Don’t tell Jeff Krulik he’s famous, especially if anybody's around.
“I’ll be with somebody and they’ll say to somebody, ‘Hey, this is the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot!” Krulik said. “And I know what’s coming next: A blank stare."
"It's humbling," said Krulik, who really is one of the guys who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. But he is grateful for whatever renown he's gotten from the enduring, adored-by-all-who've-seen-it 1986 guerrilla documentary. It all started 40 years ago this weekend, when he and buddy (and fellow budding indie filmmaker) John Heyn showed up early to a Judas Priest show at the Capital Centre with a video camera borrowed from the local public access TV station and their eyes wide open. They rolled tape while cruising outside the Largo, Md., arena, capturing gaggles of great unwashed metalheads in their element. Period-piece characters now known by the film’s faithful fans as “Graham of Dope,” “DC101 Guy,” “Zebraman,” and “The Girl in the White Dress,” all of whom make Beavis & Butthead look preppy and lucid, spewed unscripted, unintentionally hilarious and unforgettable dirtball verse at a rat-a-tat-tat rate throughout the movie's 16 minutes. Rick Ballard, who appeared in Parking Lot as a teen Priest obsessive, then grew up to have a career in TV and run his own record label, hailed the movie in a 2016 interview as “the Citizen Kane of wasted teenage metalness.”
Hell, not everybody's seen Citizen Kane, either.
Krulik and Heyn, neither of whom were into Priest's tuneage or the heavy metal scene, could tell even in the moment they’d stumbled onto something wondrous and worthy of exposure. Their belief in the project was confirmed in the editing room in the weeks after their concrete jungle safari. But they couldn’t legally sell or release their movie, or get Blockbuster to stock a rental copy, because they lacked the money to license the music. So for several years, next to nobody outside their friends in the D.C. area saw Parking Lot. (Ballard told me he was a grown-ass man by the time he knew he even had a cameo in the film.) But in the early 1990s, Robert “Col. Rob” Schaffner, the owner of a hip Southern California video rental store with a reputation for having the weirdest movies, got what he told me in a 2016 interview was “a grainy-ass copy” of Parking Lot on VHS, and, intellectual property laws be damned, began touting the tape’s greatness to his shop's legitimately famous customers, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Belinda Carlisle, Nicolas Cage, and Sofia Coppola. In the pre-internet age, word-of-mouth reviews were strong and relentless. Through dubs and underground tape trades, the outsider art made inroads into the touring rock band realm. By the time a copy made its way onto Nirvana’s bus, cult classicdom was certified.
“The video has become a helluva anthropological study, looking at how everybody is dressed and acts, the mores,” Heyn told me recently. “People just looked different back then.”
And even without any financial windfall, more than enough folks are still referencing Parking Lot to warm its unfairly anonymous auteurs' cockles. The New York Times went long in noting the upcoming anniversary in April, describing the film as an "ethnography of Baltimore- and D.C.-area youth in the mid-1980s." (Speaking of quaint: Krulik spent the morning the Times story came out driving around the D.C. suburbs trying to buy a print copy of the newspaper with a writeup of his movie in it. He failed. “I had to buy back issues online for $10 a copy,” he said.)
And the members of Judas Priest, none of whom Krulik nor Heyn have ever met, now acknowledge the film often and with fondness. Lead throat Rob Halford made several mentions of Parking Lot in his 2020 memoir Confess, and, in an interview with Revolver to promote the book, called the movie “very very valuable.”
“I love that,” Halford said. “It's great.”
Krulik said the band also licensed a "couple minutes" of Parking Lot to include in The Ballad of Judas Priest, a new and authorized rockumentary co-directed by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Krulik hasn't yet seen the Priest doc, which is currently getting screened at the sort of film festivals that would never host anything as outsider as Parking Lot, but likes everything he's heard.
“We’re treated as a film, not just footage. And that's nice,” Krulik said. "The band embraces this as part of their history.”
To celebrate Parking Lot's milestone, Krulik and Heyn are throwing their own soiree at this weekend at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, a very respectable moviehouse in Silver Spring, Md. Along with screening the original version of the movie, Krulik and Heyn will for the first time show fans all 65 minutes of raw footage that was shot in the Cap Centre lot 40 years ago to the night of the party.
“They can see how the sausage was made,” Krulik said.
The anniversary gathering's agenda also includes a tribute to several of the main characters who are no longer around to reminisce about their hard-living adolescences. Among the departed: Johnny “DC101 Guy” DeVault, who died in 2021 of what his family told me was a fentanyl overdose. He was 53. And Graham "Graham of Dope" Owens, who died in 2020 after suffering from COPD. He was 51. And Cherie “Girl in the White Dress” Steinbacher, remembered for seeming above it all, even while showing off recent scrapes from car sex in the arena lot, and yelling “Metallica!” at the camera, which she told me in 2016 came from her 18-year-old self being so fucked up that she actually thought she thought she was going to a Metallica show. Steinbacher died in February 2026 after decades of suffering from multiple sclerosis. She was 57. All had become friends with the filmmakers in recent years, and let them know they enjoyed the 15-or-so minutes of cult fame the movie gave them.
“I can’t elevate its stature, like this is something from Bergman or the Russian cinema,” Heyn said of his movie. “But I’m proud that a short and scrappy little production that was kinda thrown together, surreptitiously put out, is still being talked about by some people. I’m happy we’re in any form of conversation.”
