Drew Johnson grew up in Cedar Rapids making movies with his friends in his backyard. Now an adult, his filmmaking career has flourished without Johnson needing to leave the Midwest. He’s was one of the founding members of Loose Films, an award-winning production house based in Columbus, Ohio.
Johnson founded the company with Noah Dixon and Ori Segev, who co-direct its latest documentary. The Bulldogs chronicles the town of East Palestine, Ohio for over a year following the catastrophic Norfolk Southern chemical train derailment in February 2023. The founding trio teamed up with Alex Hyde, a veteran documentary producer from England who just happened to land in rural Ohio, to tell the everyday stories of the town’s residents against the backdrop of environmental, legal and political firestorms.
Alex Hyde visited Iowa City for a screening of The Bulldogs at FilmScene on Aug. 9, as part of the Vino Vérité series, presented by FilmScene and Little Village. The event followed the doc’s world premiere at the Slamdance Festival, where it was a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature. According to Johnson, The Bulldogs will continue to play on the festival circuit and in special screenings, with a theatrical release slated for November.
Ahead of the early Iowa City screening, Little Village talked with Johnson about why the 2023 disaster in Ohio hit close to home, how the sensationalized national media coverage (including highly publicized visits to East Palestine by everyone from Erin Brockovich to 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump, and conspiracy theories bolstered by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Aaron Rodgers) spurred his crew to take action, and why a scene involving morel mushrooms feels like an allegory for life in East Palestine.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us about growing up in Cedar Rapids, and how you found your way into film?
[I] spent my entire life in Cedar Rapids until I graduated high school. Growing up in Cedar Rapids, I think the first thing that really started me in this [film] world is just watching movies, going to the movie store, renting a movie for that weekend and then over that weekend, watching that movie six or seven times in a little fort that I would make.
Then when my family got a DV camera, my best friends from Kennedy High School and even from Franklin Middle School where I went, we would just make dumb little videos in the backyard — of choreographed fight scenes or little dramas of things. We would just play around — we’d use the swing set in the backyard as the castle — and edit in-camera. And that’s what I think started my whole love of making things.
How did you meet Alexander Hyde and get involved with The Bulldogs?
I heard that Alex was in Ohio, and he’d done a lot of really amazing things and worked on some pretty big series. He had a lot more experience in this world of doc than I had. I reached out to him just to grab a coffee and we instantly connected. By the end of that coffee, we both, as producers, agreed that we wanted to work on something together. We didn’t know exactly what that would be, but we were both in Ohio and had resources at our disposal and thought it would be a great opportunity for us to do something.
But then that’s kinda where we left it. And then less than a month later, we saw the news headlines everywhere for the East Palestine derailment. You know, when we first saw that we were checking our watersheds to see if our drinking water was safe. Cincinnati shut down their water intake of the Ohio River portion for their treatment. When that was happening, Alex and I just started texting each other, like, “Hey, do you see this?”
I think what really pushed us over the edge to say, “We have to go there,” is when we started seeing the biggest news groups in the U.S. start to take this narrative. We’ve seen it before in a lot of different areas of mass media, where these big news corporations will take these stories, sensationalize them and spin them in a way that benefits their news cycle. We also have seen that the news cycle ends, and they move on. Alex and I saw this and were like, here’s an opportunity for us to cover a story that’s in our backyard — but also because it’s in our backyard, we can stay. We wouldn’t be leaving like we know that these media outlets are going to do. That’s what really was the starting point.
In addition to the physical consequences of the disaster, what kind of effects came from the weight of national news coverage?
I think a lot of the meditation that our documentary does is about the effects that news coverage and sensationalization can have on small towns. We see it across the world, but especially across the United States, in terms of different disasters, whether they’re natural disasters, manmade disasters, or other acts of record that become these news stories. We always see those news cameras leave.
What I think we saw and, granted none of us are from East Palestine, but all of us are from places not too dissimilar from East Palestine. But what we saw was a community that was grappling with this. There was a lot of different information going around about the severity of the derailment and the controlled burn. Residents were asking us what we knew about it, in a search for answers. It felt like for the first week up there, there was just a lot of confusion from residents. I think beyond that, we saw a community that had to adapt in real time, and I think that’s always messy.
And you’re seeing news outlets take advantage of that in some ways and show stories that, for the most part, serve a narrative that serves their audience and their financial agenda, and you saw that take a toll on the town. One thing we heard a lot, and it’s even in our documentary, is that a lot of the people that were on these news outlets, the residents that we were talking to had no idea who they were. The narratives that came out of that sowed a certain amount of division or uncertainty in the town of who was controlling the narrative.
Unlike a natural disaster, what happened in East Palestine was a manmade disaster with big political causes and implications. How did you and the other filmmakers navigate this wider context while focusing on the human stories of the people affected?
One thing we wanted was to not focus specifically from a journalistic lens, to cover exactly the path from from A to B of how this happened, but rather to show the residents and their perspectives, and allow the residents time to speak. And I think it really gives humanity to what we see in these 30-second news cycles.
As much as we tried to do that, at the end of the day, a lot of the residents that we talked to were searching for those answers. Then, by nature of that search for those answers, it becomes political or bureaucratic. I think we did our best to show the nuance of how politics can creep into the everyday life of these small towns where these incidents occur. But I think even beyond that, you zoom out to how these lines of division get sewn across the United States by way of a lot of different things, including news outlets and private and public corporations having their way in controlling narratives.
What we ended up finding and trying to show as accurately as possible is: this is not necessarily one side of the aisle versus the other. This is a systemic issue that spans both political parties that have had significant power in the United States, and it’s bigger than just red or blue.
And the people at fault for this have paid a price, but that price is, I don’t think, anywhere near what the residents of East Palestine faced.
What led you to choose The Bulldogs to be the title of the film?
Noah, more than anyone else, spends a lot of time in meditation on titles and style and font and the best way to convey what specifically this project is about. And the title really came from the high school mascot. You know, the school is the largest or second-largest employer of the town of East Palestine. It’s everywhere.
There’s bulldogs all around the town, and you see it in the doc. These bulldogs sit there, these statues on a lot of these street corners. In a lot of ways, it feels like they’re observing this village of East Palestine. That’s kind of what we felt like we were doing as well, as filmmakers sitting and observing and allowing the residents to have their space to talk.
I think it was only natural that that title was born from that mascot.
Looking back at the film, was there a specific subject or story that resonated with you? And what do you think will resonate most with the audience?
I hope that the biggest thematic takeaway for the audience is that things like this and our lives and society as a whole are nuanced and require discourse to understand the intricacies of it and to not entrench ourselves in a point of view of misunderstanding. I think that’s what we try to convey the most thematically.
There are a lot of sides to this. A lot of things have happened, and it’s hard to say what is the right move or not. And I think allowing some grace in people’s choices and understanding where those choices are coming from is a big thematic piece to this.
From my side of things, there’s a few [scenes] that are really special to me and felt like the life that I knew growing up in Cedar Rapids. One of the biggest ones is the morel mushroom hunting scene. I grew up going out hunting with my dad, every day for the few weeks in Iowa that the morels are popping up and going to our secret spots and crawling on the ground looking for these little mushrooms. And then I think, at least in the documentary, you see these morel mushrooms, these tasty morsels becoming an allegory for life as a whole in this town. And I think that scene really resonates as something that I connect to as a piece of nature. One small organism in nature can be looked at and studied and then related to in a much larger sense.
In a way, that’s what we’re trying to do with this documentary; show that this one village of East Palestine is so much so much bigger than just this one spot.
What’s next for your team and The Bulldogs?
So this fall, The Bulldogs will continue to play on the festival circuit and in special screenings like this one at FilmScene. In November, we will have a theatrical release. Part of that release will be a roadshow where myself and the rest of the team will be in different cities around the U.S. for screenings, attending these screenings in person for Q&As, which we’re really excited for. And we will be doing screenings in East Palestine and surrounding communities, to be able to bring that film to the audiences there that wouldn’t traditionally have a film like this at their theaters.
