For Penelope Spheeris, Fame Came at a Price

One of the first ways "Decline" found an audience and established Spheeris's reputation was by airing on "Night Flight," a program launched in the early '80s on the USA Network as an alternative to MTV. Stuart Samuels produced the show and is now a filmmaker (with his own Silverdocs entry, "Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream").

Samuels points to Spheeris's ability to capture the scene as it was exploding.

"[Punk] was not made for music videos or commercial consumption," says Samuels. "So if you weren't in the audience at the clubs or the venues, you weren't going to get that. So she was there to catch that rawness about it and that directness of it."

Spheeris followed "Decline" with punk-oriented narrative features such as "Suburbia" in 1984 and "Dudes" in 1987. A year later, "The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years" focused on the excesses of Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss. Then, because of her relationship with "SNL" and fluency in the metalhead culture, Lorne Michaels offered her "Wayne's World."

Six years later, with her career speeding along in reverse on the wheels of mainstream comedies, Spheeris made a spontaneous trip to revel in counterculture art at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. She went to sleep there and awoke with a new mission.

"I woke up the next morning and said, 'You know what? I'm going to get out of here and finish my documentaries,' " she says, recalling the experience. "At a certain point, I kind of have to do the work I think is most important, and if money comes out of it, fine."

That same year, she made "The Decline of Western Civilization Part III," which caught up with the punk scene -- now a somber, suicidal shadow of its 1981 self. And she turned down every lucrative picture the studios dangled: "George of the Jungle." "Dr. Dolittle." "Legally Blonde." She kept out of the Hollywood scene as she made "We Sold Our Souls for Rock 'n Roll," though she remains "heartbroken" that it hasn't been released.

And her aversion to the mainstream remains strong.

"Ten percent of the people that are very powerful that are making movies really are good human beings and do it right, so I don't mean to blast the whole industry," she says. "But generally, it's a snake pit. . . . It's almost like the more experience you have and the more you know, the more distasteful the environment is."

Spheeris has created her own environment on three acres in Studio City, where she lives and works. She has a daughter and grandchildren, but prefers not to talk in detail about them.

So it's a nice life. But what if there were no "Wayne's World," the film that's made the current phase of her career financially possible?

"I think I'd be better off," she says after a pause. "I do. I'd probably be living in a nice little house in Laurel Canyon, very contained, not a lot of people bugging me. I'd have a lot more friends."