About this episode

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine discuss their documentary Teenage Wasteland, exploring its themes and production process.

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine talk with Mike about Teenage Wasteland, their documentary premiering on Netflix September 4th. The film resurrects five hundred hours of decaying VHS tape shot between 1991 and 1997 by English teacher Fred Isseks and his Middletown, New York, students as they investigated a toxic dump — and stumbled into a conspiracy involving organized crime and cover-ups reaching the state government. Moss and McBaine, the Boys State and Girls State team, describe tracking down Isseks, winning his trust over a twelve-course brunch, and the moment a crayon-drawn map of his gutted classroom convinced them to physically rebuild it on a Hollywood soundstage. They talk about editor Christopher Passig (Telemarketers) cutting the archive down from hundreds of hours, the ethics of dramatizing a documentary about documentary-making, and why they left the VHS's tracking lines and artifacts untouched rather than cleaning them up with AI. They also get into what it meant to bring Isseks's original students — now in their fifties — back together decades later, a story one of them had never told before about his father, and how a film about a 1990s toxic-waste scandal ended up…

People in this episode

Host: Mike

Guests: Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine

Topics covered

• documentary
• toxic waste
• VHS tapes
• conspiracy
• interviews
• film making

Keywords

• Teenage Wasteland
• documentary
• VHS
• toxic dump
• organized crime
• Fred Isseks
• 1990s scandal

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Netflix, Boys State, Girls State

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