Spheeris, who will appear at the IU Cinema this week along with some of her films, including the “Decline” trilogy and “Wayne’s World,” shuddered at the project.
It would involve sifting through the hundreds of boxes of film and video from 40 years of work collected in a cold, temperature-controlled vault.
Aside from the drudgery of it, spending that much time looking at work she did decades ago would be “pure hell,” she said.
“There’s other layers like ‘I wish I had done it differently,’ or ‘That time which was great is over now,’ and then you go straight to ‘I’m going to die soon,’” Spheeris, 69, said. “It’s like my life flashing in front of me by watching these movies.”
So Fox took charge, working with old film formats and borrowing a digital audio player from former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum. Within two years they found a distributor — Shout! Factory — and earlier this year, the films were released as a set on Blu-Ray and DVD.
“Anna was right, because it was a big burden on my shoulders to have the movies not out there, and people really, really want to see them,” Spheeris said. “We’ve sold out theaters all over the country.”
Spheeris will speak as part of the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture Series at 3 p.m. Friday, and the cinema will spotlight her films from Thursday through Saturday as part of its Directed by Women series.
Screenings and the lecture are free but ticketed, and screening times can be found at cinema.indiana.edu.
Initially released in 1981, “The Decline of Western Civilization” was Spheeris’ feature debut. It documented the punk rock subculture of the late-1970s and early-1980s Los Angeles, including interviews with and performance footage of a roster of bands that would prove influential — Black Flag, X, the Germs, Fear, Circle Jerks and others.
When Spheeris began work on the film, she owned Rock ‘N Reel, a music video production company.
She had studied psychobiology — also known as behavioral neuroscience — before entering the University of California at Los Angeles’s film school. She became a fan of punk music, fascinated by the radical behavior, fashion, social attitudes and music of the subculture.
“I did know that it was somehow historically important to put it on film, just as a document,” she said. “ ... I knew instinctively it needed to be done, because I’d studied film at UCLA, and I was obsessed with it.”
After “Decline,” Spheeris directed a handful of narrative features before returning to the documentary series in 1988 with “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.”
The film features interviews with rock icons such as Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper, plus performances by Megadeth and other bands.
Spheeris said she turned her interest in human behavior toward Los Angeles’s metal scene as it supplanted punk as the city’s dominant musical subculture. She grew fond of the genre, which she’d considered “ridiculous” during punk’s heyday.
“If you look at music movements over the decades, you can notice very clearly that each music movement kind of stomps out the previous one,” she said. “Metal stomped out punk, grunge stomped out metal — I don’t know what happened once the Internet hit, because everything just got screwed up at that point. It was just a reaction.”
In 1998, Spheeris released “The Decline of Western Civilization Part III” in a limited theatrical run. The film focused on young punks, many of whom were homeless or squatting in abandoned buildings.
Though the film never saw home video release until this year’s box set, Spheeris said she considers it the most significant.
“If you see the third ‘Decline,’ that’s the purpose for the entire ‘Decline’ series, because what it does is point out a social problem that we have here in the United States with bad parenting and homeless kids and drug and alcohol abuse,” she said. “I think it serves a purpose.”
Between “The Metal Years” and “Part III,” Spheeris’s film work shifted gears from documentaries and independent films to studio comedies.
That shift began in 1992 with “Wayne’s World,” the Mike Myers and Dana Carvey vehicle that spun the pair’s “Saturday Night Live” sketches into a hit film that grossed more than $180 million internationally.
Spheeris had known “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels since before he started the show. She said the second “Decline” and its focus on metal — the choice genre of Myers and Carvey’s goofball characters Wayne and Garth — helped get her the job.
She wanted to do studio work for her whole career, she said, but film industry sexism put up barriers for her.
When she finally did get studio work with “Wayne’s World,” she said another problem presented itself.
“Once I did a comedy and it made $180 million, I couldn’t make any studio movies that had anything but stupid-goofy in it,” she said. “They just assume that’s all there really is for me to do.”
She said she can’t complain too much, as projects like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Little Rascals” allowed her to make movies for money.
But those limitations were a sign of industry sexism that still exists today, she said.
“Nothing has changed,” she said. “It’s still really discriminatory, it’s still really difficult, it’s still 92-or-3 percent men and probably 80 percent white men. There hasn’t been any progress.”
Spheeris said she won’t let the studio comedies that she got stuck with in the ‘90s obscure what she sees as her legacy: the “Decline” series.
“The ‘Decline’ documentaries, to me, that’s my identity,” she said. “That’s why I was placed on the face of the Earth.”
