Deborah Shaffer has a 50-year career as a documentary filmmaker. She began making films in 1970s as a member of the Newsreel Collective, where she collaborated on the short film Make-Out. In 1972 she co-directed and co-produced the short How About You?, and in 1976 Chris and Bernie. Shaffer co-produced and co-directed her first feature documentary, The Wobblies, an oral and archival history of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1979, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2021.