'Middletown' Unearths a Toxic Government Cover-up and a Grassroots Exposé Led by Students

It’s 1991. Nirvana’s “Nevermind” is topping the charts and shaking speaker systems, while the rising grunge culture oozes through the streets of New York City. But 60 miles up the Hudson River, in the quiet suburb of Middletown, something more sinister is seeping beneath the surface.

Toxic sludge is flowing into the Orange County landfill, and as a new school year begins at Middletown High School, a group of students in Fred Isseks’s “Electronic English” class is about to uncover a chilling secret buried in their otherwise idyllic hometown.

“Middletown,” written and directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, is both a meta-documentary and a coming-of-age story that melds archival footage with modern-day reporting, and follows four students who, alongside Isseks and some quirky locals, worked relentlessly to uncover the truth behind this local controversy. “Middletown” will screen at Guild Hall in East Hampton as part of HamptonsFilm’s SummerDocs lineup on Friday, August 29.

In a recent interview, McBaine and Moss spoke about the film’s creation and community impact, and reflected on chronicling the exposé.

The idea for the documentary first came to McBaine and Moss in 2020, after the pair read a profile of Isseks and his students.

“It was just an incredible story — these teenagers in a high school class making an investigative documentary, filming it, and uncovering this conspiracy in their small town,” Moss said. “It was like a real life ‘Stranger Things.’”

Moss and McBaine reached out to Isseks, who, as it turned out, had been writing a blog about the situation in Middletown, to keep the story alive.

“He had such a magical quality when we spoke to him,” Moss said of Isseks, who had kept all the tapes that the students shot, and stored them in his basement for the past 30 years. “As documentary filmmakers, it’s kind of a dream to stumble into this extraordinary archive.”

McBaine and Moss are based in California, but the natural beauty of this East Coast suburb is one of the things that piqued their interest to create this documentary.

“The Hudson Valley has a lot of incredibly beautiful land, but it was also ground zero for a lot of industrial happenings,” McBaine said. “There’s mountains and trees, and then you have this toxic waste dump smack in the middle of this gorgeous area.”

Because the documentary uses so much archival footage of the students’ work from Isseks’s class, the directors explained that there was relatively little contemporary production, only totaling about six days — an unusual practice in documentary filmmaking.

“Most of the footage in the film was shot by the kids and by Fred — home movies and class project footage — and we wanted to build a movie from their camera footage to tell it from their point of view,” Moss said. “The challenge of the film was to marry the present and the past.”

The editing, McBaine said, took the longest.

“The class had been working on this particular documentary for seven years, so there was seven years worth of their material,” she said. “There was also material from other news media that had covered them. There was a lot to go through.”

Not to mention Isseks’s extensive memory and home archive, which made for particularly long interviews.

Moss said that despite the length of the journey from start to finish, there was a lot of joy and humor to be found both in the archival and the contemporary footage.

“What we particularly loved about the footage was that it was funny,” Moss said, adding that documentary filmmaking can sometimes be deadly serious. “This deals with big themes like democracy and journalism and our environment — stuff we all care about — but in such a fresh, funny and surprising way.”

“Middletown” is essentially a documentary inside of a documentary, and the meta nature of the film is one of the attributes that makes it stand out. However, McBaine and Moss prefer not to get too tied up in its meta qualities, lest the film lose the themes at its core.

“This is definitely a documentary about a documentary,” Moss said. “The risk, though, is that you make a film that’s like, too cute, too much about itself. How do you make it meta without letting meta consume it?

“As storytellers, the playfulness of the past and the present, the fear and the reality, the underground and the below-ground, all these dualities of the story are really exciting, and they were challenging to figure out how to balance,” Moss continued.

McBaine added that she thought the meta aspects of the film emerged naturally.

“To go back in time to the 90s, again, when it was the very early days of cameras, we were a changing culture,” McBaine explained. “To throw yourself back there is hard, because it was a more innocent time.

“What does it mean to make a documentary? Are you an activist or are you a journalist? Those are the kind of questions we were thinking about and talking about,” she continued.

The film merges the timelines of Isseks and his students from 30 years ago with the present day, giving audiences a special look at how they grew and changed throughout the years.

“I think all students in the film who are now adults are thinking, ‘I was such a rabble rouser when I was young, why did I stop doing that?’” McBaine said. “The problems didn’t get smaller. They in fact got a lot bigger. So what happened? You got busy, you had jobs, you had families. On some level, you can’t always stay that person you were.”

One person, though, did stay the same.

“The beauty of Fred is that he’s a responsible adult with a job and a family, and he cares for all these people, but he’s also still doing the work and pushing back,” McBaine said.

“He’s still a guy who climbs fences,” Moss added. “That was great to see, because we need more of that.”

The filming of the documentary may have ended, but Isseks’s work to uncover these deep-rooted environmental issues has not. Without giving audiences any spoilers, the story involves a lot more than just careless garbage disposal, and, 30 years later, Isseks is still fighting for resolution.

“There is not a Hollywood ending,” McBaine said. “There are some documentaries that give that to you, but ours does not, and I think it’s real to the environmental story. There’s some superfund sites that did get cleaned up, but if you compare that to the number of problem zones that did not, what do we do with that?

“No one wants to talk about garbage,” she continued. “No one wants to think about how much we produce. Our film is sort of shining a light on that. Here’s something that we don’t like to talk about a lot, but there is no resolution. We’ve got to at least acknowledge we have a problem.”

“The power of this story is that it speaks to these larger issues that we’re dealing with as a world, as a culture, as a society, and as a country,” Moss added. “Those are not resolvable simply and easily, and Fred makes that point. The message of the movie is to think locally and act globally.”

For the best experience, audiences should go into the film relatively blind, but to quote Isseks in the opening of the film, “Middletown,” and the documentary inside of it, the film is “more than just a record of environmental crime. It’s an archetype of young people rising up to the challenge, investigating what the problems are in their worlds, and doing something about it.”

“Middletown” will screen as part of HamptonsFilm SummerDocs 17th annual season on Friday, August 29, at Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton, at 7 p.m. Following the screening, directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss and film subject Jeff Dutemple will join HIFF Co-Chair Alec Baldwin and Chief Creative Officer David Nugent in conversation. Tickets are $35. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit guildhall.org.