Boing Boing, You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’

Yesterday Boing Boing posted some exciting news for local geezers: Heavy Metal Parking Lot “recently became available on DVD”! That’s great, I thought, but I could have sworn I’d interviewed Jeff Krulik once for Spin about it coming out on DVD. I e-mailed Krulik to congratulate him and ask if he and co-director John Heyn would want to talk about their good fortune. Here’s what he wrote me:

Sure Andrew. I guess. You can write about how the DVD has been out for over two years, available through Atomic Books, Filmbaby.com and even Amazon for that long, after being neglected by Rykodisc (who had been courting us and working with us for five years). I guess someone at Boing Boing just found out about its availability. We released it for the 20th anniversary in 2006. On May 31 it’ll be 22 years old. Happy Birthday to us. Maybe for the 25th anniversary we’ll put it out on Bluray or whatever the next format of the moment is. I dunno.

I think the important thing here isn’t the release date—it’s that this documentary keeps finding new fans. Let’s face it, laughing at high people in zebra-striped unitards is natural. Here’s a great piece Dan Gilgoff wrote in 2001 about HMPL’s outsize cultural reach. The doc’s Web site has lots more press. Krulik and Heyn may never get rich off their most famous creation, but 22 years on, this little doc about heshers in their native environment (Mark Jenkins once wrote, “The genius—if that’s the word—of Heavy Metal Parking Lot is that it’s a nature film,” and it’s hard to argue with that) still keeps bubbling up. “Graham–like gram of dope”? Awesome.

UPDATE, 12:18 p.m.: Athitakis blogged about this yesterday! Poo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Arts, Awesomeness, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.