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REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS For Documentaries, the Difference is Outreach by filmmaker J.J. Hanley I learned as much about successful outreach as I did about filmmaking when I produced my first documentary film, REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS. REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS tells the dramatic stories of women who raised children with autism in the 1950s and '60s - a time when medical orthodoxy blamed autism on the mother's supposed failure to bond with her child. The "refrigerator mother" diagnosis condemned thousands of mothers to a long nightmare of self-doubt and guilt, and left their children without hope of effective treatment.
We were fortunate to get funding from these organizations, but what we didn't realize at the time was that for a documentary like ours, funding was just the beginning. We were about to learn that once the film was finished, it would take a national outreach campaign to make sure REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS hit home. What follows here are some of the invaluable lessons for outreach that I learned from working on outreach with Refrigerator Mothers - lessons that can be applied to organizing outreach for any documentary project. PLANNING AHEAD I was thinking about outreach and raising dialogue about "mother blame" long before I put pen to paper to write a proposal for Refrigerator Mothers. That's because I too had been blamed for causing my child's autistic behaviors - not in the 1960s, but in the 1990s! When I took my three-year-old son to our pediatrician in 1996, the doctor told me that the reason my son didn't talk and had strange, self-isolating social behaviors was because of my supposedly overbearing, highly anxious mothering. The doctor was wrong, but I didn't know it and for several wasted months I followed his advice to "get off my kid's back" and waited for my son to get better. Eventually my little boy was diagnosed with a mild form of autism. When I read about the "refrigerator mother" era of blaming mothers for causing autism in their kids, I knew that it was time to end the practice of accusing mothers for children's autistic behaviors out of medical ignorance and arrogance. REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS grew directly out of this passion to raise awareness about the true nature of autism. From the very beginning, I always saw the film as part of a bigger outreach campaign. But although I planned to "do outreach" with the film, I still didn't understand the details of what that meant. MAKING AN OUTREACH SHOEBOX I did know I'd need contacts, and from the very early stages in planning for the film, I kept what I called an outreach "shoebox" in a file on a database on the computer. Throughout the three years of production and editing, I gathered a huge amount of potential outreach material and information with very minimal effort through the business cards, newsletters and pamphlets I would pick up at conferences. I also clipped articles from newspapers, jotted names on the back of paper napkins, printed out emails and was disciplined in collecting contacts whenever I came across them. I put all of these resources and names into that database shoebox: health care professionals and organizations, educators and educational groups, parents of autistic people, government agencies, university departments and professors, researchers and research-oriented foundations and local and national autism organizations. You name it - if it even hinted of someone who might be (or should be) interested in the film it went into that box. In addition, very early in the project, we designed a simple thing we called the "outreach one-pager." Using some basic computer software, we designed a simple black-and-white flyer that described the project and highlighted the kinds of organizations we thought would benefit from outreach screenings. At the bottom we added a tear-off form where you could put your name and address and send it to us to be added to our mailing list. Any time we communicated with anyone about REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS, the outreach "one-pager" went out with the communication. We mailed them with letters. We handed them out at any function we attended. Over the course of a year, this simple effort resulted in a few hundred more names for our outreach and publicity database. Once ITVS came on board as the major funder for our project, we printed the list that we'd been collecting in our database shoebox and we shared it with ITVS National Outreach Manager Jim Sommers. This early preparedness on our part gave us all a jump-start on developing an outreach strategy for REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS.
With our database shoebox and one-pagers in place, I took it for granted that once we notified interested organizations that the film was ready and available for use in outreach activities, they would immediately come knocking on our door to make it happen. They would seize on the opportunity to use to use film to draw attention to the subject, right? Wrong. With the film just several months away from broadcast, and a buzz starting through several focus screenings that we had organized, our work to organize screenings had only just begun. What I quickly learned was that many organizations, especially non-profits, don't understand how to use film media to enhance their work or their missions. It doesn't mean that they aren't interested or don't want to use it, it's just that many have limited staff or time to devote to understanding how film media could be used in their work. In fact, one major autism organization - founded specifically to fight against the "refrigerator mother" theory - responded to our contact with pretty much a blank stare about how to use the film. The truth was, they just didn't know how to take advantage of the film for outreach. So Jim, his ITVS field support staff and I worked together to educate that organization and others about how to fit outreach screenings of REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS into their goals and objectives, to raise awareness about autism or get grassroots community support and dialogue going about the disorder. Here are a few of the things I learned: Get in touch with organizations as early as possible. This is a key thing to do, because many groups that might be interested in screening your film plan their calendars up to a year in advance. Our early planning and preparedness with database shoeboxes and one-pagers helped a lot in this effort, because it allowed us to get to the groups as early as possible. Jim met face-to-face with leaders of that previously mentioned organization six months before the film's broadcast as part of this early planning effort. Eventually, they did screen the film to a standing-room-only crowd at their annual conference. That organization benefited from the buzz being created by other screenings. People saw the film and a dialogue was created.
Offer to help to design the screenings with interested organizations and (when possible) involve the film's subjects in the screenings. We had an excellent experience with Wisconsin Public TV in Madison, Wisconsin. They have a dedicated outreach coordinator who has been working with a community-based clinical research facility to help raise awareness about the work being done there with autism. The coordinator contacted ITVS to put together a screening and reception for 150 families, educators and researchers at the center. She was a creative thinker and very open to our ideas about how to shape the screening. After a few conversations with Kerry Richardson (contracted ITVS national coordinator) and me, the WPT outreach coordinator put together a dynamic program that involved me and two of the mothers from the film. After the screening we joined other parents and professionals in a panel discussion about the impact of autism and the refrigerator mother theory on families. I've used this model several times in helping small organizations organize local community screenings of the film. BASKING IN THE OUTREACH AFTERLIFE Outreach continues even after the broadcast. Since the program's broadcast in July, I have received many calls from groups eager to host screenings of the film. My public school district is hosting a community screening at our library, and several educational organizations and agencies who serve the developmentally disabled have organized screenings for staff and parents. Those early efforts in building a database, creating ongoing communication with potential outreach users and then doing some creative hand-holding with many of them have contributed to a wave of buzz that continues today, several months after the broadcast. Most importantly, each outreach event leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction that comes from sharing REFRIGERATOR MOTHERS with different audiences, and knowing that the film is creating dialogue and raising awareness about autism. Outreach took some early planning and a team effort, but it is, without a doubt, the most satisfying way to feel like I've accomplished my mission to raise awareness through film. |
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