We live in a society in which a one-minute video of a baby biting the finger of his older brother can achieve pop culture significance because of the Internet. The word “viral” has been used to describe how videos, images, and other content rapidly spread from one user to another to create capricious phenomena that play out with a click of a button. Of course, it’s easy to spread media these days, but what about in the pre-digital days of tape trading? That is half the story of the documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, which explores the history of the famous underground recordings of Peter and Ray.
Never heard of Peter and Ray? The elderly duo happened to live next door to just-out-of-college Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D in a San Francisco apartment complex in 1987. The pair became an underground audio phenomenon when Eddie and Mitchell recorded the frequent drunken arguments between their neighbors Peter and Ray, which often were reduced to boozy, gay-bashing insults which, if nothing else, are hysterical in their vitriolic hatred.
In the pre-Internet, pre-digital world these recordings still became an underground phenomenon, which speaks to the strength of the original recorded material. Yet perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the documentary is the fallout that Eddie and Mitchell experienced once the recordings began to be commercially successful. What had once been a fun counter-culture artifact became something that could generate real income. Though the Peter and Ray tapes had been adapted for underground comix (including strips drawn by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes), puppet shows, popular music, and a stage play by Gregg Gibbs, several competing movie versions of the angry old men never got off the ground in the mid-1990s because of copyright issues – including, of course, that Peter and Ray never legally consented to being taped or having their lives adapted for film. It’s at this point that the documentary makes a fascinating turn as it becomes apparent that unbeknownst to the original subjects (Peter and Ray) at least three factions of people associated with the tapes were vying to be the first to produce a film based on them.
Like any good documentary Shut Up Little Man! brings up several ethical questions, particularly whether or not anyone – particularly Eddie – has the right to make money off of taped private conversations even if he and Mitchell could clearly hear the yelling from their adjacent apartment. In fact, it’s not hard to find sympathy for Peter and Ray during the film when you realize that those who want to make a film about them are willing to pay Peter as little as $10 for the rights to his argumentative and embarrassing life story. In fact, my biggest complaint about the documentary is that director Matthew Bate is a bit slow in focusing on the exploitive nature of the whole situation, and although Bate does show us Eddie selling Peter and Ray merchandise — including death certificates for the two men — over two 
decades after he co-recorded the tapes the important ethical question about whether Eddie has a moral “right” to profit off of his “art” recordings of Peter and Ray (several of the documentary’s talking heads dispute whether or not recording environmental audio could be considered art) aren’t really raised until the documentary’s final minutes.
But Shut Up Little Man! does show the end result of nearly every underground phenomenon: what starts out as something ars gratia artis (art for art’s sake) eventually becomes something that everyone involved wants to make a profit off of when its moneymaking potential reveals itself. In this case, however, the question of whether the “art” originated with Peter and Ray’s arguments or Eddie and Mitchell’s taping of the arguments is asked. Still, it’s not surprising that many viral Internet hits over the last several years have faced the same issues – for example, the infamous “Star Wars Kid” whose parents actually sued the families of the students who made his video public because of the subject’s eventual humiliation and harassment when the video became a worldwide viral hit. The documentary reminds us that as we continue to create video and audio hits of “found footage,” it’s important to consider the impact that media will have on the subjects. Peter, in an archive interview from the 1990s, is prophetic when his immediate reaction to being told of the popularity of the tapes is “when can I sue?” Exploring those issues which is the real conflict of the story, could have made the documentary more interesting since these questions are rarely addressed until the final 30 minutes or so of the documentary.
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is a documentary that has its place in the study of media law and pranksters, but can certainly pull in crowds who have just a general interest in the fallout of taping two old men yelling at each other. Perhaps if the director was a bit more aggressive with its subjects it could be even more universal and provocative, but as a record of a cultural phenomenon of the late 1980s to early 1990s it is unrivaled by any documentary on pop culture obsessions I’ve seen since King of Kong. If nothing else, it exists as a fascinating record of an era when distributing a “viral” hit took a lot more than just a Facebook post.
Rating: 7.5/10 Worth watching if you’re curious how a viral hit can turn ugly or in its legal ramifications
Check out where you can see Shut Up Little Man! in theaters or on Video On Demand here!
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