Sometimes life imitates art. In one of the more memorable scenes from Rob Reiner’s 1984 classic rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, a mix-up results in a comically small Stonehenge set piece being descending from the ceiling during a concert. Months earlier, members of Black Sabbath had experienced the same situation, but in reverse. When the film hit theaters in in August 1984, the heavy metal pioneers were reportedly “furious” that Reiner had ripped off their story. More than four decades later, Reiner still considers this notion laughable.
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“Black Sabbath was doing a tour [without Ozzy], and they came out about two or three weeks before our film came out, [and they had Stonehenge],” the Misery director, 78, recently told Screen Rant. “They saw our film and they were furious that we had stolen the Stonehenge theme from them.”
It really is kind of a Spinal Tap moment that Black Sabbath thought Reiner could have heard about Sabbath's incident with Stone Hinge, then shot the entire movie, edited it, and released it within two weeks of that moment.
— Ken Scott (@foomper) July 5, 2025
I hope there's a scene like that in the sequel.
Reiner continued, “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.”
The Time ‘Spinal Tap’ Apparently Predicted This Heavy Metal Mishap
Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler detailed the band’s Spinal Tap-esque incident in his 2023 memoir, Into the Void.
“People often ask if I’ve seen the film… I always reply, ‘Seen it? I’ve lived it,’” wrote the 75-year-old musician.
Manger Don Arden, father of Ozzy Osbourne’s wife/manager Sharon, conceived the ill-fated gimmick, which Butler pronounced “utterly ridiculous” from the get-go.
“Presumably because we had an instrumental called Stonehenge on the album, Don wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, the set’s designers mistook the measurements as meters rather than feet. Consequently, the rocks “were almost touching the ceiling,” according to Butler.
The story gets much, much worse, but Rob Reiner’s point remains: The Spinal Tap team reportedly filmed their Stonehenge disaster a full seven months before Black Sabbath’s occurred.
“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,” Butler wrote in Into the Void. “I find that difficult to believe.”
Regardless, the heavy metal icon still called This Is Spinal Tap “one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen.”
Featured image by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for TCM
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