Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman, the screaming, swearing borderline insane duo of San Francisco drunks who had their violent and idiotic arguments immortalized in multimedia as “Shut Up Little Man!” have now had a documentary film made about them called Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend.
If you are, as yet, unaware, of the (perhaps dubious, but I’d say sublime) pleasures of the Shut Up Little Man!, er… legend, here is how the recordings came to be, described by “Eddie Lee Sausage,” who along with his roommate, “Mitchell D,” made the tapes of their belligerent, violent neighbors, eventually releasing them into the world, first on cassette and later CD:
We were introduced to the saga of Peter and Raymond when we moved next door to them in the fall of 1987. As neighbors, we lived in the same Pepto-Bismol-colored apartment building in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. The building was designed like a cheap motel, so that the apartments were sardined alongside one another and separated by thin walls.
Within a week of our arrival, we were exposed to what would become a dependable routine from our next door neighbors: evenings charged with belligerent rants, hateful harangues, drunken soliloquies, death threats, and the sound of wrestling bodies thumping against the wall that separated our apartments. Peter and Raymond fought with a raging abandon and total disregard for everyone in the building. Initially, we were angered by the volume and recurrence of the arguments, but equally we were intimidated by the threatening content. Whenever we got angry enough to go next door, confront them and ask them to keep the noise down, we were forced to give the idea a second thought. Perched in their front window, facing the walkway greeting all who dared pass, was a human skull; what horror would greet us? However, one can be meek and tolerant for only so long. Unnerved by sleepless nights and Peter’s incessant refrain, “Shut Up Little Man” one of us banged on their door, only to receive the first of many murderous death threaths from Ray. “I’m perfectly willing to kill anyone that thinks they’re tough. I was a killer before you were born, I’ll be a killer after you’re dead.” Soon thereafter the notion of recording their threats — in case of the need for criminal proof of an assault — was born.
Shut Up Little Man! has been made into stage plays, an indie film, a number of CD recordings and Peter and Raymond (who are both long dead) have been drawn by Daniel Clowes and seen some of their best lines woven into dialogue in SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons. And now there is a documentary about them. Not bad for a “fuckin’ piece of shit” and a “queer cocksucker” (both deceased) now is it?
Here is an excerpt from the first Shut Up Little Man! CD. Sounding like Sartre’s No Exit if it had been written by Samuel Beckett collaborating with Charles Bukowsi and El Duce, as all three chugged bottles of Night Train, this is how most people were first introduced to Raymond and Peter:
The awesome short by renowned animation director Kevin Peaty (The Lion King, The Little Mermaid):“Shut Up, Little Man!”
The trailer for the new documentary, Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
Thank you, Aimee Knight!