Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny

Liam Lynch directed it; Jack Black, Kyle Gass and Lynch wrote it. Black and Gass play themselves. Dave Grohl plays Satan, drums on the album and sings Satan’s part on Beelzeboss. Ronnie James Dio appears as himself and Meat Loaf plays JB’s father, with short turns from Ben Stiller, Tim Robbins, John C. Reilly and Amy Poehler. Black cut his usual 12 million dollar fee to 1 million, split with Gass. Shooting was put back about a year because Black had been cast in Peter Jackson’s King Kong; the main shoot was in the spring of 2005, with two rounds of reshoots in the summer of 2006. The band had wanted a film since forming in 1994; an abandoned draft had the pair obsessed with Atlantis and sent to Miami. It opened at number eleven in the United States and took 8.2 million dollars there, on a 19 to 20 million budget. The band’s 2012 album Rize of the Fenix is built on a fictional break up after the film and opens with a line saying the Pick of Destiny was a bomb. A good fit if you are curious how the band carried its mythology into a feature. Not for anyone who dislikes crude or drug humour: the Chicago Tribune critic wrote that pot rarely helped anybody’s comic timing.