AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin’s changed a lot over the last four decades, and now a documentary filmmaker is chronicling the history of the city through TV shows created by people who lived here.

Public access launched in Austin in 1973, making it the longest-running access channel in the country, according to the city. Countless creators since then have used the medium to showcase art, current events and what made Austin weird.

“It’s such a great collection of just the visual history of this city as shot by its citizens,” John Moore said, scrolling through videos of 1970s hoedowns, early concerts from bands like No Doubt, and a show called “Ballooning Over Austin.”

Moore is collecting old tapes of those and hundreds of other public access shows from the last 45 years and turning them into his first feature-length documentary, called “When We Were Live.”

“It’s almost like time traveling,” he said. The videos, each one a sort of time capsule, come to him from the creators who’ve saved them for years on VHS and Betamax tapes. Moore, A University of Texas at Austin grad, has been filling up a storage unit with them for the last three years.

Moore posts clips to a YouTube page from time to time, where people can rediscover the shows they watched growing up. At a time when anyone can pick up a phone and live broadcast themselves to millions of people, the documentarian is looking back on the history that brought us here.

“In order to do that 20, 30 years ago,” Moore said, “you had to really, really want to have something to say.”

What people had to say on public access varies widely: from interviews with a local inventor talking about “hydronauting,” to a cooking show featuring the cultural icon Carmen Banana, to a window into the just plain weirdness that Austin had to offer. 

The channel was an early outlet for the filmmaker Richard Linklater — “You have to be a lot of things to a lot of people,” Linklater said in a 1991 interview that aired on the channel — but it’s not without its infamy, either. Access served as an early platform for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the ’90s.

The channel’s eclectic lineup hooked Moore when he found out about it. Growing up in a military family, he traveled a lot and first discovered public access in North Carolina. There, though, he saw nothing but religious programming.

“That’s all it was,” he said, “was like one church had a television station, they had a monopoly over it, so that’s what I assumed public access was.”

Austin’s access was a revelation to Moore, as it was to Keith Kritselis, a creator for a couple years in the early ’90s.

“Most towns, you couldn’t just walk downtown and say, ‘I want my own TV show,” he said. “This was a rare and beautiful thing.”

Originally from Amarillo, Kritselis made his way to Austin in the late 1980s. He was a little lost, he said, when he found public access.

The anything-goes channel gave Kritselis an outlet for his creativity. At one point during his time on access, he was programming 18 hours of television a week. That included experimental artistic endeavors, live call-in shows and something he called “Public Domain Theatre,” a show that aired old non-copyrighted videos he’d find at a local video store layered with live music.

Kritselis is proud of a lot of his work back then, and even what he’s not so proud of, he said, represents a time when he was able to step outside of what he’d grown up with and experiment with a new, exciting medium.

“At the core, that’s a lot of who I still am,” he said. “It’s just a creative person who’s looking to do interesting things.”

The channel led him to a career in media, and in the years since he’s started digitizing the tapes he created at the beginning. It’s a slow process working through 300-plus hours of tape with a family and other responsibilities on his plate, but he thinks it’s necessary.

Statues, paintings, and photographs from dozens or even hundreds of years ago survive, he said, because people take the initiative to preserve them. The tapes that creators like him have kept for decades are slowly deteriorating, disintegrating.

“That’s just a huge chunk of our history that’s just going to go away,” Kritselis said, “little by little.”

He doesn’t want to see it lost, which is why he’s thrilled Moore is taking on the task of compiling as much as he can into one place.

The filmmaker plans to take a few months off from his video editing job to complete the documentary, which includes interviews with creators alongside their content, a tribute to the creators who made access what it was in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

“It’s also just kind of a love letter to this town and to what makes it so fantastic,” he said.

He hopes to have it finished and ready for public consumption by summer 2019, but his work won’t stop there. Collecting and digitizing tapes, whether they make it into the final doc or not, he said, will likely be a lifelong pursuit.

Each tape offers a view into what Austin was like and where it was going. No matter how meaningful or trivial each segment seems, it’s all a part of the history of the Texas capital.

“If you don’t think this town is weird,” he said, “oh, I just hope you can watch five minutes of this.”