Yes, Jack Black is awesome and 40 Watts from Nowhere

Read Time:5 Minute, 7 Second

By Chad Aiggia, Screenmancer Staff

Yes, Jack Black (“School of Rock, “A Minecraft Movie,“ “Kung Fu Panda,” ”Jumanji”) is a real musician, beyond awesome, and now signs on as executive producer for badass rock and roll documentary “40 Watts From Nowhere.” Since you asked, this tasty project comes from filmmaker and OG Pirate Radio Queen Sue Carpenter. Don’t say you’ve never heard of her because she literally chronicled this gritty radio look-back epic in her book of the same name, “40 Watts from Nowhere,” originally published by Scribner a couple quick decades ago.

Enter Jack Black to make this doc rock, as JB was very much a part of the Silver Lake (in Los Angeles) music scene back in the ’90s. The future Nacho Libre and School of Rock God used to hang out at indie venues like Spaceland, which is code for musician street cred.

EXCLUSIVE JACK BLACK LINK HERE

Fittingly, “40 Watts From Nowhere” splashed out as a world premiere at the 30th anniversary of the Slamdance Film Festival, in its new home in here in LA. And this Jack Black-driven musical odyssey joins the maximum opus of rock documentaries, as it plays peekaboo into the gonzo sub-culture of pirate radio in Los Angeles, which dominated the airwaves in the 1990s. You’ve got interviews with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, Germs drummer Don Bolles and pirate radio activist Stephen Dunifer, among others. (FYI, insiders, Alex Nohe and his team at Blood Sweat Honey are handling global sales for the film.)

Now, about Sue Carpenter, who was bummed and bored by what she heard on commercial radio in the ‘90s? Carpenter literally built a pirate radio station from scratch and broadcasts from her LA apartment. Basically this static-free joyride chronicles Los Angeles pirate radio station KBLT, and the 1990s low-power FM movement in the US, plus vintage footage shot in 1998, that shows KBLT blasting out 24/7 from a literal apartment closet in Silver Lake ,with DJs running the gamut from Keith Morris (Circle Jerks), Mike Watt (Minutemen) and Don Bolles (Germs) to garden-variety music fans playing everything from jungle and punk to vintage country and French pop.

“I never thought I would make a film about my old pirate radio station,” Sue Carpenter said of the project. “When I wrote the book about it, I thought it would be the definitive chronicle of that experience. But when I learned there were 12 hours of vintage footage that showed what it was truly like, I was inspired to take on the challenge. I’m a journalist who’s worked in print, radio and television, and I thought I could fuse the skills I’d learned over the years to tackle a full-length film.”

Gotta love doc helmer Sue Carpenter, who started the 40-watt FM station in 1995, by exploiting a legal case that allowed hundreds of low-power illegal radio operators to proliferate throughout the country and gave birth to the legal LPFM movement. At the time, 28-year-old Sue a “secretary and an aspiring journalist” who set up KBLT, and invited strangers into her home to spin whatever the hell they wanted.

Soon this bath-tub gin equivalent DIY musical distillery took on a life of its own, drawing Mazzy Star to headline a benefit concert and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play live in her very same living room. Vintage footage captures the arc of the story, from its full-tilt heyday in the summer of 1998 to its FCC shutdown later that year. Shot by a DJ who intended to make a documentary but never did, this footage is rounded out with interviews Carpenter conducted in 2023.

Again, this documentary would never have happened if Carpenter hadn’t first written a book about it. That book was discovered by the experiential theater makers Mister & Mischief who transformed it into an interactive experience that premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 2022 to rave reviews. (Oh to be a musical fly on the wall for that one.) In sum, the 40 Watts experience was so successful that Mister & Mischief staged it again in Silver Lake in 2023. Reconnecting with the old DJs through the new theatrical experience is how Carpenter learned about the vintage footage that forms the basis of the movie.

Maybe the New York Times reviewer nailed Carpenter’s memoir in 2004, as he declared: “The book will be of great interest to music lovers, self-publishers and renegades in all media, and film rights purchasers – you wonder why Carpenter didn’t forgo the book and sell that screenplay.”

Filmmaker Sue Carpenter is a first-time documentary director, would you believe. But for 30 years, she worked as a journalist in Los Angeles, including 14 years at the Los Angeles Times, where she was the newspaper’s first motorcycle columnist, an awesome and hardy credit. She also contributed to the New York Times, Marketplace radio, National Public Radio and numerous national magazines, including Road & Track, Marie Claire and (in the ‘90s) Jane and The Source, all while trying to make a living and living with the legacy of her pirate radio days.

Carpenter currently works as a national digital journalist for Spectrum News. But before becoming a journalist, she founded and ran that seminal radio station out of her closet in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. (You have to repeat that a few times before you grasp the gravity and import of the statement, as it was not just a hobby, but a movement and rebellion against the corporate takeover of everything creative, including the music business).

Anyway Jack Black is awesome, we all know it, ps; so is 40 Watts Pirate Radio Queen Sue Carpenter. So you know what to do… look and listen for this doc when it drops to support the hell out of underground push-back against mass-marketed music. Let’s boost indie music and musicians of the no-commercial-potential stripe, okay?

Over and out…

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