New documentary pays tribute to late, great KUT/KUTX personality John Aielli

A new documentary celebrating the late KUT and KUTX personality John Aielli is set to make its digital debut. 

Faders Up: The John Aielli Experience hits Apple TV, Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube and Fandango At Home Tuesday, with the filmmakers saying they’re hopeful that they’ll be able to bring it to public television in the coming months, perhaps through Reel South. The documentary already aired on KLRU in Austin late last year. 

Winner of a 2024 SXSW audience award for best documentary feature, Faders Up celebrates Aielli’s life and work and has been lauded by legendary director and Austinite Richard Linklater who called it, “a really wonderful, fun, intimate piece about a pretty mysterious guy,” adding, “Anyone hoping to understand [the] Austin of the last 60 years should just start with Faders Up.” 

The film pays tribute to Aielli’s more than 50 years and 60,000 hours on the air, including a lengthy run as the host of his own, often 6-hour-long show, Eklektikos. Best known for his introspective and often unpredictable pontifications and his wide-ranging musical tastes, exemplified on shows that could feature both rock bands and whale songs, Aielli died in 2022 after a series of health issues that included a heart attack and a stroke. 

“John was just so purely himself and gave so vulnerably and transparently, which I think was the spark that drew people in,” says David Hartstein, who co-produced and directed Faders Up under his Blue Suitcase shingle. “People talk about why radio is important to a community and how it can be meaningful, and I think it’s through real people [like Aielli], with real voices and a real personality that reflects the community.”

Hartstein, who first became aware of Aielli when he moved from New York to Austin to attend film school at the University of Texas, says listening to Eklektikos helped him learn about the city’s art community. When he and co-producer/director Sam Wainwright Douglas heard that Aielli’s health was beginning to fail sometime around the pandemic, they decided they wanted to do what they could to, as Hartstein says, “continue his legacy and tell his story for the next generation of people coming to Austin.” 

A visual film about radio

Initially conceived as a short film funded by KUT and KUTX, Faders Up began production by interviewing Aielli for three hours shortly before his death, then talking with fans who queued up for his delightfully eclectic estate sale. “As we got more into the project, though, the more we realized that John’s story was fascinating and strange and all over the place,” Douglas says. As the team did more and more interviews with those who knew Aielli and the film’s editor started to cut together the footage, they realized it had the potential to be a full-length feature. 

“There was just something about John’s life that captivated people,” Douglas says. “Even today, when people who don’t know anything about him check out the movie, they’re blown away by this zany, engaging, emotional, thoughtful, wacky person.”

Douglas and Hartstein pieced together funding for the full-length through private donors and grants from places like the Tejemos Foundation, the Austin Community Foundation, and the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. The pair also continued collaborating with the people at KUT and KUTX, who gave them access to its archive of Aielli’s shows from the ’90s on, much of which had already been compiled behind the scenes for a celebration of the host’s 50 years on the air. (Even more Aielli content hasn’t been digitized, though KUTX PD Matt Reilly says a “very slow-moving” project is in the works to make it available to the public.)

Reilly, who first met Aielli in 2008, says the station decided to work on a film with Hartstein and Douglas because staffers felt that the host had impacted so many people in Austin. “It took a little convincing my boss [KUT Public Media GM Debbie Hiott] since we’re a radio station and we don’t make movies, but once we got rolling and she was looking in on some of the shoots, she said, ‘You know, we really made the right call here,’” Reilly says. 

As a result, Faders Up is a pastiche of interviews with radio station staff, Aielli’s family and friends, and Aielli himself, layered with archival video and audio of Aielli as well as new footage shot in Austin that the filmmakers felt spoke to Aielli’s comments. “I think we ended up making a very visual film — probably more than you would think a film about radio could be,” says Douglas. “It takes you on a Technicolor dream-space-time continuum cruise through the last 50 years of Austin, giving you a healthy dose of counterculture and all the strange, wonderful things that have made [this town] what it really is.” 

The film juxtaposes Aielli’s freewheeling personality with Austin’s reputation as a place where outliers are embraced and weird is good. But as more large corporations move into Austin, the city’s counterculture faces an uncertain future, something Hartstein and Douglas take care to address in the film. 

“John is on the Mount Rushmore of Austin weirdos, and we wanted to make this movie to honor that, educate people who might not know John, and to keep his spirit alive into the future of Austin,” Hartstein says.

A fixture in the community

The film also addresses the changing nature of radio and its listenership, with many young people not listening to terrestrial radio. KUTX has leaned into connecting people with the community, which Aielli was incredibly passionate about. 

“Public media stations like KUTX and others around the country and personalities like John can really bring a community to life,” Douglas says.

“Every radio station in America could certainly stand to have someone like John, who’s unapologetically themselves and who shares art openly and generously,” says publicist and Austin local Talia Pinzari, who is promoting the film. “And we need that everywhere, not just in Austin.” 

The Faders Up team has worked with public media in Austin to help spread the word about the film. It has hosted screenings at the Austin Film Society featuring Q&As with KUT and KUTX hosts, and the KLRU screening last winter, around when Aielli would traditionally host an all-Austin holiday sing-along at the Texas State Capitol, was done in part to make sure that locals would have free access to the movie. 

“I love living in a city where there are radio stations like KUT and KUTX that represent the town, that talk about what’s going on and that celebrate people in town who are doing thrilling things,” Douglas says. “I hope that if people see this movie, they’ll see that even though radio may be an ‘old medium,’ it’s still a very relevant, powerful one.”