'Spinal Tap' Director Blasts BLACK SABBATH For Being 'So Dumb That They Thought' Stonehenge Scene Was 'Stolen' From Them

Rob Reiner, director of iconic mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap", has blasted the members of BLACK SABBATH for thinking that they were the inspiration for a classic scene in the movie when SPINAL TAP's live concert set of Stonehenge is mistakenly built to be 18 inches tall instead of 18 feet. A similar incident occurred on SABBATH's "Born Again" tour in 1983, except the band's monument was too big to fit on the stage. However, the movie scene in question was actually filmed in 1982, as part of a 20-minute short (called "Spinal Tap - The Final Tour") the production team used to get a greenlight, making any similarities between the film and SABBATH coincidental.

Speaking to Screen Rant to promote "This is Spinal Tap"'s 41st anniversary re-release, Reiner said: "BLACK SABBATH was doing a tour [without Ozzy Osbourne], and they came out about two or three weeks before our film came out, [and they had Stonehenge]. They saw our film and they were furious that we had stolen the Stonehenge theme from them."

Noting that the writers had been working on the Stonehenge idea for years before making the movie, the director added: "To me, it was the best thing, because what morons. What did they think? They [thought] that we shot the film, we edited it, [and] we got it into the theaters in two weeks? I mean, it is ludicrous. But to me, that was the great, perfect heavy metal moment: that they were so dumb that they thought that we stole it from them."

BLACK SABBATH bassist Geezer Butler wrote about the band's use of giant rocks on stage during the tour in support of the "Born Again" album — SABBATH's sole release with singer Ian Gillan — in his autobiography "Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath - And Beyond".

"Presumably because we had an instrumental called 'Stonehenge' on the album, [BLACK SABBATH's then-manager] Don [Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne] wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed," Butler wrote. "I thought it was an utterly ridiculous idea."

According to Butler, the stage designers wrongly interpreted the SABBATH tour manager's measurements of the size of the rocks as referencing meters rather than feet. As a result, the stage props which were delivered to SABBATH were three times larger than they were supposed to be.

"When we rehearsed at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, the stones were set up on the floor and actually looked really expressive," Butler recalled. "But when we did our first gig of the tour in Norway, and out the stones on the stage, they were almost touching the ceiling. That's when Don had another brainwave: 'We'll have a midget crawling on top of them, dressed as the baby devil on the album cover'... At our gig in Canada, this little bloke, who was dressed in a red leotard with long yellow fingernails and horns stuck to his head, was crawling across the top of the tallest stone and fell off. That was actually supposed to happen, but someone had removed the mattress, and the poor fella injured himself quite badly. That was the end of the devil baby."

Addressing the similarities between "This Is Spinal Tap" and SABBATH's Stonehenge prop, Butler added: "Years later we did a photo shoot with SPINAL TAP and asked them if they'd based those scenes on us, but they said it was just coincidence. I find that difficult to believe.

"People often ask if I've seen the film... I always reply, 'Seen it? I've lived it.' I know IRON MAIDEN hated that film, thought it was an affront, but it's one of the funniest films I've ever seen, because it's so accurate."

SABBATH guitarist Tony Iommi wrote about the band's Stonehenge prop in his 2011 memoir, "Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven And Hell With Black Sabbath".

"When we were thinking about the stage set for our 'Born Again' tour, Geezer said: 'Why don't we have something that looks like Stonehenge, you know, with stones and all that stuff?'," the guitarist wrote. "Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: 'Oh, great. The stage set is going to come today.' It came in and we couldn't believe it. It was as big as the real Stonehenge. They had taken Geezer's measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said, 'How the bloody hell did that happen?'"

As for the fate of SABBATH's Stonehenge prop, Iommi said: "At the end or the tour we tried to give it all away to the people who had bought London Bridge and reassembled it in Arizona, but they didn't want it. We couldn't take it back to England, so the crew dumped it off at the docks somewhere and left it. Just ridiculous."

When "This Is Spinal Tap" was released, not everybody got that it was a "mockumentary." U2's The Edge immediately embraced it, saying: "I didn't laugh, I wept. It was so close to the truth." Ozzy didn't understand it, saying the first time he watched it, he thought it was a real documentary. Early home video versions of the movie reportedly even had a disclaimer at the start and finish of the movie stating the band didn't really exist.

"We do love that, the musicians who have said, 'Man, I can't watch 'Spinal Tap'. It's too much like my life,'" Harry Shearer, one of "Spinal Tap"'s creators and stars, said in John Kenneth Muir's book "Best In Show: The Films Of Christopher Guest And Company". "That's the highest compliment of all. It beats all the Oscar nominations we never got."