Hyperreal Film Club runs the coolest, weirdest movie night in Austin

The creators of Austin’s coolest movie night don’t really do “impossible.”

At one of Hyperreal Film Club’s events, you might hear local legend Robert Rodriguez play a voice memo from Elijah Wood before a Halloween screening of his cult classic flick “The Faculty” at the Paramount Theatre.

You might watch Tilda Swinton’s gender-bent immortality tale “Orlando” at Hyde Park’s historic sculpture museum, where the faces sculpted by Elisabet Ney never wrinkle, either.

You might even get to pose with a sick ride at the Museum of Human Achievement when you see a “Fast and the Furious” flick at a pop-up drive-in with a car photo booth. A car. Photo. Booth.

Since 2016, Hyperreal Film Club founders David McMichael, Jenni Kaye and Tanner Hadfield have gone from throwing one scrappy screening in a now-demolished basement downtown to creating a bona fide scene all their own. They've taken up residency at East Austin rock club Hotel Vegas, where they present cult classics weekly-ish. On top of that, they presented shows for the Paramount, Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In, Austin Film Festival and more.

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The club’s founders are, simply, friends who love sharing movies. And when you spend time with the trio, you feel like you’re … well, part of the club.

“We want to show art house, esoteric, out-there movies, but we also want to show ‘Fast and Furious.’ We want to make everything feel like it's on an even playing field, and accessible, and make movies fun again,“ Kaye, 34, told the American-Statesman recently.

The three co-founders sat down with us on a November afternoon at Airport Boulevard cafe Sa-Tén. If you’re at all familiar with what Hyperreal Film Club does, it shouldn’t shock you that their story starts — at least indirectly, in the way that your own story starts with your parents meeting — at a video store.

From a sheet on the floor to 'The Holy Mountain'

McMichael and Hadfield, both 33, remember browsing the shelves of their local movie rental shop as childhood friends in Abilene. The pair were preternatural cinephiles; they would pull cases off the shelves and check for film festival laurels on the covers, McMichael said.

After grad school, Hadfield needed a fresh start. In 2014, he decided Austin was a good place to spend his 20s. Hadfield remembered visiting for South by Southwest years before, when it was more like “the Wild West,” he said. McMichael followed a year later, “because Tanner was here,” he said.

By 2016, McMichael was working at the Paramount. He and Hadfield wanted to start showing movies somewhere around town. Synchronicity struck: They got to talking with Co-Lab Projects, then operating a gallery near the Paramount, and found the art group was looking to show movies in their basement.

The first film screened by this primordial version of Hyperreal Film Club: “The Holy Mountain,” Mexican director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s notorious 1973 surrealist fable. A man with cheetah heads for breasts, lizards dressed like Mesoamerican warriors … it’s heady stuff.

Kaye joined up right before the first screening. Originally from Florida, she had experience working in film festivals and event production. After moving to Austin (a city that she first thought was “nuts” because she also happened to come, unbeknownst to her, during SXSW), she found a welcoming crowd.

“I felt such a low barrier of entry for creating things in the art scene and movies,” she said.

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And in McMichael and Hadfield, she found creative collaborators who shared formative experiences with film. As a kid, she snuck a glimpse of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic “The Silence of the Lambs” from the hallway while her parents watched the movie. “It blew my brains out,” she said. (Kaye’s mom caught her, but she wasn’t mad.)

McMichael glowingly remembered growing up with Friday movie nights on a small TV set. His family would put a sheet on the floor and eat pizza, maybe sausage balls. One night, his father came home with a movie he said was about a father and son, and McMichael groaned in preemptive boredom. It turned out to be “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” — his first PG-13 movie, and one that taught him how big and fun movies can be.

As the trio got older, they individually discovered deeper cuts from the film vault. Kaye found Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 “Morvern Callar” in college. Hadfield saw John Carpenter’s 1987 “Prince of Darkness” in grad school, and it taught him about the construction of story and place. Through 1928 silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Hadfield channeled a spirit that lives on in Hyperreal.

“I can't believe they made that movie like 100 years ago,” he said. “What they do with lighting and with staging is really inspirational to me. DIY is one of our core tenants. So I'm always drawn to movies that inspire me to make art and make me feel like, if they can make this movie 100 years ago, I can make something with the limited resources I have.”

Big, loud, fast movies

Hyperreal Film Club’s ethos is simple and proletarian: Cinema for the people.

“It’s not necessarily this elitist thing. You can engage with us just on those more mainstream screenings, but we're still going to try and bring something to them that's a little bit more alternative and out there,” Kaye said.

She elaborated: Car-centric action franchise “The Fast & the Furious” actually contains queer subtext, examinations of male friendship and diverse blockbuster casting, all things the Hyperreal touch can reveal when presenting a Vin Diesel movie.

The founders run their screenings in the spirit of the DIY spaces that shaped them, McMichael said. Events often feature shorts from local filmmakers before the main attraction. The club tries to be intentional about being a welcoming space. The doors open a bit before start time, to encourage folks to come hang out. They celebrate when attendees say they haven’t seen the night’s movie before — it’s a “hell yeah” moment of excitement, he said. Most events cost $5-$10, so as many people can come as possible. They make it a point to have at least one of the founders at every screening.

The club programs films to fit their venue, Hadfield said. Take their Hotel Vegas residency as an example, where they look to show what McMichael called big, loud, fast movies.

They started the series with Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock musical “Phantom of the Paradise.” The specifics of the venue — a bar in the room, street noise from the nightcrawlers bustling outside, hard plastic chairs and access to a sound system that usually pumps out punk rock — led them to something kinetic that would clip along, McMichael said.

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Their programming philosophy also sets them apart from any ol’ movie night in town. McMichael said that they look for films that aren’t necessarily obscure, but that people have not often seen in repertory screenings. There’s also an eye toward representation of often-marginalized identities, he said. Hyperreal collaborates with guest programmers from communities the founders aren’t part of, and they introduce the club to movies the club otherwise wouldn't know about.

“We have this big, ethereal rubric that we triangulate everything on,” McMichael said. “We know each other so well at this point. … Our taste Venn diagram overlaps a lot.” If there’s something one of them has seen that the other two haven’t, he said, it’s a go.

Hadfield has taken the lead on securing film rights. The others call him an expert internet sleuth.

“If there is someone who has rights to a movie, regardless of who it is, Tanner will find it,” McMichael said.

One of their proudest finds: “The Adventures of Iron Pussy,” which the club founders described as a “Thai camp queer spy comedy musical.” Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Michael Shaowanasai, its online presence was sparse, so Hadfield embarked on a quest that led him to a person in Thailand and a lot of Google Translate. Hyperreal finally screened the film in March at Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday.

It’s hard for the founders to pick a favorite event. (So it goes with choosing your children.) McMichael is proud of the Hotel Vegas residency, some 30-plus movies strong, and the weekly community consistency it’s allowed. Some people come to every date. “It’s like movie church,” he said.

Kaye said, “I love the weekly community-building screenings, but I really thrive in my element when we can do these ambitious, one-off special screenings.”

There was the time they built out a warehouse space to look like sci-fi Neo-Tokyo for a screening of 1988 anime landmark “Akira.” The event was produced in partnership with Lifted Traces, a film series co-founded by Kaye, Joseph Postiglione and Raz Khandpur.

Kaye loves excite-and-delight moments, and the temporary magic of turning scavenged trash into transporting settings. She said they would love to do a similar immersive show for “Titanic.” Maybe someone dressed as a rat would run down the aisle, she offered.

And it’s not just film screenings. “We're just always trying to create little easy ways for people to get involved,” Hadfield said. During the early days of the pandemic, Hyperreal launched an online film criticism project as a way to keep people together through movies even when they were physically apart.

The club started curating video ‘zines after Election Night 2016. “We needed to give people another outlet to create art and express themselves,” Hadfield said.

The ‘zines take the “film for the people” ethos pretty literally. “You can shoot something on your phone for 15 seconds. You can call that your first short film. No one is going to challenge you, and we're gonna screen it for everyone,” Kaye said. The 'zine project is currently on hiatus, but you can watch the archived videos on the Hyperreal website.

Kaye continued: “Sometimes it just takes somebody to be like, ‘No, you can do this, you could make a movie. Let's get a camera, let's go out.'

“Sometimes that's all you need, is other people taking your work seriously, and your creativity seriously.”

Something more than real

We asked: How do you make it all work? McMichael shook his head. Kaye laughed.

When we met the Hyperreal founders, they’d just blazed through 16 events in October. According to the club, they produced 58 live shows this year and welcomed more than 5,200 guests, including about 600 people for “The Faculty.” But even as much energy and time as McMichael, Kaye and Hadfield put into their creation, they can’t do it all.

That’s where the club part comes in.

Hyperreal initiates volunteers into their not-so-secret society. They try to keep the volunteer work fun. There’s even a Discord server for the club. McMichael said that sometimes the members plan movie meet-ups of their own, which seems worthy of a “mission accomplished” banner.

Their team has grown. Programmer Morgan Hyde put together their collaboration with Blue Starlite. Managing editor Ziah Grace runs the reviews site. Kaye said they want to find a way to pay themselves, make Hyperreal their full-time jobs and keep bringing in new blood to make it sustainable.

And maybe someday, if this club continues to grow, they’ll be able to achieve their dream: opening a movie theater. Kaye said they’ve talked to people who know how to run a cinema and noodled a business plan. They have a lot of ideas for the aesthetics, of course, McMichael added.

They don’t want to do it better than any existing operation, really, just to do it differently. “Kind of bizarre and a quarter-turn off of what you’d see somewhere else,” McMichael said.

As Kaye put it, their theater would have a place where you want to hang out to talk about the movie you just saw — that’s not a parking lot, long the bastion of post-cinema conversations. McMichael playfully suggested building in something like the interstellar bar from “Star Trek: Deep Space 9.”

This belatedly begs the question: Why is this film club hyperreal?

The word comes from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book “Simulacra and Simulation.” You might remember it as the book in which Keanu Reeves' Neo hides information in “The Matrix.” Kaye said the founders don’t really think of the club’s name as a direct reference to the book, but the word “hyperreal” did represent the movies they showed: left of center, and something magical.

“Mostly, we've forgotten what it means, because it's hard to hold that stuff in your head,” McMichael admitted. “But it (represents) things that are a whole transportive experience, that cover you in on the sides and wrap you up.”

In other words, something weird and/or wonderful.

“We're doing essentially the same stuff that we were doing in that basement, right?” McMichael said. “It's just bigger.”

More about Hyperreal Film Club

Hyperreal Film Club's Hotel Vegas series returns in January, with "The Hidden" on Jan. 16, "Fateful Findings" on Jan. 23 and "The Cat" on Jan. 30.

For more information on screenings or to sign up as a volunteer with the club, go to hyperrealfilm.club or follow them on Instagram: @hyperrealfilmclub.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Hyperreal Film Club runs the coolest movie night in Austin, TX