‘Murder in Glitterball City’ Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato on Their Chilling New True-Crime Doc and Piecing the Puzzle Together: ‘Two People Should be in Jail’
Back in June 2010, James “Jamie” Carroll’s body was discovered by Louisville police.
The house on 1435 South Fourth Street, owned by Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend Joseph “Joey” Banis, became a crime scene. At the time, Banis and Mundt were dating, and a wild night involving sex and drugs led to a bloody murder. But who did it?
In HBO‘s two-part true-crime doc “Murder in Glitterball City,” now streaming on HBO and HBO Max, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato seek to put the pieces together.
Over the two-part series, they use community to help tell the story of this couple and how, at the center of it all, was a very toxic relationship. The doc opens with what appears to be Banis confessing on camera, but as the story unfolds, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
As gruesome as the murder was, Bailey says, it was important to honor the victim. “This is a true crime story. It’s also a queer story. David, who wrote the book, is gay, and we’re queer filmmakers.” He adds, “In telling it, we wanted to avoid being coy about the details, but also present the details, and that was the best way to tell Jamie’s story and remember him.”
Both Banis and Mundt were tried for murder, but Banis remains in prison, while Mundt walks free. Bailey and Barbato sat down to talk about the film, and share thoughts on the film’s ending.
Randy Barbato: It was over five years ago. Lisa Heller and Nancy Abraham from HBO said, “We have a book we’re going to send to you. Take a look at it.” We read David Dominé’s “A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City: Murder, Secrets, and Scandal in Old Louisville,” and we were like, “What is this?” So, we flew to Louisville and spent a few days ringing people, knocking on doors, and tracking people down in the book. We came back and called HBO, and we said, “We have to make this, and we don’t know what it’s going to be.” We spent the next four years talking about it, going back and forth.
At the heart of it is a gruesome crime, but there are these concentric circles of fascination and incredible characters and just who inspired us and made us laugh. We asked, “Wait, how are we going to make all this fit together? And I don’t know if we did, but I do know we finished it.”
Fenton Bailey: It’s a large cast of characters, isn’t it? And in a way, this is looking at it after the fact, but it’s a bit like the disco ball itself. You’ve got this single event; it hits the disco ball, and all these different versions, reflections and ideas bounce off it.
In the case of John and Missy, that’s how David’s book begins, and it’s so good because we said, “We’ve got to find them.” When we met with them, they were such great characters. And you’ve got an enclave of Old Louisville that is just a few blocks that was saved from the demolition ball by these gay guys. They’re not in the film. But, other gay people moved in, and artists came, so you have this unique little time capsule with these Bohemian, creative characters, all within a tight few blocks.
Barbato: We are archive queens, and you know this about us, but we have an incredible team that we work with, and they are also archive queens. It’s interesting because now that you mentioned it, there’s a lot of archive in this. That archive is a character that we used and needed, and it was part of the gig of putting the story together.
Bailey: One thing that happened was partway through, we were speaking to Joey in prison, and he gave permission to his lawyer to let us have a copy of his laptop. And so we suddenly found all this stuff. And this was in 2012-2013, when even though there were texts, iPhones and emails and all that in abundance, policing hadn’t really caught up to that with those sorts of departments, and so there was so much stuff that they just had never been able to look at. That material ends up being the linchpin to the whole story, because it begins with this videotape of Joey appearing to confess to the crime at the very beginning, and then, of course, as everything unfolds, you realize that is not what it appears to be. But there is an enormous amount of information at a time when I don’t think the authorities really were able to process it. Even now, with the Epstein files, they don’t seem able to process it all. It’s just the volume. Some of what Joey himself captured, either by phone calls or texts, or videos, is pretty extraordinary. Such as when, for reasons best known to them, it looks like Jeffrey started a counterfeiting operation. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
Barbato: The primary question was, had justice been served, and what don’t we know about the crime and the story? But as we started making the film, a million other questions surfaced. We started learning about the community, the city and different characters and their connection to it. There was a different question every day. A lot of it became organic. We stuck with trying to better understand the crime, and what it becomes is this psycho drama as well. So you’re trying to understand and build out these character portraits of these two people, and of course, Jamie, who is very important for us to humanize him and to not label him as a victim buried in a basement. So it was an endless course of discovery.
And that thing of how do you connect the discovery we made of all the ancillary characters with the crime at the heart of this story, and what is that connection? That became a huge obsession for us, because it was, “Why are these people as important as what’s in the center and the crime, and what is their connection?
Bailey: We had an education witness, LaTanya, and she was brought in to talk about domestic abuse and how it works, and the dynamics of it.
Barbato: She helped us understand why community is so important when it comes to crime. There are these horrific crimes that happen that you think have no relationship to you, and you have no connection to, but that’s actually not the case at all. We are all impacted, and we all can learn in some way. And so we didn’t even know that was a question we were going to need an answer to, and we never would have thought she was the one to give it to us.
Bailey: In the immediate context of the trial, she was there to help support Jeffrey’s defense argument that he was a victim of domestic abuse and that he was terrified, and that didn’t really entirely sit with the way we felt when you look at the everything of it all. But she was saying that toxic relationships are dangerous, not just to the people in them, but more alarmingly, that people should know that they can be dangerous to innocent bystanders, and that people around can get caught up in it. It’s very true in this case, and because Jamie was really an innocent bystander.
And what did we go in with, and what is the question we have at the end, who did it? You know, although I think really after, like, talking about it for hours and months and years. I think Randy and I both think that two people should be in jail, not just one.
Barbato: We were really trying to do that. It’s because of who we are, and regardless of what role anyone played, including potentially being the murderer, we are all human, and to understand anything is to connect with that, and to communicate with empathy and to have a connection with people you know, including all the attorneys. You can watch so many true crime stories or programs, and they do a great job. They’re amazing, but they’re very procedural, and I don’t often feel a connection with any of the people, and so for us that’s really important.
In Joey’s case, it’s just being curious about how he came to be who he is, because clearly, when his first boyfriend talks about them, and they’re falling in love, it’s this beautiful story until it turns dark, but it’s so sweet that you realize even monsters have some soft spot.
Bailey: Unless the monsters do exist, and they’re the ones who escape justice. If a monster is there, and the monster is those who escape justice or being held to account. And I think to some degree that might have happened in this story.
Watch the trailer below.
The house on 1435 South Fourth Street, owned by Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend Joseph “Joey” Banis, became a crime scene. At the time, Banis and Mundt were dating, and a wild night involving sex and drugs led to a bloody murder. But who did it?
In HBO‘s two-part true-crime doc “Murder in Glitterball City,” now streaming on HBO and HBO Max, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato seek to put the pieces together.
Over the two-part series, they use community to help tell the story of this couple and how, at the center of it all, was a very toxic relationship. The doc opens with what appears to be Banis confessing on camera, but as the story unfolds, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
As gruesome as the murder was, Bailey says, it was important to honor the victim. “This is a true crime story. It’s also a queer story. David, who wrote the book, is gay, and we’re queer filmmakers.” He adds, “In telling it, we wanted to avoid being coy about the details, but also present the details, and that was the best way to tell Jamie’s story and remember him.”
Both Banis and Mundt were tried for murder, but Banis remains in prison, while Mundt walks free. Bailey and Barbato sat down to talk about the film, and share thoughts on the film’s ending.
Randy Barbato: It was over five years ago. Lisa Heller and Nancy Abraham from HBO said, “We have a book we’re going to send to you. Take a look at it.” We read David Dominé’s “A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City: Murder, Secrets, and Scandal in Old Louisville,” and we were like, “What is this?” So, we flew to Louisville and spent a few days ringing people, knocking on doors, and tracking people down in the book. We came back and called HBO, and we said, “We have to make this, and we don’t know what it’s going to be.” We spent the next four years talking about it, going back and forth.
At the heart of it is a gruesome crime, but there are these concentric circles of fascination and incredible characters and just who inspired us and made us laugh. We asked, “Wait, how are we going to make all this fit together? And I don’t know if we did, but I do know we finished it.”
Fenton Bailey: It’s a large cast of characters, isn’t it? And in a way, this is looking at it after the fact, but it’s a bit like the disco ball itself. You’ve got this single event; it hits the disco ball, and all these different versions, reflections and ideas bounce off it.
In the case of John and Missy, that’s how David’s book begins, and it’s so good because we said, “We’ve got to find them.” When we met with them, they were such great characters. And you’ve got an enclave of Old Louisville that is just a few blocks that was saved from the demolition ball by these gay guys. They’re not in the film. But, other gay people moved in, and artists came, so you have this unique little time capsule with these Bohemian, creative characters, all within a tight few blocks.
Barbato: We are archive queens, and you know this about us, but we have an incredible team that we work with, and they are also archive queens. It’s interesting because now that you mentioned it, there’s a lot of archive in this. That archive is a character that we used and needed, and it was part of the gig of putting the story together.
Bailey: One thing that happened was partway through, we were speaking to Joey in prison, and he gave permission to his lawyer to let us have a copy of his laptop. And so we suddenly found all this stuff. And this was in 2012-2013, when even though there were texts, iPhones and emails and all that in abundance, policing hadn’t really caught up to that with those sorts of departments, and so there was so much stuff that they just had never been able to look at. That material ends up being the linchpin to the whole story, because it begins with this videotape of Joey appearing to confess to the crime at the very beginning, and then, of course, as everything unfolds, you realize that is not what it appears to be. But there is an enormous amount of information at a time when I don’t think the authorities really were able to process it. Even now, with the Epstein files, they don’t seem able to process it all. It’s just the volume. Some of what Joey himself captured, either by phone calls or texts, or videos, is pretty extraordinary. Such as when, for reasons best known to them, it looks like Jeffrey started a counterfeiting operation. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
Barbato: The primary question was, had justice been served, and what don’t we know about the crime and the story? But as we started making the film, a million other questions surfaced. We started learning about the community, the city and different characters and their connection to it. There was a different question every day. A lot of it became organic. We stuck with trying to better understand the crime, and what it becomes is this psycho drama as well. So you’re trying to understand and build out these character portraits of these two people, and of course, Jamie, who is very important for us to humanize him and to not label him as a victim buried in a basement. So it was an endless course of discovery.
And that thing of how do you connect the discovery we made of all the ancillary characters with the crime at the heart of this story, and what is that connection? That became a huge obsession for us, because it was, “Why are these people as important as what’s in the center and the crime, and what is their connection?
Bailey: We had an education witness, LaTanya, and she was brought in to talk about domestic abuse and how it works, and the dynamics of it.
Barbato: She helped us understand why community is so important when it comes to crime. There are these horrific crimes that happen that you think have no relationship to you, and you have no connection to, but that’s actually not the case at all. We are all impacted, and we all can learn in some way. And so we didn’t even know that was a question we were going to need an answer to, and we never would have thought she was the one to give it to us.
Bailey: In the immediate context of the trial, she was there to help support Jeffrey’s defense argument that he was a victim of domestic abuse and that he was terrified, and that didn’t really entirely sit with the way we felt when you look at the everything of it all. But she was saying that toxic relationships are dangerous, not just to the people in them, but more alarmingly, that people should know that they can be dangerous to innocent bystanders, and that people around can get caught up in it. It’s very true in this case, and because Jamie was really an innocent bystander.
And what did we go in with, and what is the question we have at the end, who did it? You know, although I think really after, like, talking about it for hours and months and years. I think Randy and I both think that two people should be in jail, not just one.
Barbato: We were really trying to do that. It’s because of who we are, and regardless of what role anyone played, including potentially being the murderer, we are all human, and to understand anything is to connect with that, and to communicate with empathy and to have a connection with people you know, including all the attorneys. You can watch so many true crime stories or programs, and they do a great job. They’re amazing, but they’re very procedural, and I don’t often feel a connection with any of the people, and so for us that’s really important.
In Joey’s case, it’s just being curious about how he came to be who he is, because clearly, when his first boyfriend talks about them, and they’re falling in love, it’s this beautiful story until it turns dark, but it’s so sweet that you realize even monsters have some soft spot.
Bailey: Unless the monsters do exist, and they’re the ones who escape justice. If a monster is there, and the monster is those who escape justice or being held to account. And I think to some degree that might have happened in this story.
Watch the trailer below.