Almost forty years on, the best-known scene in metal documentary history remains Chris Holmes floating fully clothed in a swimming pool, pouring vodka over his own face while his mother sits at the water's edge and watches. It was never the plan.
Penelope Spheeris, who directed "The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years" in 1988, has returned to the scene in a new interview with Michael Moynihan of The Moynihan Report. What she wanted for the W.A.S.P. segment was the band's frontman. Blackie Lawless, she says, "was too cool to participate."
So she got the guitarist. And then, by her account, she thought she had wasted the shoot entirely. "I don't got this interview," she recalls thinking. "We're gonna have to film him again." She wanted a reshoot — "We need to shoot this again" — and the budget would not stretch to one, which is the only reason the footage was used at all. Her description of what was actually on the tape is not flattering: Holmes, she says, was just "floating over there" in the pool.
It became the defining image of the film, and it has not aged into comedy for the man in the water. Holmes has spent years circling back to it. He confirmed to Full In Bloom in May 2021 that the alcohol was real — "Yeah. If you look at the footage, it burns my eyes" — and he has raised the obvious concern about what the scene models for young viewers. He also has a complaint about the money, which went through management rather than to him: "Penelope, you owe me 300 bucks," he told TotalRock's Dawn Osborne. And he does not rate the film's grasp of the scene it was documenting, arguing Spheeris "could have got somebody that lived in L.A. that knows deep underneath the rock scene."
Spheeris has offered one piece of mitigation. She told Rolling Stone that "the first half of the bottle of vodka was real, and after that he was filling it up with pool water" — which makes the scene marginally less alarming and does nothing to explain why anyone thought it should be filmed.
"The Metal Years" also caught MOTÖRHEAD, AEROSMITH and KISS on camera. Nobody remembers any of that. They remember the pool.