news

Outreach Journal: The Education of Shelby Knox

Published on October 21, 2005

By Amala Lane. Interviews Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt.

The Education of Shelby Knox is a coming of age story about Shelby Knox, a religious Christian teenager from Lubbock, TX, a community where teen pregnancy and STD infection rates are astronomical and abstinence education reigns. When Shelby's interest in politics leads her to get involved in a campaign for comprehensive sex education in her town's public schools, and then to a fight for a gay-straight alliance, Shelby must make a choice -- stand by and let others be hurt, or go against her parents, her pastor, and her peers to do what she knows is right.

The Education of Shelby Knox tells the story of a teen activist who challenges the abstinence-only sex-ed taught in her school system.

In 2005 the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, kicked off the season of PBS' P.O.V. series and spurred a vigorous outreach campaign.

The Incite Approach to Outreach

"Build it and they will come."
"Pre-plan and stay flexible."
"Preaching to the converted or reinforcing the committed?"
"Reaching the open minded?"
"It's really elbow grease."

Over the years we've developed a litany of phrases that collectively describe the "Incite" approach to outreach, but when it came to the specifics of writing an Outreach Journal about The Education of Shelby Knox, we found ourselves reverting not to those catchy phrases, but to a step-by-step rendition of the process...and that, we decided, would be boring to read.

Instead, we asked Amala Lane, the outreach coordinator for the film, to ask us a few questions that illuminate what we grandly call "The Education and Outreach Campaign for The Education of Shelby Knox."

Amala: Where's a good place to start?

Marion: Let's start by acknowledging that we've been very, very lucky with the outreach for The Education of Shelby Knox. Because the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and launched the PBS P.O.V. series, we haven't really had to drum up a lot of interest...audiences have come to us. P.O.V. does an amazing job, and their site is a wonderful place to go to for ideas.

Rose: But we've also had experience with films that had a far lower profile and the beauty of outreach is that you can build an audience for practically any film, as long as there's interest in your subject matter.

Amala: At what point did you begin to think about outreach?

Rose: For social-issue docs, outreach is a part of a whole gestalt, and we pay attention to it from very early on. We plug into networks of groups working on a subject we're interested in to find stories, to create partnerships and to meet advisors. This network is a very important part of the dialogue with funders, insuring them, and ourselves, that we know what we're doing.

Marion: It's a chicken or the egg question. Since most of our films are foundation funded, we lay an outreach network as we are coming up with the subject of our film. The Education of Shelby Knox was funded by foundations concerned about the rise of abstinence until marriage sex education, and those foundations predicated their grant on our having a plan for disseminating the final product. So as we wrote our proposal, we networked with the key groups and organizations that would eventually use the finished film. In the case of Shelby, we'd actually gotten funding for the issue before we'd found our story and it was a tip from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), that led us to Lubbock, TX.

Amala: Is there a cycle to the outreach?

Marion: There's stage one, the research phase where you create your networks, stage two is the festival phase, where we link events to festival presence -- getting the groups and people in our network to help publicize and come to festival screenings ---this stage builds a wave that crests at broadcast.

Rose: And then you ride the wave home. With Shelby it's been a big wave that seems to keep on going with more festival screenings, each one an outreach opportunity, there are re-broadcasts, screenings on campuses, and international festivals and broadcasts.

Filmmakers Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt. Photo by Robert Maass

Amala: When you say outreach is about elbow grease what do you mean?

Marion: The outreach for Shelby, as for any film, relies on forming and maintaining scores of relationships. Unlike a broadcast, festival screening or review in a national magazine, it's using people to get out the message of the film. That means there are many details to keep track of and scores of disparate events.

Rose: But at a certain point, we've concentrated on coming up with a strong focus -- magnet events like a campus tour of the film, or a series of Planned Parenthood screenings, or a newsletter campaign...events that make the film's outreach campaign more than the sum of its parts.

Amala: When you use the term "Brand Shelby" what do you mean?

Rose: Big distributors do this through marketing, but if you are small, and we are, it's coming up with all the aspects of a successful marketing campaign. I don't know if we'll get to that level.

Marion: The film is the product, and we have to think of how to sell it -- where will we sell it? To whom? And how?

Amala: Do you think of outreach as you are making the film?

Rose: We struggle against adding too many lawyers of complexity to our films because that's what we like to do. But we found that this is ultimately good for outreach because often those layers are reflective of a range of issues.

With Shelby we could have made a film solely about abstinence and sex education. We didn't have to add the LGBT rights issue. It was enough to show a family struggling with Shelby's liberal conversion over sex education. At one point we even wondered if we were making two movies or one. How could we make it all work together organically? Artistically we thought that leaving out the LGBT issue might be better, but from a political point of view we really wanted to pull in the LGBT community as they are profoundly impacted by abstinence until marriage sex education. This, in turn gave us a broader outreach base.

Marion: There's always a tension between making an entertaining film and dealing with important issues. Our biggest challenge is how to make issues and ideas entertaining.

Shelby and other teens in Lubbock. Photo by Robert Maass

Rose: It's a question of how to make art and not propaganda.

Marion: And not put audiences to sleep.

Amala: What are some of the most memorable outreach things that have happened?

Rose: At a small town screening in Nebraska, there was a woman who was fighting the same fight as Shelby almost single-handedly, and she came to see the film. Shelby gave her a thin thread of inspiration.

This is the most rewarding thing for us. When a film is televised the response is abstract, when someone in an audience says, "this film meant so much to me," that's the best.

Marion: Four hundred enthusiastic people came to see the film in Lubbock.

Amala: What's been the best part of the outreach?

Marion: Shelby herself. She's a wonderful public speaker, she appeals to college students (she's one herself), and is really committed to doing outreach -- that is, to speaking out, to articulating for audiences, the issues the film deals with.

Rose: At every screening someone always says, "Shelby for President!" How could someone who inspires that kind of response not create a groundswell of interest?