In the early 1990s, a group of teenagers from Middletown High School used their video recorders to make a student documentary about the brown muck surfacing at the local dump in their upstate New York town and uncovered a vast conspiracy that was poisoning their community. Thirty years later, they revisit their film and confront the legacy of this transformative experience.

Using archival footage from that class project, Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, as well outtakes, diaries, and interviews with the participants, Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss’ new documentary, Teenage Wasteland, weaves a sobering yet buoyant story about fighting the good fight as its own life-changing triumph.

On September 3, the Special Projects Documentary Series screening in the Los Angeles DGA theater was introduced by Special Projects Committee Co-Chair Rachel Raimist, who appears in the film as a former student journalist. Following the screening, McBaine & Moss discussed the making of Teenage Wasteland in a Q&A moderated by Director Alice Gu (The Donut King). During the conversation, they revealed how they went through 500 hours of archival footage from former Middletown High School teacher Fred Isseks to find the heart of their film.

“We identified the building block scenes and were also juggling the narrative of the investigation, the development of the subjects and who they were and what their relationship to Fred was. And then there’s sort of a layer of the present tense on top of that. We did kind of assemble the archive before we did any filming with our subjects. It wasn’t like a rough cut but we just we needed to really understand what we had to work with before we were ready to have that conversation with them,” said Moss.

“Jesse and I are different,” added McBaine. “He likes being in the field and he likes to shoot and I’m happy to be in the editing room for a very long time. There was a lot of footage to get through. We had to figure out how to make it shorter than seven years. I mean, they made a film right and that’s a new challenge like we’re remixing someone else’s awesome product.”

McBaine and Moss’ directorial credits include the 2021 DGA Award-nominated documentary, Boys State, and the 2024 Primetime Emmy Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program-winner Girls State. Moss’ solo credits also include the 2015 DGA Award-nominated documentary, The Overnighters. Moss has been a DGA member since 2015 and McBaine has been a DGA member since 2018.