Heavy Metal Parking Lot was a 1986 short film made by
Jeff Krulik and
John Heyn, filmed in the parking lot of a Judas Priest concert in Maryland. Much has been written about it. You can watch the film
below.
I first saw it sometime in the late 90s and started telling all my friends about it. Crushes would vaporize when a girl I liked would sit bored through the entire thing and summarize their review as: "uh, you found that funny?" Thankfully the
girl I married not only had seen the film, she had her own bootleg VHS copy which had a completely awesome homemade VHS box cover.
During one of the zillionth times of watching it I started focusing on the periphery. After I saw the fourth ZZ Top
Afterburner t-shirt, I began to wonder what other shirts showed up in the film.
Sometime around 2011 I imported the official DVD into Adobe Premiere and went though ~30,000 frames of the entire film, one by one. The frames that had the clearest shot of a t-shirt are displayed and accounted for below.
Life
got in the way and I forgot about this project. I did show HMPL to other hikers when I hiked the
Pacific Crest Trail in 2013 though!
When I read a recent and very detailed
Deadspin article on the film by Dave McKenna, I realized I needed to finish this project in celebration of the 30th anniversary of that May 31st, 1986 Judas Priest concert.
Although I was able to identify several shirts, down near the bottom of this page are several shirts I have not been able to identify, feel free to drop me an
email along with the shirt ID number if you have any ideas or write me on
Twitter. You can also click on the photo and leave a comment.
(As for this ace webpage design: I dug up an old 3.5" floppy disk I had from 1995 that contained a bunch of mid 90's graphics that were essential to any web page made back then...who could forget the rainbow horizontal line!)
5/20/16 update:
I talked to Keith of Scratch Records fame in Vancouver BC (who my wife Cora got the HMPL VHS tape from). He says:
"As for the Heavy Metal Parking Lot bootlegs, yes, it was I believe my friend Justice who made them, we sold/gave away/distributed them, and Lester Smolenski did the graphic. Lester did all of the gig posters for dozens (if not hundreds) of shows through the 90's...Also band logos, he came up with the Lil' Scratchie logo I used as well."
5/24/16 update:
Jay Hughen (
#87) dropped by to say hello. I didn't know he was "Alumni #1" according to this
LA Times article from 2001.
5/26/16 update:
There is a reunion+screening of
Heavy Metal Parking Lot at the
University of Maryland this Friday. I will be attending too!
I got all the stills from the
Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The Lost Footage online. The
Lost Footage is available on the
Official DVD. There are some clearer shots of people who show up in the main film, plus plenty of other folks (and their shirts) exclusive to the outtakes. I've marked any still that came from the outtakes with the word "outtake" in yellow.
Finally, Cori (
Robert Plant shirt) and James (
Live Aid Shirt) wrote in to say hello.
5/27/16 update:
Thanks to
metalsucks.net and
Dangerous Minds for the nice words.
5/28/16:
I had a really great time at the screening last night. I have a ton of photos and video to get online. It was really good to meet John and Jeff who made the film, along with Dave who wrote the Deadspin article mentioned above. I also got to meet
Leopard Woman!
7/12/16:
I added a page with some photos and video from when I hiked the
Pacific Crest Trail in 2013 and showed HMPL to other hikers.
...and also!, I am "
Best Heavy Metal Stenographer" in Willamette Week's "Best of 2016".
4/11/18:
I wrote a
running commentary of HMPL for Willammete Week.