Behind the scenes of the hyperlocal street art doc Stick 'Em Up!

Film producer Alex Luster unearths the story of Houston's street art subculture in his documentary, Stick 'Em Up! CultureMap visited Luster's studio to explore the film's inspiration and the truth behind the city's burgeoning art underground.

"This started off as just a short promo video for the local street art gallery Aerosol Warfare," Luster tells CultureMap. A longtime friend of the collective's GONZO247, Luster moved his video studio into the back room of the EaDo gallery.

"I wanted to be around this artistic energy that you just don't feel every day," he says. He created a short video about one of the gallery's first exhibited street artists, Give Up. As the uploaded video went viral, Luster began to conduct more interviews of local street artists for an extended documentary.

Beginning with the goal of depicting a day in the life of a street artist, Luster narrowed his focus onto poster-based wheatpasting.

"I quickly realized that traditional graffiti artists have a spray can and basically wall paint at the moment," says Luster. "Yes, there's a high risk for that, but that story's been told. The poster is interesting because these guys put days of work into one poster, and they have the risk of it coming down in an hour or a month. It's the chance that they're taking. What drives them? What's the prize; what's the goal? What makes them stay so committed to their art?"

When Luster interviewed Give Up, the wheatpaste artist had been working on Houston streets for six years. "I knew his stuff gets ripped down quickly. Doesn't that discourage someone to stop doing something?," asks Luster. "It made me want to know more."

With a decade-long background in news journalism, Luster was unafraid to request interviews from strangers. When he began filming Stick 'Em Up!, street artist Shepard Fairey's iconic portrait of Barrack Obama was reaching critical acclaim. Once Luster secured an interview with Fairey via e-mail, the producer decided to contact representatives from all sides of the street art story.

"Artists said 'yes,' the sheriff said 'yes,'" he recalls. "As that happened, I realized this was much bigger than a 10-minute documentary."

"From there, it just grew into the beast that it is today: one hour and 14 minutes," says Luster.

Although a forerunner for creating the first documentary on Houston street art, Luster says, "I'm just telling a story that is going on in every major city in the U.S. There is a Give Up in every city who puts stuff out every week. There's a sheriff in every city. There's an art collector."

Indeed, street art has entered the commercial art market in unprecedented ways. In Stick 'Em Up!, Luster interviews a local collector who bridges the imagery on Houston's concrete jungle to the French Surrealist movement of the 1940s.

"For these artists, the street is their gallery," explains the producer. "It's like shooting a shotgun into the air — you don't know who the bullet is going to hit. People don't see the posters on the side of the road. They just go on their routine, and these posters intrigued me because of that."

Luster identified with covert street artists for the amount of time they spend in their studio compared to an otherwise scant amount of viewer observation. "When I started this movie, not a lot of people outside the subculture realized what went on before street artists hit the streets," he says.

"These guys aren't nervous; they don't care," Luster says. "They just go out there and act like they know what they're doing, whether it's two in the afternoon or two in the morning. There might be a guy changing a McDonalds billboard into a poster with a dead rat with an ice pick in it. Nobody stops to even question it."

During filming, Luster would sometimes awaken to a 3 a.m. phone call from an artist inviting him to document the poster process. "They're artists, so they do things when they feel the impulse," Luster says. "I have to go with the flow."

Rather than relying on opinionated narrative, Luster states that he takes a fair and balanced journalistic approach to organizing the documentary.

"I never say, 'This art is beautiful and you should support it,'" he explains. "You might leave the theater loving street art because the film exposed the hard work that goes into it. At the same time, you may hate it because you hear the legal side that's also documented in the movie."

When the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop encountered wide acclaim in 2010, Luster initially feared that his local film could be overshadowed.

"I thought, 'Oh man, this is going to kill us.' But every time there is some news of that movie, I see the e-mail signups for updates on my documentary sky rocket. I think that people saw Exit Through the Gift Shop and wanted more. There's been plenty of street art films, but Stick 'Em Up! covers street art from birth to death — the poster going up to it being taken down."

As Luster added more scenes, he watched Internet buzz over the documentary grow exponentially, a sign of growing street art enthusiast communities on social media platforms. The documentary sold out its few preview screenings solely via social media alerts.

"I think everyone is tired of traditional media talking at us," Luster says. "Everyone is ready to make their own decisions, including how we view street art. The buzz that social media created for this film just felt like a virus — it was really interesting to watch."

Following the three River Oaks Theatre screenings Thursday night, Luster and his crew at Shoot. Edit. Sleep. plan to pitch the three-years-in-the-making Stick 'Em Up! to such major festivals as Sundance and Tribeca.