Tribeca Film will release Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, written and directed by Matthew Bate and produced by Bate and Sophie Hyde. Shut Up Little Man! will be released nationwide on VOD August 25, 2011, and theatrically the same day (expanding on September 9), by Tribeca Film, a comprehensive distribution label operated by Tribeca Enterprises. The documentary premiered in competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and has played in New Directors/New Films and the True/False Film Festival.

In 1987, Eddie and Mitch, two young punks from the Midwest, moved into a low-rent tenement apartment in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. Through paper-thin walls, they were informally introduced to their middle-aged alcoholic neighbors, the most unlikely of roommates—Raymond Huffman, a raging homophobe, and Peter Haskett, a flamboyant gay man. Night after night, the boys were treated to a seemingly endless stream of vodka-fueled altercations between the two and for 18 months, they hung a microphone from their kitchen window to chronicle the bizarre and violent relationship between their insane neighbors. Oftentimes nonsensical and always vitriolic, the diatribes of Peter and Ray were an audio goldmine just begging to be recorded and passed around on the underground tape market. Their tapes went on to inspire a cult following, spawning sell-out CD’s, comic artworks by Dan Clowes (Ghostworld), stage-plays, music from the likes of Devo and a Hollywood feeding Frenzy.

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