For most people, the Route 22/MacArthur Road interchange is a place to do some shopping and/or get trapped in a traffic jam. But for three men in the early 1980s, it was home.

In September 1982, Ron Kistler, Dalton Young and Michael MacKay, all Lehigh Valley residents who didn't have much else to do, climbed a billboard overlooking the busy Whitehall commercial district and lived there far longer than anyone expected.

The three men were competing to become instant homeowners. The eccentric local businessman Harold G. Fulmer III had launched a contest, reminiscent of Great Depression-era dance marathons, promising an $18,000 mobile home to the person who could spend the most time on the billboard, which promoted his radio station WSAN.

No one was prepared for the international media frenzy -- or the scandalous drug bust -- that followed.

Almost 35 years later, the billboard is long gone and WSAN has become a Spanish-language sports station.

But this unorthodox chapter of Lehigh Valley history is being brought back to life with "The Billboard Boys," a new documentary screening this week at the SouthSide Film Festival in Bethlehem. The movie tracks the story through a collage of old TV footage, newspaper clippings and brand new interviews with those who lived it.

"The story is so great -- there's so much texture to it," says Pat Taggart, the movie's Philadelphia-born director.

Taggart first learned about the phenomenon when his wife's family, who are from the Lehigh Valley, were discussing the 30-year anniversary of the contest.

He was immediately struck by the layers to the story. The Valley's economic anxiety in the early 1980s -- captured, serendipitously, by the release of Billy Joel's "Allentown" two months into the billboard contest -- offered a perfect backdrop to a tale of three men going to extreme lengths to secure the American dream of home ownership.

Luckily, Kistler's wife Sue had kept hours of tapes of old television coverage -- more than even the stations had preserved.

"If not for that, I don't know that we would have been able to tell the story," Taggart said.

The three contestants, who slept in tents stocked with a portable toilet, a telephone and other bare necessities, offered perfectly distinct characters to carry the story.

The soft-spoken Kistler, with shoulder-length hair and a baby face, was a "quiet warrior," set on winning a home.

Young, usually sporting aviator sunglasses, was freshly home from a stint in the Army and took a detached, nonchalant approach to the contest.

MacKay, a bushily bearded pipe-smoker, was a showman and prankster who dubbed himself "Billboard Mike."

"It's probably the most important thing that happened in his life," MacKay's ex-wife, Linda Johnson, says in the movie. (MacKay died in 2006 at age 53 from heart complications.) "Mike was looking for stardom."

WSAN's initial motivation for launching the contest was simple: It was changing its format from country to "nostalgic mood music," and wanted to let people know. Fulmer, the station's owner, was a 250-pound, 6-foot-4-inch entrepreneur with a knack for drawing attention. The owner of more than a dozen McDonald's franchises, he drove around in a Jeep with a hamburger on top, The New York Times reported.

The contest was a local oddity for the first few months, but a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal in December 1982 propelled it to national, and eventually international, attention. The three men started receiving calls and visits from reporters hailing from far-off locales like France, New Zealand and Japan.

But the radio station, taken aback by the craze and unsure how to harness it, never effectively leveraged the interest into a wider listenership.

Whitehall Township, too, grew weary of the spectacle in the area's busiest shopping district.

The situation was strange enough before the sensational turn it took in March 1983, when Dalton Young was arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover cop.

"I'm probably the only person in history to be arrested for selling pot from a billboard," Young, now an addiction counselor, says in the documentary.

Young insists he wasn't in the habit of dealing from his perch, and just meant to get a pestering onlooker off his back. A man named Dennis Peters had started regularly hanging around the billboard, chatting with the three contestants and eventually asking Young if he ever got high.

After some further inquiries from Peters, Young says he offered him about half an ounce in exchange for a six-pack of beer, but claims Peters insisted on giving him $20. Two weeks later, Young was yanked from his tent by police after 184 days on the billboard.

(A People magazine article from the time floats theories that police might have been tipped off on Young by his opponents, or the radio station looking to end the contest -- but those theories remain unsubstantiated.)

The arrest prompted the only break in the contest, as MacKay and Kistler were both subpoenaed and forced to briefly descend from the billboard. Young ended up with probation, a $100 fine and a felony on his record. And when neither MacKay nor Kistler showed any sign of giving up, WSAN caved. After 261 days, both MacKay and Kistler descended to accept a mobile home and a new car.

Retelling the story more than 35 years later with less than a $10,000 budget, Taggart and Petka tackled the project essentially as a two-man job. Petka tracked down the major players for interviews and built relationships, while Taggart handled the creative side.

They ran into some early discouragement when Kistler, ever a man of few words, seemed to dismiss the idea that there was anything worth revisiting.

"It's just part of the past," he says in the film's opening sequence. "It was 30 years ago. I don't think it was that big of a deal."

But the movie ends up using Kistler's indifference as a frame, challenging itself to demonstrate what about the story so captured the world's attention.

MacKay, according to his ex-wife, never recaptured the high he felt on that billboard. (In 1990, he made minor headlines by telling the press that he'd cheated at the contest, secretly climbing down once for a beer.) Young, self-described as single and lonely, admits he's as detached as ever.

Kistler, it seems, made out the best -- he spent 20 happily married years in the mobile home and raised a daughter there, before trading up.

And after catching a screening of the documentary, Kistler is finally starting to see the story's appeal, Taggart said.

"He walked out of the theater, and walked straight up to me," Taggart said. "He shook my hand and said, 'Well, I guess it was more interesting than I thought.'"

The SouthSide Film Festival will present "The Billboard Boys" at Charter Arts high school at 7:20 p.m., Friday, June 16 and 5:20 p.m. Saturday, June 17. Director Pat Taggart will attend Friday's screening and producer Frank Petka will attend Saturday's screening.

Andrew Doerfler may be reached at adoerfler@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @adoerfler or on Facebook.