In 1991, Middletown High School teacher Fred Isseks started an elective class that every student wanted to take. “Electronic English” introduced teenagers to new media and emerging art forms, providing them access to camcorders, editing machines, and digital photography. Each day, students filmed music videos, shot horror movies, and hosted talk shows, developing their broadcast and rap skills in an environment that encouraged creativity and the kind of collaboration and critical thinking that other classes couldn’t.
But Isseks wasn’t just overseeing good times and teaching technical skills. Not long after learning about toxic waste spilling into a local landfill, Isseks convinced his students to embark on an environmental video project that would investigate the town’s unreported ecosystem of corruption and neglect. Over the next six years his classes produced four documentaries about the subject, the last one called Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, a culmination of all their journalistic work helping to expose an intricate web of political and corporate malfeasance and crime-family control in their otherwise sleepy town 60 miles north of New York City.
Was the class a success? It’s a question directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss pursue, more than 30 years hence, from a variety of angles in this moving, nostalgic retrospective that mostly satisfies the promise of an intriguing setup. After documenting ambitious, politically minded high-schoolers in Boys State and their gender-swapped follow-up Girls State, the pair of filmmakers remain inspired by the classroom––so much so that they create an artificial one in Los Angeles to match the exact parameters and equipment that Isseks had at his disposal. The makeshift room is a memory-jogging meeting ground for four of Issek’s best, most dogged students (Rachel Raimist, Jeff Dutemple, David Birmingham, and Mike Regan) to reconvene and reflect on that stretch of activism and the changes (or lack thereof) that took place once they graduated and left their hometown.
The quartet all had different backgrounds and reasons for joining Isseks’ class––in Regan’s case, hanging around it, since he forgot to enroll. But like most curious teenagers, they were eager to rally around an adult and leader passionate about feeding their interests to “make stuff” and concerned about the health of their community. Though students often called him “Crazy Fred,” he was considered the cool hippie teacher, even playing a father-figure role for Dutemple, whose actual dad had struggled with alcoholism and served prison time. After Isseks brought in a friend to speak to the class about the brown water seeping into nearby farmer’s yards and homes, everyone was hooked and eager to explore the town of Wallkill landfill for themselves.
Because Isseks preserved and kept the majority of his students’ tapes and projects, McBaine and Moss have reams of grainy VHS footage to parse and share. That starts with trespassing field trips to the landfill, where the class gets an up-close look at green ponds, bubbling creeks, and the smell of dead bodies. As Raimist notes, it was probably a little foolish to be traipsing around unauthorized areas with thousands of tons of toxic waste, but the trips and interviews with resident farmers suffering from the hazardous goo provided a baseline for Electronic English to dive deeper.
Middletown proceeds to unfold much like a news documentary––there’s more footage exposing the landfill’s sickly appearance, amateur interviews with local officials, and recorded community town halls. The project effectively worked as a broadcast camp, giving students the opportunity to hold a microphone, report from the field, and speak with prominent community leaders and lawmakers about real issues. In most cases the tension of these dialogues is palpable––city councilmen and newspaper editors, expecting an easy assembly in a makeshift TV studio, suddenly bristle as teenagers ask hard-hitting questions and take them to task over contradictory details.
It’s inspiring to watch. Isseks provided the tools and the idea, but the students took the cause to new heights, a symptom of their strong feelings about the governmental negligence occurring in their backyards. Over the years they gain more traction by enlisting the help of a wildlife pathologist while Isseks sourced anonymous calls from shady figures, claiming to have knowledge and receipts of a larger conspiracy. The students––eventually deemed “Toxic Avengers” when national news began covering their exploits––were impressionable and believed in their teacher’s initial mission, but they didn’t follow blindly: they stood up to their representatives and showed what a sleepy town expected to roll over could look like when it woke up.
In some ways, Middletown makes sense as McBaine and Moss’s next project. When they set out to make their 2024 summer-camp doc Girls State, the goal was to be a reverse shot of Boys State, documenting how well a bunch of high school girls could put together a mock government. But halfway through shooting they latched onto a more interesting storyline: one of the participants had ditched her political efforts to write an exposé on the unequal treatment and standards between the two camps. If it was an unlikely sequel, you can tell McBaine and Moss appreciated the organic plotline and agility to highlight someone embracing journalism’s task-taking power.
That storyline––that individual desire to uncover the truth and make change––is only magnified in Middletown. There’s an energy and momentum to their discoveries and governmental pushback, and for the majority of its runtime it feels like we’re headed to some revelation, some discovery that will crack the case, find those responsible, and restore a poisoned community. Unfortunately that never happens (the ending credits share the results of the class’ collective efforts), which is a bit of letdown––if also, maybe, the point.
No matter the end results of their efforts, the four adult subjects who return to the scene of their rebellion don’t question or cringe at their awkward television presence and interview skills, as most would upon flipping through an old yearbook. Instead, sitting together and reminiscing with Isseks only further affirms how special their four years were. It’s as though they’re recognizing the start of their awakening to the world’s issues (even at such a small, micro-level) and the enduring struggle––and power––that journalists have to hold those in charge accountable.
Middletown premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.