As a document of Salt Lake’s mid-’80s punk-rock underground, this darkly funny film is not accurate enough for the scene’s survivors and a face-slap to the conservative Reagan-era types who had no idea mohawked, slam-dancing punks full of anarchistic rage were roaming the night, saying “Hell no” to saying “‘No’ to drugs,” breaking things and fighting everything and everyone, even (and often) each other. The 1998 feature, by Judge Memorial High School alumnus James Merendino, peels back Salt Lake’s squeaky clean sheen, revealing a motley crew of characters based—at times controversially—on real SLC punks of the era.

There are fights. There’s gunfire. Robberies. Wanton acts of abandon. Characters collapse into mental and physical illnesses, all catalyzed through heedless descents into drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll, right here in sleepy Salt Lake.

“Back in 1985, I was living in Salt Lake City, and, at 14, I was already different, already bizarre,” Merendino recalls. “I was bored and I was very much an outsider. I was a Catholic in a Mormon state. I was the geeky guy in the cafeteria who was always getting his ass kicked. I began listening to punk music because it appealed to me, and gave me an identity to help me survive the horrors of high school.”

Punk was a response to the failures of the ’60s starry-eyed idealism that led to the top-down restructuring of economies in Europe and America. Merendino’s Utah experience is not uncommon and made Salt Lake fertile soil for the punk movement as embodied by Stevo’s (Matthew Lilliard) diatribe at his parents in one of the film’s most memorable scenes. 

“Mom, don’t talk to me about self-destruction,” Stevo shouts, his blue mohawk waving. “And don’t start blaming yourself either. It ain’t how you raised me… It’s the future baby. Take a good look, I am the future. I am what you so arrogantly saved the world for. You saved the world for guys like me. Guys who are going to send it straight to hell!”  

Salt Lake played host to the most well-known punk bands of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. They stopped in town on the way to Vegas or Denver to play in Salt Lake at wild venues like Speedway Cafe, The Painted Word, the Indian Walk-In Center and punk crash pads like Hell House. 

When we interviewed him, Merendino suggested that we were calling too early and that the film does not hit 25 years of age until next year. And that’s true to a degree: the film debuted in the U.S. at Sundance on Jan. 22, 1999, with a U.S. release on April 16. But German investors pulled some strings and the film opened there early, on Sept. 24, 1998, thanks to the presence of the German actor Til Schweiger—whose Euro trash drug-dealing character, Mark, is one of the film’s more engaging, if not necessarily likable, characters. 

Years later, the impact the film made on the scene it depicted is hard to quantify. Not just in Salt Lake City, where the film’s name still brings nods of recognition, but also in punk circles around the country (and the world). The film tackles punk rock with elements of reality. It does that with specific references to Salt Lake—the Utah State Capitol, the Great Salt Lake, the University of Utah, Memory Grove Park and West Side industrial districts—that provide either color, backdrop or plot points. (For example, the gang tries to sink a stolen car in the Great Salt Lake.) All the fights in the film? Yeah, they’re dramatized, but they’re heightened representations of the real contradictions and the clashes among tribal groups.

Anarchy in the SLC?

SCENE: A beat-up pickup truck pulls onto a quiet corner in Salt Lake’s Avenues. In the distance, we see the LDS Temple and the Utah State Capitol. Two rednecks in wranglers and ball caps climb out and chug down Budweisers, tossing empties onto the quiet street. Stevo narrates: 

“The thing about me and Bob and pretty much all of us was, we hated rednecks more than anything else, period. Because rednecks, for us, were America incarnate. And America…Well. F*** America.”

Stevo and his sidekick, Heroin Bob, emerge from the shadows. They ambush the men, with fists, legs and Bob’s metal pipe, laying them out. Victorious, they run toward the camera, laughing maniacally and disappear into the night.

It’s scenes like this that cause blowback. The main beef: Writer and director Merendino liberally adapted storylines based on the exploits of actual figures in the SLC punk rock scene. Some names, like the colorful Sean Fightmaster, were used outright in the film and factual events were only lightly burnished for narrative effect. 

As Merendino told Billboard in 2019, “[Stevo and Bob] are named after two people who were actually pretty big figures in the punk scene and I got their permission to use their names. One is Stephen Egerton from The Descendents. He grew up in Utah, and was in a band called Massacre Guys. But the story’s not based on them in any way, I just liked the names. Heroin Bob’s stories are drawn from experiences I had with a guy named Chris Williams, who’s now an Episcopalian priest and a great guy. He didn’t actually overdose. He’s the one who came into school with a shaved head and he looked like Travis Bickle; he really looked good with a mohawk.”

Still, there’s some consensus that the film is important both as a representation of the international punk scene and mid-’80s Salt Lake. Merendino is aware of the praise. And the criticism. He’s self-effacing about it all. “Like many filmmakers, I only hear negative reviews.” 

Finding Stevo

Regardless of the tribal battles over the film’s authenticity and its, at times, too-close-to-home scenes, SLC Punk! set the stage for some of the actors, whose memorable early-career performances would lead to varying degrees of stardom.

Take, for example, the on-screen successes of Matthew Lillard (Stevo) and Jason Segel, who played clean-cut, preppy Mike, with a violent temper. While there are many local actors and crew members scattered throughout the credits, Lillard and Segel came to the film through a national casting call that included interest from well-known actors like Jack Black, Vin Diesel, Jared Leto and, whoa, the late Heath Ledger. 

One of the greatest challenges in the production was finding the right actor for the role of Stevo because of his large amount of screen time and role as the film’s narrator. 

“We couldn’t move forward until we found exactly the right person,” says Merendino. “We read a lot of people. Matthew Lillard came in and he was the most interesting person to come to audition, mostly because I think he said he didn’t understand the script. It messed with my head because he forced me to pitch my own movie to him. It made him stand out. He said, ‘OK, well, let me go now. And now that I understand where you’re coming from, let me come back in and just nail this.’ He came back the next day and he was just awesome.” 

SLC Punk’s Not Dead  

Merendino’s noticed over the years the tendency for SLC Punk! to get referenced in a variety of pop cultural contexts, many found close to home.  

SLC Dunk!, for example, is a podcast dedicated to Utah Jazz basketball, affiliated with the SB 

Nation media family. After a lot of uploads in 2022, the pod seems less populated today. Credit, though, for the clever title in the first place. 

SLC Punkcast is a much longer-running podcast, dedicated to “new songs, old songs, great albums, influential individuals, live shows and guilty pleasures.” The show is hosted by Dustin and Eric and has topped 320 episodes. 

Merendino says that friends let him know about new homages “All the time.” Take, for instance, Proper Brewing Company’s pilsner ‘SLC Pils!’ 

“I guess though it’s ironic to call it SLC Pils because in the movie the guy Bob overdoses, he’s murdered by or inadvertently killed by pills. Wow. Well, I don’t know that they made that connection, but…When I posted pictures of it on my Facebook page, a lot of people came in saying, ‘That’s not cool!’”

Merendino says one platform, unimaginable at the time of the film’s release, has birthed some attention-grabbing content: TikTok. Merendino says TikTok is actually one of the main ways he stays connected to the film, which he seldom watches anymore. 

“There are these TikTok edits where, you know, kids on there repurpose shots from the movie and make little homages and their own edits, which I find actually more interesting now than the movie itself.”  

Flashback: The Speedway Cafe

Salt Lake City upped the punk reaction to the Reagan era. The extra sheen of squeaky-clean Mormonism bred an especially virulent antibody to the cultural vaccine: a raucous and edgy underground manifestation of punk rock ethos. 

“As an old guy, I look back at the ’80s and I see why we were so angry,” says local chef Jerry Liedtke. “Reagan was working with the Taliban, the CIA was working with Pablo Escobar, there was talk of a draft, Russia had nukes pointed at us. So we took a lot of drugs and there was a good amount of hooliganism, but here in Salt Lake, it was different because you’d have these Mormon kids and straight-edgers, who didn’t do drugs, in the scene, too.”  

Liedtke and his partner Kestrel went legit and now operate the Tin Angel Cafe in the Eccles Theater. But he came up in the heat of the punk scene in SLC and ran with a punk crew called the “Fry Gods.” The music and mayhem were centered around a host of small and medium-sized ad hoc all-ages clubs like the Palladium, DV8, The Bar and Grill, Maxims and the Pompadour, to name a few. 

The epicenter of the scene was the Speedway Cafe, a truly subterranean venue buried underneath the viaduct at 500 South and 500 West. Liedtke’s punker cousin Paul Maritsas co-owned the Speedway with the aptly named metalhead Jay Speed. Young Liedtke got the coveted job of running the beer room. Punk and hardcore legends like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, The Stench, the BoxCar Kids, GWAR and many more sweated it out on the stage, and Liedtke had a front-row seat. The Speedway closed in the early ’90s but its legacy and impact on Salt Lake’s music scene remain.

The Sequel (or Spin-off)

When Merendino was typing up a script for a sequel to SLC Punk!, he had some pretty big ideas. The script was going to follow the lead character Stevo, with shooting locations “around the world.” He estimated that the film would cost around $7 million as envisioned, a figure that he had no chance of raising at that time. 

Fans of the original film asked about a sequel enough that they convinced Merendino to tackle the project, even if at a lesser price than the already-modest cost of the original. He turned to crowdfunding to add to the coffers and was able to secure just enough cash from the old-head fans to proceed with a stripped-down follow-up, much of it shot in and around Ogden, beginning in 2014. 

Released in 2016, Punk’s Dead: SLC Punk 2 drew mixed critical reaction, which rolls off of Merendino. Discussing it today, Merendino says, “It turned out how it turned out. I like it. And some other people do. A lot of people don’t. That’s okay with me, you know, that’s the nature of art.”

Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) stars as the scene-stealing punk rocker Crash—the most well-drawn character in the film, portrayed with gusto by Baker. On the other side of the fame conversation, several of the star-level folks who appeared in the original (Segel, Lillard, etc.) didn’t take part in the rebooted version, and there are moments in the film in which you sense that Merendino was padding out the run time, with lengthy concert segments shot for the film given plenty of space in the second half of Punk’s Dead. 

 In talking to Merendino about the work, there’s the sense that he’s okay with leaving where it lies, even if there was a different story that he wanted to tell. Faced with creating a different version of his original idea, or letting it go, he says, “At the last minute, I ended up sort of making it more of a spinoff.” 

Three new lead characters carry the film, while actors and their respective characters from the first film were written into smaller support roles and cameos. 

“Had it been a real sequel, it would have been about Stevo. And that was the subject of the script I originally wanted to do, but I just couldn’t afford to do that.”

Where Are They Now?

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Another iconic movie filmed in the Beehive state turned 30 last year, read on to see where the stars of The Sandlot are now!