Carmen Banana, star of The Carmen Banana Show and a central figure in When We Were Live. The new documentary about Austin Access from local filmmaker John Spottswood Moore premieres at Fantastic Fest this week.

It’s a big month for John Spottswood Moore. Not only does When We Were Live, his long-gestating documentary about Austin’s public access TV, finally premiere at Fantastic Fest, but he’s also getting married. However, it may not be a coincidence.

Spottswood Moore started the project in 2015 with a Kickstarter campaign, and was ecstatic to wrap up this history of Austin Access. He said, “I think if it was at 11 years, I might not have finished it, but I was at a calendar decade. My fiancée said to me, ‘We’re going to be together for the rest of our lives, but I want you to finish the film before we get married.’” Luckily, he’ll be getting that Fantastic Fest premiere. “Talk about getting right under the wire,” he laughed.

John Spottswood Moore, director of When We Were Live
So Spottswood Moore knows when the film will finish its long, strange trip to the screen, but he can also recall the exact “a-ha!” moment that began his decade-long production. He was working for a year in the AV department of a tech company, “and all of my colleagues were old Austinites. They were all in their late 30s, early 40s, they’d all be born and raised here, and one day we were just sitting there, eating lunch, and they were telling me about Austin in the ‘90s. ‘Oh, yeah, you’d go to a party and there’d be a backyard band, it was so much fun and everyone was drinking Lone Star.’ Then one of them goes, ‘But we’d have to be home by midnight?’ ‘What? Well, why?’ ‘Well, that’s when Ol’ Bitty comes on.’”

For the dropouts, burnouts, weirdos, and insomniacs of Austin, The Ol’ Bitty Show was must-see TV: a zero-budget call-in show built around a foul-mouthed grandma. When Spottswood Moore finally saw some footage, he initially thought it would make for a fascinating short and even met the drag performer under Ol’ Bitty’s wig. That’s when the story really started to expand. Spottswood Moore said, “After a while, he said, ‘You know, John, if you really like what I did, here’s another guy who actually rigged himself with squibs and got shot on the air.’ So he puts me in touch with him, and he says, ‘Well, if you like what I did, there was this banana-themed drag queen, and you should really get in touch with him,’ and it just kept going. … It was becoming like a daily thing.”

Over the course of watching all this material, he’d sometimes come across a show that no one seemed to have any contacts for, and so he became “unintentionally good” at tracking people down (“I could have been a PI”). Then he put up a Facebook page “and I was absolutely swarmed with people going, ‘I have footage, I had a show, it was wild.’”

The more people he was introduced to or tracked down, the more Spottswood Moore realized how crazy the story really was, and how much it was a part of Austin culture. Many cities have public access stations, but Austin’s was unusual because of a combination of culture and policy. Many stations just allow people to just come in and sit in front of a camera (“It’s like a step-and-repeat”) while Austin Access let producers check equipment out and capture how the city really was, from wild vox pops on the Drag to capturing police brutality on film. “As a result,” Spottswood Moore said, “You get some stuff that’s incredible, and some stuff that’s just like, ‘What am I watching?’”

Spottswood Moore admitted that he’d always wanted to make a documentary based on found footage, and as the donated archive grew it was clearer and clearer that this was a strong enough subject to support a feature. If anything, his biggest problem now became that he had too much material. Not only did he have endless hours of original footage, much of it stored in closets and under beds for decades, but it also seemed like everyone who had ever been part of Austin Access was more than happy to be interviewed. “You didn’t get a lot of people going, ‘No, this documentary about community, I don’t want to be a part of it.’”

The question now was: Who would become the central characters of the film?

Lo-rez but high energy, an image from Austin Access show Jam City!, one of the first programs to allow Austin’s Black community to represent itself

The selection process was made a little easier when, in 2021, he launched the accompanying five-part web series, Our Town on TV. Across those episodes, he did a deep dive into shows like Ol’ Bitty and the music-centric triumvirate of Raw Time, The Show With No Name, and CapZeyeZ. The series started as a way to release some of the footage he was collecting without having to wait for the feature to be complete, and to his surprise it became a massive success. “They were getting tens of thousands of views, and we were getting coverage from Indiewire and Texas Monthly.”

For the feature, since there was no point in repeating himself, Spottswood Moore was able to focus on three key figures as the heart of this version of the story: producer and citizen journalist Gilberto Rivera, Livia Squires of phone-in advice show Ask Livia Live, and David Haun, the host of The Carmen Banana Show. Around them he was able to fit in a cast of characters who were equally important, like Brenda Malik, producer of Austin’s answer to Soul Train, the breakdancing extravaganza of Jam City!.

However, they weren’t selected just because they picked up the phone. They became a part of the narrative because Spottswood Moore saw them as representing “different crevices of our city. Carmen is obviously the queer community, the gay community, the community affected by AIDS. Livia was the midnight crowd, but also she was giving this service to women who were calling in. And then of course we have Gilberto, who really represents this very under-represented class of the Chicano community, while Brenda really represented the African-American community.”

Those crevices are just part of the bigger edifice created at Austin Access, and that sense of belonging was what makes it all so special to Spottswood Moore. Even though Austin still has public access (now renamed Austin Public and administered by the Austin Film Society), in the 1990s it filled a strange niche that may never quite be repeated or duplicated. “It was like a 24-hour community center,” Spottswood Moore said. “People would come in and have an idea, but it was more about getting together and doing something, and you just so happened to be filming it.”

When We Were Live

World Premiere
Friday, Sept. 19, 2:30pm
Monday, Sept. 22, 11:40am

Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
Find all our news, reviews, and interviews at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

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The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.