Penelope Spheeris Collection

Penelope Spheeris with Eyeball

The collection of filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began to arrive at the Archive in 2011. Containing hundreds of items, the collection spans Spheeris’s career as a producer, documentarian, and director of both shorts and features. In addition to prints of her features, original elements for her early short films, and examples of her music videos, Spheeris’s collection contains material relating to her influential trilogy of documentary features: “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981), “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years” (1988), and “The Decline of Western Civilization Part III” (1998). Her other feature films as a director include “Suburbia” (1983), “Dudes” (1988), “Wayne’s World” (1992), and “Black Sheep” (1996).