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Members on Outreach: Scout's Honor

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Posted on March 19, 2002

Scout's Honor

About the film:

A 12 year-old boy and a 70 year-old man -- both heterosexuals dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) -- have launched an international grassroots campaign to overturn the BSA's antigay policies. Through the story of these activists, SCOUT'S HONOR traces the place of Boy Scouts in American culture and history, uncovers the debate about gay discrimination among BSA ranks and explores what can happen when gay and straight Americans come together with a common purpose.

Scout's Honor

The Outreach:

Outreach and distribution of SCOUT'S HONOR began before we ever shot any tape. Once our treatment of the film was in place, I created a board of advisors that represented a number of communities whose work could be bolstered by the film and who could potentially play a role in getting the film out. This included gay and lesbian organizations like the Horizons Foundation, gay/straight coalition groups including the Gay, Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and Scouting for All, and media organizations such as Film Arts Foundation and New Day Films.

Pre-Broadcast:

Once the film was licensed by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and we neared completion, I began discussions with ITVS Community Connections Project staff and submitted to them a detailed list of our community contacts and descriptions of our relationships with those organizations. Because the show had been contracted by ITVS, and was bound for public television, it was important for me to consider outreach on various fronts, both around the broadcast of SCOUT'S HONOR but also around the limited theatrical and film festival launch.

The premiere at Sundance was invaluable to that launch. I'm certain that it raised the cachet of the piece in the eyes of public television programmers, such as P.O.V., who ultimately decided to lead their 14th season with SCOUT'S HONOR in June of 2001. And since, by contract, we were unable to do a full-fledged theatrical run, it raised the film's profile nationally and internationally: dozens of film festivals and many more community organizations in the U.S. and abroad contacted us to program the piece.

I mapped out a six-month and year-long outreach trajectory and began a collaboration for pre-broadcast outreach with the ITVS Community Connections Project team and P.O.V. We developed post cards and a viewer's guide which detailed the salient issues in the film, provided resources and links to the community organizations with whom we had developed alliances, and highlighted information about the broadcast. Between ITVS and myself, we determined a number of towns and cities where I and/or some participants from the film could attend free community screenings of SCOUT'S HONOR and panel discussions. We began making connections with community-based organizations that could help organize these screenings -- in many cases, the very organizations with whom we had built relationships in the developmental stages of the project.

Factors that went into determining locations for the community events included both my festival itineraries (and indeed, in several places, we combined a film festival and community screening in the same period, sometimes at the same locale) and even more importantly, where in the country communities had become embattled with the Boy Scouts or with public entities around the Boy Scout issue. These often included smaller cities like Ft. Lauderdale in Broward Country, Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Dayton, Ohio to name a few. At each of these events, we provided viewer's guides, post cards, posters and other material. Often times, local politicos, mayors, city council representatives, leaders of organizations, boy scouts, and representatives from United Way and other boy scout supporters attended and agreed to sit on these panels. The forums proved contentious, lively, emotional, and extremely successful. At each of these events, we also kept track of people who might be interested in doing future outreach around SCOUT'S HONOR.

In addition to community outreach we did with ITVS, P.O.V. embarked on a hugely successful media campaign that resulted in first-rate national coverage of SCOUT'S HONOR around the time of broadcast in June, 2001. P.O.V.'s High Impact Television initiative worked in collaboration with several public television stations who organized community forums to bolster the broadcast of SCOUT'S HONOR. These events were quite effective in tapping communities who had become engaged in heated debate around the film's issues. For example, events in San Diego, California and Madison, Wisconsin wherein local stations taped viewer's responses to the screening provided video material that P.O.V was able to utilize in their on-line and broadcast version of Talk Back segments.

Post Broadcast:

Following the broadcast of SCOUT'S HONOR, I am moving into the next phase of outreach: educational distribution. While continuing to present the film at film festivals around the country, our priorities are now shifting to getting the tape into educational and community groups, especially churches and high schools. Because churches and schools are the largest charters for Boy Scout troops and because the film resonates very strongly with youth, the potential for outreach to these institutions is high and the need for distribution critical. Hence, I joined New Day Films (please see www.newday.com), a grassroots educational film distributor and cooperative and have begun developing distribution initiatives. New Day Films essentially provides support for self-distribution. The initiatives currently in motion are as follows:

Targeting colleges and universities -- both student alliances as well as classrooms. I am developing outreach brochures to mail to 15,000 media centers, professors, student groups, and others in the first year. Also, we have submitted the film to dozens of academic reviewers and conferences in the hope of securing reviews and workshops to further publicize the film.

Working Films. In collaboration with Robert West and Working Films (please see www.workingfilms.org), we are raising foundation money to do a pilot program in North Carolina -- an outreach to churches who charter boy scout troops and whose congregations continue to grapple with gay and lesbian issues. If this initiative is successful in North Carolina, I will seek more funds to expand it nationally.

GLSEN Outreach. In collaboration with GLSEN chapters around the country, I am organizing screenings in towns and cities we did not reach in the broadcast portion of our outreach to help galvanize gay/straight coalition movements where the boy scout issue continues to reverberate. I am also developing an initiative wherein foundations provide support to subsidize SCOUT'S HONOR packets to gay/straight alliances in high schools around the country. These packets will show students how to organize a screening in their school, include a tape, posters, and outreach material, and provide questionnaires for me to track the outcome and success of their events.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pressroom/2001materials/1_SH/scoutshonorphotos.html

This article was originally written for the Sundance Institute