In 2000, the editors from the New York Times received an indignant letter from one Tom Jackman:

John Leland's suggestion that moviegoing audiences didn't ''get'' ''This Is Spinal Tap'' in 1984, thus necessitating its rerelease, is ludicrous [''The Heavy Metal Joke Not Everyone Got,'' Sept. 3]. Certainly the sold-out audience I watched it with in the West Village laughed almost continuously, and it played both there and in theaters around the country for months.

Almost instantly, lines like ''This one goes to 11'' and ''It's a fine line between clever and stupid'' became national catch phrases. Mr. Leland proposes that ''dumbfounded test audiences saw 'Spinal Tap' in the towering shadow of the Stones.'' ''Spinal Tap'' mocked the excesses of irrelevant dinosaurs like the Rolling Stones accurately and mercilessly, and even back in the dark ages of 1984, many millions of us were able to grasp that.

Certainly, in 1984, This Is Spinal Tap was clearly seen as a spoof in the pages of the Gray Lady; their March 1984 review of the movie called it a 'mock documentary' in the headline of the review, while a feature about the movie from May 1984 refers to it as a 'rock spoof'.

However, in that May 1984 article, Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner does say that

We previewed the movie in a Dallas shopping mall...a small section of the audience laughed. The rest asked why we would make a serious documentary about a terrible band they had never heard of.

The relevant passage from the 2000 New York Times article that Tom Jackman took offense to was this:

WHEN the makers of ''This Is Spinal Tap'' first showed their movie to test audiences in 1984, the reaction was noteworthy. The people hated it. Shot in deadpan documentary style, the film tells the story of a fictional heavy metal band blazing a spandex trail across America. The audience did not get it. Some objected that the band was too obscure and poor; others thought the filmmakers should have chosen a good band, like Led Zeppelin. One answered every question about the movie with three cryptic letters, DNA. ''It took us a long time to figure out what this meant,'' said Michael McKean, who played the band's singer and guitarist, David St. Hubbins. ''Finally, we realized it meant Does Not Apply. She disliked everything about the movie so much that no possible standards could apply to any part of it.''

And therein lies the rub. Moviegoers who had seen the publicity for This Is Spinal Tap knew exactly what the film was - a contemporaneous poster accurately trumpets that it is "the funniest rock movie ever made"$; it quickly became a cult success, and by the early 1990s, it was well-known and successful enough for the cast to reunite for a TV movie, A Spinal Tap Reunion: The 25th Anniversary London Sell-Out, with a corresponding album and a majestic MTV-ready music video for the single 'The Majesty Of Rock'. The group had a cameo on The Simpsons and even cashed in with television ads.

However, the test audiences mentioned in the Leland article are largely not actually the kind of people who would ever have gone and seen a rock documentary. Test audiences have long been famously bemoaned by directors for their lack of 'getting it', and the way that the studios used the feedback test audiences to justify 'dumbing down' movies. Test audiences don't necessarily get much context for the movie, and aren't necessarily going to be the right target market for a film where a drummer died in a bizarre gardening accident. So perhaps it would be inevitable that their review of This Is Spinal Tap was to the effect of 'shit sandwich'. And in the end, the average moviegoer likely didn't even notice that Spinal Tap existed; it was only the 117th highest grossing movie of 1984 (it didn't get to #111, let alone go up to #11). Perhaps the Hollywood executives knew all too well that there was a fine line between stupid and clever.

So in general, it's likely that the few moviegoers who saw the publicity for the "funniest rock movie ever made" and decided to go see the movie might have noticed it was a mockumentary.

$With apologies to The Rutles.