Austinist Interviews Alamo Music Mondays Mastermind Kier-La Janisse
Every single Monday night, music fanatics converge upon the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown to attend Music Mondays, a brilliant series of engaging, informative and sometimes peculiar films about music.
It’s an awfully cool series, and while we’ve always assumed that these sort of things magically organize themselves, that turns out not to be the case at all. Music Mondays is actually the invention of writer / music lover / dedicated film junkie Kier-La Janisse. Recently, Austinist had a chance to sit down with Kier-La to discuss Music Mondays, the unique nature of music films and the questionable legitimacy of The Monkees.
Were you involved in film before you came to work at the Alamo?
I was doing film stuff for maybe five years before I came here. When I lived in Vancouver, I used my student loan to put on my first film festival.
I’m sure the government would be happy to know that.
Yeah, I’m still avoiding their phone calls. In 1999 I put on a horror film festival called Cinemuerte, and I did it every year up until last year. I just worked at a video store, and I would just pay for this festival out of my own pocket.
When I first did it, I rented some theatre for really cheap, and it was by complete accident that I rented it. I basically went to the theatre owner and said, “Why don’t you play some horror movies?” And he called me up later and said, “So, what dates do you want to rent the theatre for? Because I’m setting up the new schedule”. And I was like, “I don’t want to rent the theatre. But…well, how much is it to rent the theatre?”
I’d just gotten my student loan, so I was like, “okay, I’ll rent the theatre then”. So I booked it for ten days, which is insanely long for the first time you put on an event. Most people start by doing a weekend thing, and if it’s popular they’ll do it longer the next time. But I didn’t know what I was doing.
The place could only play 16mm and various forms of video, so the first year that’s all I could show. Now, I’m totally opposed to showing video – if the film is shot on film and available on film, I will not show a tape or a digital version. But the first year, because I only showed 16mm and Beta, it was fairly cheap. I was able to get in touch with the rights holders for most of the films through people I knew at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.
Was the festival successful?
I didn’t expect anyone to actually go. I just thought it’d be fun to watch some horror movies on a big screen with my friends. But it turned out that people came, and it got to the press. So I did it again, and moved it to a bigger theatre, and got 35mm prints of everything, which made the whole thing a lot more expensive. The shipping of the films is expensive on its own – and I brought guests in from Europe. I brought in Jean Rollin, who made a lot of French Lesbian Vampire stuff in the 60s. And I brought a German underground director named Jörg Buttgereit who’d made this movie Nekromantik that I really liked.
So I went right into this full-on, expensive festival with no sponsors or anything. And doing that for years was what got me the job at the Alamo. Tim and Karrie, who own the theatre, came up there one year after hearing about my festival from a mutual friend, and they were watching me run around and do everything, and they were like, “don’t you have anyone else that does that?” And I didn’t! I eventually had volunteers that would work the door, but for the first four years I didn’t even have that. I’d work the door, run in to introduce the movie, and run back to the door.
Tim and Karrie were impressed with the different skills that I had doing this festival, so they were like, “well, if you ever want t a job, you should come work for us.” And I said no at first, because I didn’t have any intention of moving. I wanted to open my own theatre, which I did; but I ran it into the ground after about three months.
And they still wanted to hire you after that?
Well, it was my attitude that they liked. They thought I was crazy – they liked that I’d throw myself into it. If somebody’s willing to put their own money into things, those are better people to have on your team than people who just want to blow your money on shit.
If you’re in film exhibition, everyone comes up to you and says, “you should show my movie”, or “you should show my friend’s movie”, with no concept of the bottom line. Everyone wants to pick the movies – that’s the fun part. So I think me having the experience, and having put my own money into things, even if they failed, was impressive to them in some way.
Were you in film school in Vancouver?
I was actually in school for Medieval Studies.
Is that even a real thing?
It was supposed to be according to UBC’s course schedule. But it turned out to be not very real at all. All the teachers were dead or retired, but they still had a Medieval Studies degree listed in their stuff.
You could get your PHD in Medieval Studies. I went there because of that, and I took all the entry-level courses. But once you got into your third year, there were no courses. So I just kept taking electives. Random shit like “Scandinavian Studies” or whatever. Eventually I just quit because I was racking up this $40,000 student loan but not getting anywhere near my degree.
And film seemed the next most attractive thing to you?
Film was the thing I was always really interested in, but my parents and everybody I knew were very discouraging. The way people are with any kind of random art like that. Like, “you can do that for a hobby but you can’t really do it for a living”. Plus I didn’t really want to make films. I was just more interested in films than I was in anything else. I loved watching films, but didn’t think I could do anything with it for a job.
So you’ve been at the Alamo for about three years now, but how long has Music Mondays been running in its current form?
Music Mondays has been going for about two and a half years now. And it’s funny, because Tim was originally against it. I kept trying to get a music series together, and he was like, “there’s so much music stuff already going on in this town – who wants to come and see music movies when they could go see a live band?” And I was like, “but they’re not going to get to go see Klaus Nomi live”, you know?
Yeah – I’d actually think it’d be the opposite. I’d think that Austin is one of the better places to do this kind of series.
That was my argument. There are so many people interested in music here, so there’s practically a built-in audience. But Tim wasn’t willing to let me do it.
It eventually happened like this: Christmas week, it’s impossible to pick movies, because no matter what you pick, it’s going to fail. So I said, “give me the Monday night, two days before Christmas” It was the worst night of the week on the worst week of the year, so it didn’t really matter that much if it failed. So I put in a Serge Gainsbourg show, which was a compilation I’d put together of clips and interviews that we’d translated from French. They were interviews that were only available in French, so we subtitled them with these lame, half-assed subtitles, and we put it on a double-bill with Pretty Things, which was a glam rock compilation that I’d made. And they both sold out. It was incredible. Tim was just floored – especially because they weren’t even real movies, they were just compilations that I’d made myself.
So that’s how Music Mondays was born. But in the last month or so, we’ve seen this decline in attendance, and I’m not sure where it comes from. We used to be sold out pretty consistently.
I mean, we’re not able to have something every week that deals with a universally appreciated musician or subject. But part of the idea behind the series was that we wanted to be able to do these more obscure things and have people come anyway because it would be seen as sort of a musical education series, where you could go every week and learn something new.
Is there something specific about music movies that you like? What draws you to them?
Well, I just like music. And I’d say, as a kid, a primary influence on me was Scooby Doo. You had my two favorite things: rock bands and haunted houses. And a rock band in a haunted house was the perfect premise for any movie.
So I loved all those Hanna-Barbera cartoons that had people solving mysteries and monsters and rock bands. Some of the people on the Butch Cassidy show were actually in rock bands. Or they’d have guest stars. But there seemed to be this real pop culture tie-in. And I think a lot of the things I grew to like as an adult came form watching those cartoons.
What do you think film brings to music? What does it do that music can’t do on its own?
For a lot of music documentaries, it’s about the story. For a person who’s already a fan of the musician, they don’t really care about a documentary as much as they’d rather just see unexpurgated footage of the person performing. But in order for that musician to reach a broader audience, they need people to hear their story. It’s like a newspaper article. What’s the personal interest angle? You have to sell the person to the audience.
It’s rare that you get a music documentary where fans of the artist think that it’s anything but superfluous. But people who are just learning about the musician might think that it’s the most amazing movie they’ve ever seen. So music movies are definitely built to convert to people to the music. Most of these films are made because the filmmaker loves the music, and they want to share it with other people and draw attention to the artist.
What’s your favorite of the films that you’ve shown at Music Mondays?
One of my favorites is Head, the Monkees movie. I love the Monkees.
You know that they don’t play their own instruments, right?
They DO play their own instruments! That’s a myth – trust me.
I trust you, but I’m totally going to look it up when I get home.
They have studio musicians that play extra shit, and I think on the first album they didn’t play their own instruments. Don Kirshner was producing them at the time, and he also produced most of those Hanna-Barbera cartoons – he got a lot of the musical acts to be on them - and he didn’t want The Monkees to have anything to do with the music. He just wanted them to be puppets. But after they had some hits from that first album, they were allowed to have more control and they wanted to actually play and produce the songs themselves.
More of the Monkees, their second album, was mostly outtakes form the first album, so that doesn’t really count. But after that, they definitely wrote their own stuff and produced songs and played their own instruments.
And they played live concerts! And people would say that there was a live band behind a curtain who was actually playing the songs, but that wasn’t true. Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith were actually already in bands when they got cast. Micky Dolenz did have to learn to play the drums to play the songs, but Davy didn’t really do anything besides play the tambourine.
I was out of town recently, and went to a regular theatre to see a movie, and couldn’t help thinking, “this sucks!” I mean, I find that the best experiences at the Alamo are when it’s busy. But at a regular theatre, you want to go when nobody else is going to be there.
Yeah. Have you been to Weird Wednesdays yet?
No, not yet.
The Weird Wednesdays experience is very cool. Lars’ introductions are way better than mine. I don’t like doing introductions. But Lars is very comfortable up there, and he knows a lot about movies. If you pitted QT against Lars in a Movie match, Lars would win, hands down. I know a fair bit about movies, but I also know when someone knows more than me – and Lars definitely does.
Well, I'm definitely going to be a regular at Music Mondays.
Good. There are people I recognize as Music Mondays regulars, and sometimes if they don’t come one week, I’ll actually email them the next day to say, “Where the hell were you?”
