Everyone in Old Louisville knows about the couple who killed someone. In this neighborhood of elaborate Victorian architecture and genteel walking courts, the story of Jeffrey Mundt and Joey Banis and the murder on 4th Street is a local legend that won’t go away, gossiped about at happy hours and garishly re-enacted on true crime shows like Oxygen’s Snapped: Killer Couples, which ran an episode on the case two years ago.
In some ways it’s easy to see why Mundt and Banis have become a 21st-century Leopold and Loeb, the famous gay lovers who inspired Hitchcock’s Rope. Their 2009 trial hit almost every square on the true-crime bingo card, involving meth-fueled group sex, pathological lies forming webs of deceit, intense BDSM, and a body left to rot in the basement of a haunted former sanatorium.
But the sad, strange – and yes, gory – murder of the 46-year-old hairdresser and business owner Jamie Carroll is also a Rubik’s cube of a case with no clear heroes and villains. I found HBO’s new documentary Murder in Glitterball City so fascinating precisely because it embraces that complexity and refuses to tie it up in a bow. “The story had been told in a sort of American Horror Story style,” co-director Fenton Bailey tells me, “showing demonic people and with tabloid headlines.”
Murder in Glitterball City casts an empathetic eye even as its subjects can be hard to love. Banis and Mundt could not have appeared to be from more different worlds. The former was a tattooed cyberpunk bartender, while IT consultant Mundt was preppy and at times adopted a fake British accent to sound more “sophisticated” (sound the sociopath alarm). After meeting on the gay dating website Adam4Adam and bonding over their interest in BDSM, the pair moved into a dilapidated redbrick mansion, intending to restore the place to its former glory. They kept a low profile but were initially an affectionate couple who were content in each other’s company: home movies show them listening to Kylie Minogue’s cult album Impossible Princess and playing with their two cats.
On a Zoom call the week before the documentary’s release, the British-born Bailey and New Jersey-raised Randy Barbato pinball off each other like a couple that have been together forever. “We don’t agree about aaaanything,” says Bailey with a drawl. That makes for creative dynamism. After meeting while studying at NYU in the 80s, and performing in a new wave band called Fabulous Pop Tarts, the duo founded the production company World of Wonder in 1991, best known as the home of RuPaul’s Drag Race. But Bailey and Barbato are mostly documentarians by trade, producing and directing 1998’s Party Monster: The Shockumentary and the subsequent Macaulay Culkin film, as well as the 2000 documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which was the blueprint for the later Oscar-winning biopic. In 2002, the duo directed Monica in Black and White, which sought to show Monica Lewinsky with a sensitivity that was nearly unheard of at the time.
“I think we’re drawn to complicated stories or unlikely heroes,” says Barbato, before Bailey cuts in. “Maybe it’s also people that others have a snap judgment about or think they know,” he says. “Whether they’re demonized, marginalized or just judged. Everything is so much more complicated than that.”
After being approached by HBO Docs to make a documentary based on a David Domine’s 2021 book about the Banis and Mundt case, the directors hopped on a plane to Louisville. They quickly fell in love with the history-steeped neighborhood of Old Louisville and its people, and included many of the outre characters in their film too.
“What made it click was that this is a queer true crime story,” says Bailey. “Jeffrey, Jamie and Joey are queer, and Owen Myers David is queer. The fact that that neighborhood exists today is because of queer men who saved their houses from the demolition ball. Being there and getting to understand that the neighborhood exists as a creation of gay people gave us a sort of responsibility: we’ve got to tell this right because it could be so easy to tell it wrong.”
After discovering that the mirrorball was invented in Louisville in 1917, the symbol of disco-dancing liberation became symbolic of their approach to storytelling, Bailey says: “The idea of a single beam of light hitting a disco ball and producing all of these confusing, dazzling versions … After a while we were like, ‘Well, that’s what we should be capturing about this story. It’s a single event in this room, but the two people who know what happened have completely different versions.”
Murder in Glitterball City is refreshingly honest about the addiction, so-called extreme sex and violence that can often be part of gay life. The film trusts the viewer to know that inflicting consensual pain on your lover in the bedroom doesn’t add up to picking up a gun, even if those things can both happen to be true.
“It was important neither to sanitize it as we might do as queer people,” says Bailey. “Conversely, if this was a Maga production, they may want to demonize it. By looking at this in unblinking detail, we could get as close to the story of what happened as you can get. That’s the reality of life. We’re in this moment where we’re trying to be sold on infantile choices of good or bad, and life’s not like that.”
As the film progresses, we follow the arrests of Mundt and Banis, as they both accuse the other of committing the murder. The case turns into a he-said-he-said story, with each man having a different – and equally compelling – version of what really happened that night. “We still argue about it,” says Bailey, and the film leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions.
In the process of research, Bailey and Barbato discovered hours of home camcorder footage on a laptop. The couple filmed everything, from those cozy at-home moments to the intense, verbal intercourse they had while high. I ask if they found it hard to stomach. “I don’t know if people having sex is a bad thing to watch,” says Bailey, frowning. But the footage goes further than most blue movies, showing the couple strung-out and looking dead behind the eyes as they go at it. “Yeah, and the phone conversations they have are so disturbing,” concedes Barbato. “We went back and forth about how much of that should be in there because it’s so dark, it’s like you’re being pulled into a crystal meth den. But it does illustrate what that is, so it’s important.”
It’s time for my last question. “Uh-oh!” mugs Barbato in mock-fear. I don’t want to talk about sex or drugs, though. I’m more interested in how a film like this, which portrays messy and unsanitised queer lives, gets made at a time when Trump is rolling back NEA grants for LGBTQ+ arts and Glaad reports that LGBTQ+ inclusion in film is at a three-year low.
“It’s tough out there in general,” says Bailey. “We do a lot of projects [at World of Wonder] that we don’t even bother taking out to pitch. We start making them first because they’re just so hard to sell.” The duo have been trying to secure funding for a documentary on the gay genius Liberace since before Covid, but so far, no bites. “And we need a Liberace story.”
Rather than being wedded to a crucible of morality, Bailey sees Murder in Glitterball City’s embrace of grey areas as a counterpoint to our politically polarized moment. “I feel it’s almost defensive on the part of the queer community, [saying] that we are real people. We’re neither saints nor sinners. The refusal to honor that reality is a way of refusing to see us.”
Barbato adds: “Given how polarized the times are, it’s a little bit riskier to get messy.”
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