Special Report: Teenage Wasteland (2025)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Good evening, and welcome to Middletown High School. Tonight we have a visual history of Middletown and some other surprises. He never felt like a teacher. People used to call him Hippie Fred.

Other educators would have us believe Fred was a crackpot. You don't learn by sitting in a classroom and taking notes. You learn by doing, by getting involved. Hello. Hello.

Going back in time. Action. I thought of myself more of a nuisance. I was an outsider. Misdirected youth.

I was sort of against the system, but deep down, I was cripplingly shy. In the 90s, they would have called me a poser. You're a dick, Jeff. You're a dick, Jeff. Yeah, Jeff, you're a dick.

Old school teachers thought it was a joke. Making a movie is not like writing a five-page essay. Yeah, this is real life. That's harder. Middletown was picture perfect, but Fred was teaching us what's underneath the surface.

Toxic waste was illegally dumped for 20 years. We're on the edge of some kind of pond. The smell is making me sick, Fred. We were meddling kids making a documentary. Like, that felt really powerful.

Cover-ups from the county, state, and federal level. I'm nervous for that kid. I know what's in there because I've buried lots of them. I don't think any of us had any sense of the scale of this story. The biggest garbage company was in fact run by organized crime.

We're talking about mafia in our neighborhood. There was a perception that Fred was leading us into danger. The guy did threaten me. I think our phones are tapped. Mr.

B advises that I buy a gun. Are you going to stop videotaping me? I have nothing to hide. It's more than just a record of environmental crime. It's this archetype of young people rising up to the challenge and doing something about it.

The school had had enough. I remember I asked Fred if we should keep going. He said, yeah, push harder. And I was like, yeah! It was a community.

It's one of the only reasons I came to school. What if we could get it right? What if society could turn the world back right side up? That became one of our mottos, civic courage. It means acting as if you live in a real democracy.

Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode I am talking with directors Amanda McBain and Jesse Moss about their new documentary Teenage Wasteland. It's the story of a journalism class in Middletown, New York who kind of stumble onto a real story and made a documentary of their own about it. The film is now streaming on Netflix and I can't recommend it enough.

Thanks so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this interview. How did the story of Middleton come onto your radars? Fred has patiently kept the flame alive of the story. He has a wonderful blog called, I think it's garbagegangstersandgreed.com. And a great journalist that we know, Jeff Manoff, stumbled on Fred's blog and was like, what is this?

And wrote a profile of Fred, which we then read. And we're like, similarly, like, what is this? What an incredible story hiding in plain sight. And I think we are of the same generation as these kids who were a little bit older. And I think we could connect with sort of the youthful experiment of the camcorder and growing up in the early 90s and finding our voice.

And when we met Fred online, just to talk about the project, like he was just incandescent and we loved his fighting spirit and felt like something we wanted to invite into our lives in a kind of dark time. And it gave us hope to hear from him and to learn about this story, even though it deals with some heavy stuff, as you say, like environmental pollution and crime and corruption. I think it was just feeling like this is one of those stories that the world needs to know. There was a blip of attention in the early 90s around the project, but like Fred and these kids, they could be an inspiration to so many people. They were to us, and hopefully we could transmit that with this movie.

How does that go after you talk with him for the first time? Fred and his wife invited us up to their house. He still lives in the same house in Middletown and made us a 12-course brunch. So we were there for a really long time and then hung out in the backyard. And Fred and Denise are real people and wanted to get to know us before they opened up their basement to us.

And we had such a great time. Did we even go in the basements? At that point, I don't even know, but we spent a lot of time talking, getting to know one another. And at some point, when we were asking about this classroom, he took out a crayon and in evoking the memory of the space, drew a map of what he remembered it looking and where all the chairs were and where the cameras were. And we were so intrigued by that and the memory of that, that sort of got our creative juices going and we doubled down in our interest in the creative, what the creative possibilities were beyond even just the plot of the story, which was Byzantine and like overwhelming because they'd been following this story for many years and there's many players, good and bad players, and there's, it's just complicated.

And there's about 500 hours of archival material that he had amassed over the seven years he taught this class with these students. he's a good archivist but that's a lot of material and it's all vhs and it's all from the 1990s and as filmmakers as storytellers in 2020 whatever that was three four would people care right and i think that the more we hung out with fred the more we cared the more footage we saw the more we cared so i just always lean into that like if i can keep myself interested And we shared some of the VHS material with our 17 year old at the time. And she was intrigued by this footage, even though it was on VHS. So we felt confident that we had something that we could put together and do justice to the original film they had already made, by the way.

So we were coming in remixing his great song that he'd already written. And that's like very intimidating. And did we have the goods? I don't know. I've always loved the idea of like a hyper longitudinal film. and never most verite films we've made have been a couple of years in somebody's life.

And that's already a long time, but this was a 30 years in the making movie. And I just, you've probably seen some of the same films that just have that kind of sweeping arc of life and death. And we here was a chance to do that with this story. And by inviting these young people now our age 50 plus to revisit their teenage years, we just knew it could have a kind of dimension here. that would elevate the central themes of the story, I think are utterly of the moment in terms of democracy and journalism and environmental health and the power of teaching and the voice of young people, all that stuff couldn't be more important right now, but like we could bring it, we could frame it with the contemporary perspective and give it a kind of sweep that was attractive.

Was there a particular moment where you two looked at each other and said, we have to do this? Can you pinpoint that? Remember when we were looking at the archival that was available? It wasn't all available all at once, but like the first tranche that came in. And when the kids present their findings to the local news editor, the scene, and it's a set piece in our film about 20 minutes in, it was an amazing face-off between like youth idealism, but also some of the night naivete about what they were confronting, which is real pushback, not just from like the criminal element and the corrupt element, but from like sort of institutional systems.

Right. And that's the adult world. Like there's a lot of things that are rigid or challenge you to, have to push back at them. And I think that was that scene as Verite filmmakers primarily was to us felt like an immersion, like a present tense playing out kind of scene that we like. So we were like, ha, if we can get three or four of those moments, We're done.

We're golden. But then, of course, things got much harder from there. But that, to me, was useful. How about you? I think it was that Gary Grossman scene, but also the cram drawing and group drawing that Fred does.

And the idea that light bulb for us of like we could let's bring this classroom back to life. Let's build. Let's fabricate it. It doesn't exist anymore. The school got rid of it.

Now you've seen the film. So we said to Fred and not expecting him to be comfortable with the idea, we're going to rebuild the classroom because we don't have that much documentation of it. And it was so central to your project. Let's bring it back to life and we'll shoot your interview there. And he was like, I love the idea.

And that's kind of the spirit he has. And so we were able to do that and do it with this team in Hollywood that does like every, they did like good night and good luck. Any movie that has like television equipment, they do. And it all worked. Grow back.

And they love this story. They love this project. And we normally couldn't afford to work with it. They were working cameras. But they built, they helped us.

We had a great production designer who does like Broadway stage. And he loved this story too. So we were able to conjure. There was so that I think the fact that we had this gritty VHS kid made documentary stuff and then this sort of conjuring on a set was just a collision of filmmaking strategies that got us excited. So I'd say the crayon drawing and Gary Grossman were like the.

Well, and Fred, I will say, and Fred, obviously. You meet people in your life at the right time. Maybe everybody in every walk of life has that feeling, but I definitely have that feeling in documentary too. We needed to make this film at that moment when I was feeling a little despairing about just generally politics and how do you the inactive player in a democracy that feels overwhelmingly chaotic. And I think Fred walked into our life at the exact moment I needed a refresher in how to be activated.

And I would say the footage also made us laugh. We found a wonderful editor, Chris Passig, who cut telemarketers on HBO. I don't know if you've seen that, Mike, but It's a wonderful series, unlike anything else in documentary, I think. And just, we laughed so much. And Chris is funny.

And just, we loved it. We could have the feels, all the feels, while making this movie. I mean, we have to, for us and what we do, and we do make films about some very hard and dark things, like laughing is 100% part of the deal. And is garbage funny? Not really, but like.

We had a great time making this film, and I think the film is funny. Yeah, a garbage comedy. Not exactly. It's also a tragedy, right? A tragic comedy.

A garbage tragic comedy. Tragic comedy. A garbage tragic comedy. Whatever. A toxic waste tragic comedy.

They'd already made A Toxic Avenger, a trauma way back. We were happy to quote that. How much of yourselves did you see in these kids? I'd say a lot. I did have a journalism teacher in high school in a class, not quite as radical and renegade as this, but like a space and a group that felt unlike anything else in high school and was like a tremendous glimpse into a freedom of adulthood and adult life.

And like even a trade, a practice of journalism that was exciting to me that, and I didn't care about all the other stuff in class. So that was, I could just relate to which type was, I was probably a little mixture of all of those people. And maybe I would, And none of them fit neatly in types. You were saying this, Amanda. We expect high school movies to fall into high school trouts.

And there was a little bit of Breakfast Club in this. But they all are more complicated. I was 100% Rachel. I'm sorry. You were Hank.

Hank Rocker. I was a little dark. Yeah, she's amazing. And yeah, unbelievable. I love that in a room, you just see what's on the wall.

It's like this David Lynch and... It's just such a portrait of such a time and her soul and her willingness. Rachel was, she's director and she understandably was like, what kind of movie are you making? And who am I in your movie? And I'm not going to give you my home movies until I really know you.

And so we didn't get her home movies, which are really important. The last week of that is practically. Yeah. It's cool. I get it for sure.

But yes, we did come of age around the same time and the nineties were a thing and early documentary was a thing. And so there's a lot of shared memory there, even though I grew up on the, what we grew up on the West coast and they were in New York, but same music, gosh, was playing in her car, what in a commode or whatever. Like, All of that music, obviously the music everybody shared, right? We didn't use in our film, right? Partly because it was too expensive, but partly you can't license hip hop, right?

I loved that we could share Veruca salt. You know, it's like good stuff. How were the other kids bringing them along? And was there any hesitation from them as well? No, I think that they're so close to Fred still.

That's a testament to how important he was in their lives. David Birmingham and Fred still have lunch once a month, and two of them are still in Middletown, Mike and David. And once they knew that Fred had blessed the project, they were like, okay, we're in. And in fact, Jeff and David had gone to see Ward Stone, who's the New York State pathologist was on his deathbed when we began the project. We weren't filming yet, but actually Jeff and David went and filmed a visit with Ward.

And they were kind of still ready to keep making the documentary. And it was a great, I don't know, expression of their spirit to be a part of this. And they were wonderful, actually, too. Jeff had never talked about the fact that his father had been in jail in high school and I don't think he went into this project thinking he was going to talk about some of that stuff, but. But that comes later.

That wasn't the first thing we talked. No, no, not at all. Also, if it wasn't relevant, then obviously wouldn't have made it in the film. But like, I think, you know, them as adults realizing how meaningful and father figure like Fred was at the time is certainly why they wanted to do this for Fred. But of course, I think once they got to know us, it, It was also a group collaborative effort, seen sort of, like I said, as a full collaborative remix of this thing that they'd all done 30 years before, which is bananas.

David Birmingham is like one of the more profound people I've talked with in a long time. And that was, you know, just a delight that he's so thoughtful and smart about everything. He like, yeah, so that was a surprise. You know, you just don't know who, how powerful you know, who are you when you're middle-aged after who you were in high school? You just, for the most, well, everybody that we hung out with, like they just had actualized into these amazing people and amazing parents and, you know, all the good stuff.

And I love that. So it was a really positive, you know, kind of expected, like, oh, you know, like everybody's so young and full of potential in high school. And, you know, where are we going to get when we're like all facing each other as middle-aged people? And actually it was like the opposite. I was like, this is great.

That was good. You know, it was cool. And we brought them onto the set and they were all together. We did their interviews on set, but separately. And then there was like a brief period of time, maybe half a day where they were all together.

And Fred just kind of became a classroom again, this kind of set in Burbank suddenly became Fred's classroom. And they were kind of, we just backed off and, um, That was beautiful. And see some of that in a little bit of the film. And there was that, there's a moment the set got taken apart and we weren't sure Fred would, we weren't sure he should be there. He thought he might be traumatized, but he said, sure, I'd love to come back to the set.

And he just joined in the dismantling of the set. Cause that's just kind of who he is. And it became really beautiful and poignant unexpectedly. So there's a way in which we were working in such a controlled way, but it becomes, I don't know, like the set became alive and unexpected and kind of, documentary ways that we really, and I think we truly love. Other than the bulk, you mentioned 500 hours of VHS.

Were there any problems having this archive of basically an abandoned technology now? Brad had the foresight to digitize a good chunk of it about 10 years ago. It wasn't done at the highest compression or lowest, whatever the sort of optimal digitization codec would have been, but it was still really good. And probably if we had retransferred it all Now, would it decay significantly? So we had we benefited from that.

There were some tapes that he had kept that we had retransferred. It was a kind of aesthetic editorial question to have all the imperfections that remain in the VHS, like the overscan, underscan, the artifacting. A lot of that you could clean up with AI tools and whatnot, but we were like, no. It's sort of the imperfection of the work is what, and the perfection of it, for that matter, is what we want to celebrate here, all of it. That was interesting.

The limitation that we had to face, and this is also part of why we did the reenactment or the drama, whatever you want to call that space, that weird, unreal, real space of the recreated classroom. The reason we had to do that is because a lot of the footage that they shot back in the day was of the thing that they were shooting or they were stand up. They had taken in a lot of 60 minutes documentary. So standing up and saying smart things about a thing that was happening behind you or a person you're talking to. You're just very formal.

But they were not shooting Verite style, Penny Baker style, like behind the scenes of the press conference or whatever. They were not really shooting each other that much. The first pass on all this archival was like just grabbing every instance of them where they appear in the footage, right? And that didn't yield enough of process, right? What did the classroom as a whole look like?

Who was working camera when someone was on stage? That kind of on the soundstage, right? So out of necessity for helping people understand the space, the sort of the womb of that classroom, we needed to recreate it. For the audience, as much as we needed to recreate it for the subjects in the film to have recall, on their high school experiences, which were much more impressionistic than Fred's memory of that time, which, because he was in his, whatever, 30s, 40s, could remember details. Oddly, we made this movie about Smokey and the Bandit, Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham making that movie, and that was a big Hollywood film, and there was a lot of behind-the-scenes footage shot that I haven't really thought about these two films' relation to each other.

That was made over 10 years ago, and But it is a movie about making a movie. And we wanted to kind of do two things simultaneously, which is to make a movie about making a movie. But the audience needs to know what the movie is. It's not just about process. It's about what the movie is about.

And they had made a series of films culminating in Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, which is their magnum opus, their sort of culminating movie. But over the years, they did these shorter versions of that. And they built on each film. The class afterwards would build on that reporting. And so we needed...

We need to also tell the story and not just the making of the story, right? So that was a little bit of the balancing act of the film, I think. And also to not get lost in the labyrinth, which was also tempting because you'd be like, well, I love organized crimes. Amazing. Like New York gangsters are amazing.

And like New Jersey and what Love Canal is amazing. And this is inherently always a challenge of an archive film too, or any film for that matter. It's like, what matters here? And I'm like, this is going to be a feature. It's not a series.

How do we chart our way through this? Fred's own political awakening as a young person. Fascinating. How much backstory do you need against the front story? We love the challenge of this Layer K film.

And it's kind of, I think part of the reason we took it on and like why we take anything on now is partly formal. And we talked about all the sort of deep meaning of why the story matters. But I think the sort of formal huge VHS mound over here and total kind of It's. Only worth it if it scares you a little bit, right? I'm sure you've heard that before.

It really is only worth it if you're like. I do think you need a big idea to get a movie off the ground with financiers. And we were like, and we're going to recreate the classroom. And then we're like, okay, let's see how that goes. But that's just not something we've done before.

We usually work with real environments. Where and when can people see this film? The film will premiere on Netflix on September 4th, which is next Friday. And I am so tickled to see Mike Regan's thumbnail on Netflix now. If you go there and he's pointing at the dump behind him.

Oh, I got in his 90s sweater. It tickles me so much that this project is now going out to a global audience. It's amazing. Here's Mike and these kids and the work that they've done and getting the attention and Fred. That they deserve.

Mr. Moss, Ms. Bain, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this. Thanks, Mike.

Take care. Thank you. To prove I'm right I don't need Don't cry. Don't raise your eye. It's only teenage wasteland.

Sally, take my. Hand. Travel somewhere. The happy ones are here Let's get together. They're all wasted.

Thank you.