Teenage Wasteland directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State) talk about their fascinating documentary and why it took more than 30-plus years to tell this incredible story.
In 1991, New York teacher Fred Isseks challenged his Electric English class to film a documentary on a local landfill. What they discovered would change their lives.
That’s the plot of the new Netflix documentary, Teenage Wasteland, from directors Amanda McBaine and Jessie Moss, who dug through 500 hours of VHS tape to tell the story of how a rag-tag group of students and their fervent teacher uncovered a small-town conspiracy.
“The best stories are often hiding in plain sight,” said Moss. “I think that’s true of this story. Fred was patiently keeping the flame alive through his blog about what had happened in his community [30-plus years ago]. And we were lucky enough to connect with Fred.“
How Teenage Wasteland Builds Upon the Students’ Film
The intriguing twist for the directors was having the student film Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed as the starting point.
“They’d already made a film, which is a really interesting new kind of creative project for us,” said McBaine. “And so they had made certain choices in how they told the story of their documentary. And then we remixed that on some level by then adding more hours of footage, which is their interviews as adults.”
But the class wasn’t a one-and-done thing. It went on for years, with students graduating and new ones coming up. Moss said the kids they decided to interview today “chose themselves.”
“It was very clear that [the ones selected] had very vivid roles in the footage,” said Moss. “They were very active in the project. And most importantly, I would say from today, they were still very close to Fred or they carried with them very strong feelings about what the project meant and what Fred meant to them. And so I’d say when we spoke, we spoke to a lot of kids on Zoom, and these handful were the ones who just carried it with them in a very deep way.”
A Class Discussion Turns Heated with a Local Journalist
At one point in the doc, a local journalist visits the class, getting more than he bargained for when students start asking questions about the landfill. This scene asks whether capitalizing on the novelty of student documentarians was the only way for this environmental conspiracy to be uncovered.
“Fred was frustrated with the media’s portrayal of [the students] because they leaned so far into the cute kids, the Scooby-Doo aspect of it,” said McBaine, “which is part of what drew people’s attention. ‘Cause like, how do you get eyeballs, right? I love that scene with the newspaper guy. When we were looking through all the archival footage, that was the first scene that really felt like a present tense; they shot the heck out of it. It feels like it’s unfolding in front of you.”
Saved by The Bell Meets Chinatown?
While watching these kids get under the skin of local politicians and those in authority, you’re also watching them find their own voice as both filmmakers and young adults. It almost feels like something that could be a narrative television series, which is what the directors pitched at first.
“We did think about that,” said Moss. “In fact, we actually were involved in a adaptation to turn it into a scripted television series because we knew it would be wonderful, and it still would be. But yeah, that project got paused during the strike a couple of years ago. It‘s a great part for a leading man and or a leading woman for that matter. And yeah, we think it would be fantastic. And there’s so many tributaries that we could go down and sort of like a Chinatown for today.”
And none of it would have ever happened if Fred Isseks hadn’t pushed his students to think outside of the classroom.
“Teenage Wasteland is also a love letter to teachers,” said McBaine. “When we were touring the film through festivals and a theatrical release, Fred was with us doing all the Q and A’s, and there was a teacher or two or 10 or 20 in the audience. And that was a really beautiful part of bringing this film out into the world.”
