Eric Geadelmann trains his camera in tight on the neck of Bruce Robison’s guitar, the shot moving down the frets with the songwriter’s fingers as he winces out a poignant take of Waylon Jennings’ “You Ask Me To.” The small film crew is gathered in Ray Benson’s new studio just east of Austin, capturing some final footage for They Called Us Outlaws, a new feature-length documentary making its world premiere at SXSW.
It’s a project Geadelmann has worked on for over a decade, an exploration of the transformative 1970s Outlaw era in country music that has now expanded into a projected 10-part series. But rather than simply screen the first episode at SXSW, he and his production partner Kelly Magelky decided to develop an entirely new 90-minute feature to serve as a prologue to the series, focused specifically on the movement’s unlikely roots in Austin.
So a month before SXSW, Geadelmann is scrambling to finish the film, which will serve not only as the prologue to the series, but as the cornerstone of his rebuilt Crowfly Studios.
Geadelmann has been in this position before. In 2003, having recently exited his executive position with a healthtech company at the age of 34, he submitted his first feature-length documentary to SXSW. The critically acclaimed The Dance told the moving story of Billy Roth, a former 1960s champion boxer who mentored inmates in Louisiana prisons, and Geadelmann, the film’s writer and producer, finished it only days before its premiere.
“I sent in what I thought was a really shitty rough cut to SXSW,” he laughs. “I’ll never forget [SXSW co-founder] Louis Black calling me, and he goes, ‘What are you going to do to finish this? We want you to premiere this here.’”
The documentary’s unexpected success opened up doors to major studios, and led to a partnership with Nicolas Cage’s Saturn Films. It also allowed Geadelmann to launch 821, a Nashville media company that over the next decade developed divisions for music, film and television, digital communications, and a prescient concert streaming platform. They secured rights to and cultivated content directed at a “heartland” audience that had eluded Hollywood, and were becoming an influential studio, before it all fell apart in 2010.
On the same day that massive flooding swept across Tennessee that May, including destroying Geadelmann’s farm homestead outside of Nashville, he received word that the company’s $325M funding had fallen through. As he watched his home fold into the Harpeth River, he faced the financial folding of 821.
“Some divisions spun off, shut down, restructured, lost some rights to a lot of intellectual property,” he recalls. “But part of the starting over was, we’re coming back to Austin. It kind of forced me to go back to why I got into this in the beginning: to tell great stories, to move people.”
Geadelmann’s rebuilding echoes another one nearly 40 years earlier, when Willie Nelson moved back to Texas following his Tennessee ranch burning down and the country music industry largely stifling his career. For Nelson, that move led to the discovery of the odd 1970s counterculture that had blossomed in Austin, a mixture of cowboys and hippies that he would help catalyze to become ground zero for a new sound in country music.
For Geadelmann, the move to Austin was a return to his roots – the Arkansas native had attended Baylor University just up the road in Waco – and a rediscovery of the music that had inspired him back then. Geadelmann’s experience of 1980s Austin came after the seminal Seventies scene of the Armadillo World Headquarters, but its influence still loomed large in the Texas capital’s culture.
With what rights that remained from the breakup of 821, Geadelmann worked on various projects over the next decade, including the documentary Dave and Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light, but his primary passion poured into interviewing artists from the Outlaw era. They Called Us Outlaws serves as the foundation for his freshly launched Shadowbrook Studios, with plans to expand into a full media enterprise of live music and technology initiatives.
“I was always a fan, first and foremost, of singer-songwriters, of [Kris] Kristofferson, of Waylon and Willie, and going to school in Waco, following Billy Joe [Shaver] around. So that spoke to me, number one,” offers Geadelmann of his decision to focus on the Outlaw movement. “Number two was that it had never been done before, and it was high-profile enough where I felt we’d be able to do it.”
Drawing especially on rare archival footage, the prologue establishes Austin’s foundational influence in fostering this new breed of cosmic cowboy and a progressive country sound before Nashville marketing finally caught up and branded it with 1976’s industry-quaking compilation Wanted! The Outlaws, the first platinum-certified country album.
But They Called Us Outlaws also features over 130 interviews with artists, producers, and insiders to the thread through to contemporary country musicians who have pursued an independent path outside the mainstream industry. For Geadelmann, the connections between Kristofferson, Nelson, and Jennings and their modern inheritors like Tyler Childers, Miranda Lambert, and Jack Ingram are about more than eschewing the typical industry path; it’s about a dedication to songwriting and one’s own artistic vision, regardless of the outcomes.
“Kris said it wasn’t about commerciality, that we didn’t care if we made any money or were on the Hit Parade. It was about whether or not we’re doing the good work, writing soulful songs,” Geadelmann relates. “And I think it’s also about the necessity of community, that back in the day, it was such a community in Austin, and feeling that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. Does that exist today? I don’t know.
“And finally I think it’s learning the importance of just not giving a fuck,” he adds. “When I say that, it’s not flippantly. It’s about knowing where and how to put your care.”
They Called Us Outlaws
TV Spotlight, World Premiere
Sunday 15, 5:45pm, Rollins Theatre at the Long Center
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.