For His First Documentary, Ken Kwapis Turns His Camera on Girl Group The Shaggs

In 1980, Ken Kwapis was browsing in a record store when he picked up a reissue of a 1960s album called “Philosophy of the World,” by an all-girl trio called The Shaggs. Intrigued by the cover, Kwapis was stupefied when he listened to the actual LP.

“I like to think of myself as somebody who enjoys challenging music, but I really had never heard anything like that before,” he told IndieWire. “I was completely mystified. I recall being surprised by the emotional content of the songs, which is very personal and innocent, and the very dense, discordant musical textures.”

Kwapis’ reaction was not unusual; in the 57 years since The Shaggs’ first and only album was released, it has become an object of fascination for music fans, scholars, and performers (Kurt Cobain and Frank Zappa were vocal fans) who have spent decades trying to decode the group’s extremely odd style. Was their weird, half-beautiful and half-grating sound the result of genuine artistic inspiration and innovation, or incompetence? Or both? And does it matter?

These questions are at the heart of Kwapis’ new documentary “We Are the Shaggs,” which will premiere at SXSW this Friday. Kwapis is best known for feature films like “He Said, She Said” and “He’s Just Not That Into You” and countless hours of now-classic television (he directed the pilot for the American version of “The Office” as well as episodes of “Freaks and Geeks,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” and many others). He originally intended to tell the Shaggs’ story in a narrative film based on Joy Gregory and Gunnar Madsen’s stage musical about the band. After years of trying — and failing — to find financing, Kwapis decided to take a different approach.

“Rather than throwing in the towel, I reached out to Dot and Betty Wiggin, the surviving members of The Shaggs,” Kwapis said. The sisters gave Kwapis their blessing, and he embarked on his first documentary feature. His first step was to interview the sisters, with the intention of letting their voices guide the narrative. “There’s a lot of mythology about The Shaggs, so my goal was to set all that aside and let the sisters tell their own story.” Kwapis spent hours talking with Dot and Betty about their past and found that his background as a fiction filmmaker came in handy for creating a relaxed interview environment.

“As a director, I’m always trying to make actors feel comfortable and make them feel like I’m simply having a conversation with them, rather than directing them,” Kwapis said. “That absolutely applied in this case, especially for Dot and Betty, who were not necessarily used to being in front of the camera.” In addition to the Wiggin sisters — who, along with their siblings Helen and Rachel, comprised The Shaggs after their dad Austin pressured them to form a band — Kwapis interviewed various music scholars, producers, musicians, and even a Shaggs cover band to explore how the group’s music came about, what it means to people, and what it says about the way we consume and appreciate art.

‘We Are the Shaggs’Jeremy Seifert

Aside from Dot and Betty, the first piece of the puzzle was musicologist Susan Rogers, who wrote a book on the connection between neuroscience and music that included a chapter on The Shaggs and what their album says about how we define authenticity. While Rogers’ insights helped Kwapis organize the film in his head, he ultimately found that beneath the story of The Shaggs lay a parallel narrative about the evolution of his own thoughts and feelings about the band.

“The film has an emotional arc, and it’s my arc of learning to check my prejudices at the door and try to listen in a new way,” Kwapis said. “ Soon into the process, I found that the film was becoming more and more about aesthetics. It was always going to be about the story of this band, but it started to operate on different, multiple levels. One of which is an aesthetic discussion about what we mean when we say good versus bad, or what we mean when we say the words ‘accidental’ or ‘intentional,’ ‘primitive’ or ‘sophisticated,’ things like that.”

Finding the additional layers excited Kwapis as he dove deeper into the project. “In addition to that level of being about the Wiggin sisters and the creation of this band, and the more philosophical level, it’s also a movie about a small recording studio in the Northeast,” Kwapis said. “There’s also the whole question of, once you put something out into the world, how do you deal with success or the lack thereof?” That question is addressed in both humorous and heartbreaking fashion in one of the film’s animated sequences by Drew Christie, which shows the sisters reading their own horrifyingly scathing reviews.

“There’s a whole level of the film that’s about how we define success in American life,” Kwapis said. “Then there are things I couldn’t have predicted, like when the composer Eric Lyon says that he feels the song ‘Philosophy of the World’ diagnoses a problem for which the only remedy is radical empathy. I thought, OK there’s a whole new avenue to think about The Shaggs, or to think about when we’re dismissive of artists…do we need to improve our empathetic skills to understand a little better where somebody else is coming from?”

Kwapis felt that his background in fiction film came in handy when trying to find a shape for all of these ideas, as he put the same kinds of setups and payoffs into his documentary that he would in a dramatic narrative movie. If his narrative chops informed how he approached the doc, he also found that the documentary liberated him in a way that is likely to inform his next forays into fiction. “What excites me now is to go back to narrative filmmaking and not be afraid to include sidebars and detours along the way,” Kwapis said.

Kwapis is in the middle of a busy season, with the premiere of “We Are the Shaggs” and a new revival of “Malcolm in the Middle” that he directed heading to Hulu on April 10. One of his earliest directorial efforts, the Muppet movie “Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird,” will also screen next month at the Academy Museum with Kwapis and Debra Spinney (widow of Big Bird puppeteer Caroll Spinney) in attendance.

“The last thing I imagined in 1985 is that ‘Follow That Bird’ would ever be screening at the Academy Museum,” Kwapis said, while acknowledging that he always had high artistic aspirations for the film, seeing Big Bird as a spiritual sibling to Harry Dean Stanton’s character in “Paris, Texas.” “I guess that’s what happens when you model a Big Bird movie on Wim Wenders,” Kwapis laughed. “At some point, it’s going to be playing in an arthouse.”

As for “We Are the Shaggs,” Kwapis hopes the film will enrich the audience’s appreciation of the band’s eccentric yet sweetly moving music as the story progresses and the film dives deeper into the nuances of the songwriting. “One of the surprises for me making the film was to discover just how powerful and simple and poetic Dot Wiggin’s lyrics are,” Kwapis said. “They’re similar to something Brian Wilson would write, like ‘In My Room.’ One of the things I hope the movie does is make the case to take the songwriting seriously.”

“We Are the Shaggs” will have its world premiere at SXSW on Friday, March 13. “Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird” screens at the Academy Museum on Saturday, April 4. “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” premieres on Hulu on Friday, April 10.