnic is finally about the right length.

But is Krulik’s film—coming Aug. 6 to the AFI, ready or not—any good? On the bus back to D.C., I make a list of objective statements about the film: It is a time capsule, an inside look at Maryland’s white-kid 1980s music culture, and an homage to home video. Krulik made it because it reunites him with the franchise that made him famous, because too many pieces fell into place for him to say no, and because he realized a long time ago that if he couldn’t escape Heavy Metal Parking Lot, he needed at least to make his albatross into a piece of bling.

The movie is very good. But, at last, it is also not Heavy Metal Parking Lot. This is not a knock or a critique, it is simply an answer to the question that comes up every time Krulik makes another movie.

It isn’t until Krulik e-mails later to say he’ll be flying to Austin to screen a collection of his films—Heavy Metal Parking Lot included—that I realize what Heavy Metal Picnic is about. It is about Jeff Krulik. It is about revisiting a moment in someone else’s life that defined them in order to recreate a moment in Krulik’s life that defined him. This is why he wishes he’d filmed the entire ’80s, why Rudy Childs’ tapes lit a fire in his belly, why he did not give up on the movie even when making it seemed futile.

And this is why Heavy Metal Picnic is not Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Not only is it too personal, too thoughtful, and in some ways too sad to “go viral,” but it’s also too old to capture today’s zeitgeist. That was the whole point of Heavy Metal Parking Lot and its successors. By contrast, Heavy Metal Picnic is a guide to living one’s life once the monumental moments are over; when the epic field party you played before your band broke up is just a blurry memory and the accidentally great movie you released at the start of your film career is just a footnote in film history.

Whether he meant to or not, Jeff Krulik started Heavy Metal Picnic thinking he might be able to piggy-back off the movie that made him famous. He ended up transcending it.