Secession, ‘Lord of the Flies’ brought directors to Texas for program
Documentary filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss — whose résumé includes the lauded 2014 film “The Overnighters,” about North Dakota oil-field workers — knew they might have stumbled upon the subject of their next movie when something intriguing hit the news in June 2017. That was when high school students gathered in Austin for that year’s Texas Boys State — the American Legionsponsored program in which high school boys from across the state spend a week forming and running their own “government” — voted for Texas to secede from the United States.
For the directors, what happened at Boys State might have been the dying canary in a dangerous coal mine. “I think the question for us was, ‘Is the country going to split further apart?’ ” Moss says in a Zoom interview. “I wondered, at Boys State, would they reconcile?”
So California-based Moss and McBaine contacted the American Legion about making a documentary at the 2018 Boys State.
“Because of the secession vote, that created a certain amount of negative press coverage — which is how we read about it in the Washington Post,” says McBaine, also via Zoom.
“We thought, ‘They will never take our phone call.’ San Francisco will call Texas, and Texas will not take the call.”
But the Legion not only picked up the phone, it said “yes.”
“We started a conversation that lasted over a couple of months,” McBaine says. “They were very, I think, hurt by news organizations coming and parachuting in, taking one piece and leaving, not seeing the full breadth of what they have to offer. And what they liked about what we wanted to do was we were going to fully embed and fully experience the every day, 24/7, the highs, the lows, the everything of this whole week.”
“We also made it very clear that we needed to preserve our editorial independence,” Moss adds. “We were not there to make a promotional film about a program.”
The resulting film, “Boys State,” debuts Aug. 14 on Apple
TV+ after winning awards at Sundance and SXSW earlier this year. Judging from the movie’s promotion on the Legion’s website, the organization doesn’t have any issue with the finished result.
Compelling characters
As for their four young main stars — Steven Garza and René Otero as the liberals and Ben
Feinstein and Robert MacDougal as the conservatives and all at odds as they compete for votes to elected offices — McBaine and Moss say they got lucky when identifying which boys to follow.
“Quickly, we realized that we were attracted to the young men who were politically sophisticated, ambitious, smart and complicated. In a way, I think Ben, Steven and Robert cast themselves because they were so exceptional. Of course, we didn’t know how well they would do, and if their paths would intersect at Boys State.”
They stumbled across Otero at the event. “We found him on the second day of Boys State, and when he gave that extraordinary speech, we thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s like the grownup in a room full of teenage boys,’ ”
Moss says. “I mean, he was amazing. So we immediately put him in the movie.”
Despite a variety of conflicts at
Boys State, secession wasn’t a big issue this time around, and the filmmakers were heartened by the experience. “That filled us with optimism,” Moss says. “I don’t think our problems in our country have gotten better, but I do know that we’ve realized that we cannot sit on the sidelines.
“I think that’s what the lesson of Boys State is: that democracy is not a spectator sport. We had (Democratic Sen.) Cory Booker, who’s a graduate of the program, introduce a screening recently. He said that, and I think it’s really true, that whether you agree with their politics, (it’s about) their willingness to throw themselves into the process.”
Not ‘Lord of the Flies’
For McBaine, the most encouraging surprise was that the competition wasn’t more vicious.
“I was coming in with a preconceived notion that the whole thing would feel very ‘Lord of the Flies’-ish,” she says. “And there was some of that, of course, but I was surprised pretty quickly by the amount of listening, empathy and vulnerability. I was surprised that I saw so many people crying throughout the week. And I blame myself a little bit for walking into that space with certain ideas about masculinity, democracy and conservative politics.”
“We pitched the film as a coming-of-age story, but (we were) thinking, ‘How much could you come of age in a week?’ ” Moss says. “But it actually turns out to be true and that, at least among the young men we cast, it was a kind of crucible for them. They all came to know themselves in different ways … In a good documentary, a cinema verité film, you meet somebody at that transformative moment in their lives. I feel that we were lucky to find that.”