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“I’d Have Done This One on iMovie if They’d Asked Me To”: Editor Christopher Passig on Middletown
Middletown, courtesy of Sundance Institute. In the early 1990s, teenagers enrolled in Fred Isseks’ Electronic English would regularly report on the illegal dumping of toxic waste in their community, their investigation culminating in a student film at the end of the course. Now thirty years older, these former students and Isseks look back on their projects and reflect on their impact on the town’s legacy.
Editor Christopher Passig delves into the process of cutting Middletown, including the insane amount of raw footage he worked with, the “extreme levels of candor” he tries to bring to every project and the sympathy he now feels for his 17-year-old self.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of Middletown? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Passig: Our directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine were fans of a project I’d done called Telemarketers. That series has some parallels to Middletown—a lot of unprofessionally shot archival, amateur sleuthing, everyday citizens punching above their weight. It’s also very character and comedy forward, and that was something we all really wanted to achieve with Middletown as well. I’d never been quite handed the keys or been able to showcase my sensibility the way I was able to on Telemarketers, so it was thrilling to hear from Jesse and Amanda and to know they wanted to bring some of that gonzo spirit to Middletown. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise—they are such pillars of the doc world and their films have such a discipline to them, whereas my aesthetic can be more like that of a dirty dish sponge. I was kind of like, “You’re sure you got the right guy?” But they sent me some raw footage and once I watched some ’90s teenagers traipsing around a landfill and poking at some toxic sludge with a stick, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is the project for me!”
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing Middletown from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Passig: Fred Isseks, our protagonist and teacher to the students in Middletown, would essentially make a new documentary about the toxic waste scandal unfolding in town each new school year. I think there are films out there about the making of a documentary, but I can’t think of many that are about the making of like, SEVEN documentaries. (Garbage, Gangsters and Greed is my personal favorite of the bunch.) So that was a major challenge—take the amount of raw footage you would expect a film like this to have and then multiply it by seven.
Fred’s films are laser focused on the local environmental scandal and corruption at hand. Which is not the totality of what our film is about—we also want an audience to feel what it was like to have undertaken this wild high school experience as a student, the toll it can take to be strident and uncynical, the grind and inevitability of local politics and incrementalism, so there was a constant calibration of, “Where does the film we are watching the kids and Fred make end and where does ours begin?”
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Passig: I had to force myself out of in-person edit retirement! I’ve been working from home exclusively since 2019 but we had to be in the same room as much as possible. It just allowed us to be able to find the poetry in an awkward kid in the corner of a frame together or laugh at some of our stranger, public access material at the same time—things that just aren’t the same over a screen share. I was very lucky in that Jesse and Amanda also threw themselves into the stranger corners of our public access footage and were the ones to find so much of our gold. They were the ones to push me to cut it weirder and I happily obliged.
Our feedback screenings confirmed what we had already been feeling—while it’s necessary to track the plot of the toxic dumping scandal that Fred and the students were up against, the subtext of our characters coming of age needed to be the thing that was driving the bus.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Passig: I was a college dropout/insurance salesman who was lucky enough to get an entry-level, assistant editing overnight shift on a cooking show and it probably saved my life! I was able to parlay that job into editing anything I could—travel shows, pro video game events, weddings. That was enough to get me an overnight AE job on Brett Morgen film, which was enough to get me in-house at a film studio doing uncredited work on narratives for nearly a decade, which was enough to get hired for a few 5 million dollar indie comedies (the kind that no longer exist). In short, I am very, very fortunate to be where I am.
Once I got my first documentary editing job, I immediately fell in love with the authorship of it all. Docs had always been my favorite thing to watch. All of my favorites (The Cruise, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Some Kind of Monster, The Carter, Weiner, Overnight) have extreme levels of candor and so that’s what I try to bring to every project I work on.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Passig: I cut on Avid, but I’d have done this one on iMovie if they’d asked me to.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Passig: So Fred’s class filmed A LOT of town hall meetings and it was a bear to sift through. There was a lot of minutiae. And sometimes when you screen a lot of minutiae, it can start to feel more digestible than it really is.
There was a danger in getting lost in how landfills, aquifers and even local governments work—it can get really confusing and it’s easy to begin to over-explain. Sometimes I’d have a 2 minute scene explaining a concept that wouldn’t be working and we’d just go to Fred’s films to see how they were doing it. More often than not, it would be a teenager standing on a landfill with a microphone succinctly laying it out directly to camera. So here and then, we decide: “Let’s just use that.” Simple solutions!
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has Middletown taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Passig: I knew that I wanted this film to have the POV of a teenager, but I don’t think I realized how varied those POVs would be for our characters. Some kids went on this journey because they were budding environmentalists, some because they thought the cameras were cool, some because they thought the class was an easy A. All of our characters interact with footage of themselves as teenagers and you can see the gamut of emotions it brings up for them—sometimes it’s cringing at the fashion or the hair, but oftentimes it’s a reminder of a person they may have left behind as they came of age. It’s a really vulnerable place to allow yourself to be on camera.
Before working on Middletown, I would also cringe when thinking about myself as 17 years old. And now, I feel like I might have been too hard on the kid. Maybe it’s better to be naïve and earnest than wiser and jaded? Maybe that kid really was the best version of myself? I think and hope our audience will be asking themselves those same sorts of questions in an unexpected way.
