Lone Star Film Festival final day: Teen-A-Go-Go

by Steve Smith of West and Clear

The Lone Star Independent Film Festival wrapped up last night with a screening of the just-about-finished Teen-A-Go-Go, a documentary about Fort Worth’s teen rock scene in the 1960s directed by Melissa Kirkendall.

“You could make this movie about Fort Worth or Omaha or any other town that had a teen scene in the 1960s,” she said. “But I think Fort Worth is a little different because of some of the people that came out of this scene, like T-Bone Burnett or Red Young or Jerry Lynn Williams.”

Kirkendall certainly has knowledge about the Fort Worth music scene. In the early 1990s, she ran Mad Hatters, the rock club on Magnolia Avenue where the King Tut restaurant now is located. Later, she helped the Ridglea Theater make the transition from cinema to music venue.

However, Kirkendall was ready to make a transition from music to film, leaving behind an established, successful career to try something new. “I got tired of the music scene, it wasn’t any fun anymore. I had always dreamed of getting into the film industry, but I didn’t know how. So I volunteered and got started doing one thing or another.”

Teen-A-Go-Go is her first directing effort, and it tells the story of the 1960s teen scene through interviews with the musicians themselves, industry experts, Super 8 footage, archival TV footage and period photographs. And if the pressure of directing a film for the first time wasn’t enough, Kirkendall also felt the burden of telling the story right. “Music is such an ephemeral thing, it happens and then it is gone. What wanted to do with this film is create a permanent records that people could turn to and remember. And that’s a lot of pressure because if it sucks, it’s my fault.”

Invariably, Kirkendall understands that there will be people who take issue with aspects of the film — why did you talk to this person and not that one, that sort of thing. After all, memory and experience are a highly subjective thing. Then there’s also the tendency to remember things past as being much better than they really were. “There is a tendency to romanticize aspects like your moment in time. Like with Mad Hatters, I was poor, mopping up vomit and breaking up fights all the time, but that’s not the stuff I remember. I remember the cool stuff, the fun stuff.”

And there is cool stuff to remember. “And even today, you have these three CDs of Fort Worth teen scene music and everyone of those songs was recorded in 45 minutes or less and every one of ‘em is frickin’ good.”

The film is is 90 percent done at this point, and the next step is to try and meet entry deadlines for music/film festivals like SXSW, NXNW, CMJ and Berlin. She’s also starting to work on shooting three to six episodes of a webisodic series before the end of the year.

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