Documentary director Jody McVeigh-Schultz discovered the dangers of school espionage while making the series Spy High. Debuting on Prime Video in April, Spy High is a four-part series covering student surveillance and where boundaries exist over several years of interviews.
McVeigh-Schultz’s main focus was a student named Blake Robbins, who was accused of drug use and bad behavior after pictures were taken from his school-provided laptop webcam. This eventually led to the Robbins v. Lower Merion School District class action lawsuit in 2010 initiated by the Robbins family.
After being screened at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, the series won the Audience Award on its world premiere on March 9, 2025.
McVeigh-Schultz collaborated with the team at Unrealistic Ideas to executive produce the series about digital privacy within school systems. He is a five-time Emmy-nominated director, producer and editor who studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California.
His talented editing work includes the Monopoly miniseries McMillion$ and Netflix’s competitive series Cheer. Jody added director and showrunner of HBO’s successful docu-series The Murders of Starved Rock to his resume in 2021. He was the showrunner for another Prime Video series, Shiny Happy People and works with Amazon again soon, although this time in the sports section with a new true crime series about a drug-dealing college football star.
After being screened at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, the series won the Audience Award on its world premiere on March 9, 2025. McVeigh-Schultz sat down to talk about Spy High before the debut in Texas, and related what implications this surveillance might have for LGBTQ+ students.
Windy City Times: How did you start making documentaries in the first place?
Jody McVeigh-Schultz: My brother, who is five years older than me, took several film courses at The University of Chicago and brought home some documentaries for me to watch when I was young. He showed me Grey Gardens and movies from Michael Moore.
It opened up a whole new world to me and became what I wanted to do.
I eventually went to the University of Southern California to learn more.
WCT: What did you learn from making Spy High?
JMS: This is a story ripped from the headlines, and it was big news in that area. Once we started digging into the deeper story, it went in different directions than expected. We found many other victims of surveillance and discovered that, in modern days, it’s morphed into a whole different thing. While students are not being issued laptops with webcams anymore, in many ways, it’s even scarier because AI is gobbling up so much data from everyone now. How the information is being used is not in the control of the people who are being surveilled.
This expanded what it was and how it relates to people today.
WCT: Why isn’t the executive producer of Spy High Mark Wahlberg at South by Southwest with us?
JMS: He is filming a new project. He was amazing to work with and he’s a champion
of documentary films. I’ve worked on several projects with his production company Unrealistic Ideas and they’ve been a great partner in terms of creating documentaries that are accessible to a large audience.
Some people don’t normally watch documentaries, but this one is both harrowing and fun to watch. It’s important to have a balance tonally between being tragic and absurd.
WCT: With these interesting characters in the documentary how did you decide what to leave on the cutting room floor?
JMS: We do hours and hours of interviews, so I had to decide on how to best represent the experience. Our main character Blake Robbins was an interesting interview because he’s a neat person and I wanted to give viewers a sense of what it was like to be in the room with him.
Something I try to do in a lot of my projects is to show what happens after we stop the interview because that’s part of the experience.
WCT: The controversy with Martha, the Martha Stewart Netflix documentary is that she didn’t sign off on some of it and felt it was unflattering. How do you feel about it?
JMS: This is one of the major battles going on in the documentary film world. How much control should subjects have over it? It can be difficult if it’s a major celebrity.
I want to make a film that is honest and doesn’t turn into a fluff piece. It’s important to have a separation between myself and the subject, but I try to have empathy for them at the same time. With Blake, there was empathy from the general public before it took a turn.
We would assume that if you are suing your school because they’ve surveilled you in your bedroom, other parents in that community are going to be worried about their kids and they’re going to support you. That’s the opposite of what happened. People didn’t believe this family and we were trying to understand what it was like from the Robbins family’s perspective. To not be believed in this way was really hurtful to them.
In our society, we see that people aren’t the perfect victims. This happened to them regardless of what skeletons they had in the closet.
WCT: There was a recent Oscar-nominated documentary called Black Box Diaries that covered this same idea where the subject was raped but then expected to have a perfect background before she could build a case against the perpetrator.
JMS: One of the interesting pieces of this story is that it took place 15 years ago during the birth of ubiquitous surveillance, but it still very much applies today. During the pandemic, a lot of schools moved to remote learning, where students were receiving school-issued laptops. They were signing into school accounts and taking classes on Zoom. As a result of that, schools stated they were keeping kids safe while gathering data about them. We talked to experts about this and the danger there was once you start surveilling them there are all these unintended consequences. They harmed vulnerable communities more than they harmed other students.
WCT: Describe the part of Spy High that pertained to the LGBTQ+ community.
JMS: One story we explored was about two students who were in Minneapolis who started freshman year fully online. Their one social outlet was a Google hang-out chat room. One time they were talking smack just like any 15-year-old online and then they were called into the principal’s office. One of them was with his father and was questioned on why he said things in the chat. They had seen him use the word gay in these chats and thought he could be bullying other students.
The student was forced to come out as gay to defend himself to his father in the principal’s office. He was mortified and the word was a descriptor in a friend group that was full of gay folks. He said that he was lucky because his parents were super-supportive but this could have been very damaging to his mental health. His physical well-being could have been threatened as well and that part is really scary to me. If the school is protecting kids then they have to be aware of how harmful it can be to people in vulnerable situations.
WCT: What would you like viewers to take away from the Spy High series?
JMS: I really hope it starts conversations and teenagers sit down with their parents to watch this together. Different generations can enjoy this series and think about the balance between privacy and protection. The line of control can become a little blurry at times.
Parents have apps now that follow where their kids are, which can be used to keep them safe. The question is, when is it too much overstepping with these kinds of surveillance tactics?
WCT: What is your next project?
JMS: I am going to work with Amazon Prime Video again, but I can’t talk a ton about it. The project could not be more different than this.
I originally started as an editor and the company I was working with believed in giving me a shot as a director. I am very grateful for that and I want to explore a wide range of styles in terms of documentaries in the future.
Spy High educates the public on the dangers of webcams and much more beginning April 8 on Prime Video.