Originally published in November 2011 issue of NewEnglandFilm.com
Spring 2008 – Eighteen girls in Gloucester High School were pregnant, nearly five times the average for the small fishing town on the Massachusetts coast. In June of that year, a story broke reporting that these girls had allegedly made a pact to become pregnant together. In a flurry of speculations and accusations, the media networks came and went, but a few local filmmakers were not satisfied with the unfinished portraits that were left of these young mothers. They went to Gloucester to befriend the girls and to help restore an outlet for them to tell their own stories. Three years later, their film The Gloucester18 is still searching for a wider release. Last week, I sat down with director John Michael Williams and Producer Kristen Grieco Elworthy to talk about the film and its current run on the new indie distribution platform Prescreen.
Kristen Grieco Elworthy was a reporter at The Gloucester Times in 2008 and released the original story about the rise in teen pregnancy at Gloucester High. In May, another staff writer reported that the high school’s resident doctor and nurse had left the health clinic. When that story hit the wires, it prompted an inflammatory article in TIME that quoted the high school’s principal alleging that a clique of girls had made a pact to become pregnant. This offhanded comment sparked a firestorm of international media attention and public outcry. Outlandish tales were printed by the media on mere heresy including a rumor that one of the girls was so desperate to have a child that she sought out a homeless man almost ten years her senior to impregnate her. Underneath the glare of the spotlight, the girls emphatically denied the existence of a pact and eventually the interest died down and Gloucester reclaimed a degree of peace and quiet. Williams and Elworthy however were alarmed at the gaping holes left in the story abandoned by the media.
Elworthy returned to Gloucester and teamed up with Williams to produce a documentary on the bizarre incident. The two embarked on the film project as a journalistic exercise in the spirit of human curiosity, hoping to unearth some deeper insights into the reasons behind Gloucester’s spike in teen pregnancies. “As a journalist, I don’t think it’s fair that reporters went out and told a story about these girls and then nobody ever got the truth and then they just went away and went on to the next thing,” said Elworthy. Williams and Elworthy felt that the media’s fixation on the purported pact clouded their ability to form meaningful conclusions about the incident, forming a kind of suture to repress a discussion of larger issues gnawing at the core of American society.
I was reminded by Williams that in 2008 teen pregnancy was a regular topic in the headlines and, as he recalled, “When we were shooting the climate was Bristol Palin, Jamie Lynn Spears, all this glit-teen mom, ‘16-And-Pregnant’ [television show], all this stuff that was glamorized and media-manipulated.” While the nation was searching for the answer to “Was there a Pact?” they were missing an opportunity to contextualize the trend and observe the real reasons for the steadily rising incidence of teen pregnancies across the country.
The Culture of the Accessorized Baby Bump
Elworthy commented that the culture of the “Baby-Bump,” coined by US Weekly, might have manifested itself in subtle ways in the high school hallways: “I talked to one girl who was a teen Mom and she said that girls came over to her and would say ‘Oh I want one just like yours’ and she would say ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, you don’t.’ She said she felt like people looked at her baby like an accessory, like a purse, like something that they wanted.”
The glare bearing down on the 18 girls from Gloucester was as scornful as it was intense, but it also left forgiving gray areas at the peripheries of the events framed by the news story. Williams shared anecdotes about other young mothers insisting they were certainly “not part of that” and spoke about the “Horribles Parade” in nearby Beverly Massachusetts, which satirized The Gloucester Eighteen the following year after the story hit the news: “These kids dressed up as pregnant girls and threw condoms instead of lollipops out to the crowd, but we happened to find out from someone that their teen pregnancy rate is actually higher than Gloucester’s.” Its neighbors may have surpassed their teen pregnancy rate, but for reasons beyond control, Gloucester had become a focal point, perhaps a scapegoat, for a widespread problem affecting a range of communities and socio-economic groups across the country.
The quiet harbor in Gloucester, MA.
Amidst ridicule and judgment, Gloucester residents clamped down and fought for their reputation, resisting the pull of the media. In many ways, the small town of Gloucester and its obstinate resilience is a key character in the story told by the documentary. Weathered by ongoing criticism and caustic accusations, the girls themselves were especially cautious of any further inquiries into their reasons for becoming pregnant. They had grown wary of their chroniclers, who would repeatedly make false assumptions in the service of preachy warnings or slanderous caricatures. The eighteen girls were featured in a Lifetime Network movie that took gross liberties in its portrayal of the young mothers despite having access to the same interviews that founded Williams’ more understated depiction. Elworthy was frustrated by the negligence of the Lifetime production: “What bugs me is it’s one thing to do a story and not know the truth, but it’s another thing to set it in Gloucester, use real news footage and act as though you’re portraying these girls’ stories. Besides the whole pact thing, they show these girls drinking at parties and passing out while they’re 6 or 7 months pregnant. It’s offensive because as far as I know none of that happened.”
One of the girls with her newborn son.
Williams and Elworthy took a more patient approach, spending months getting to know the girls, their parents and other community members before rolling camera. Meanwhile production companies from New York and LA could not afford such a measured pace, and ultimately had to leave town, unable to persuade the girls to cooperate. “Everybody knows everybody in Gloucester,” Elworthy explains. “I think outside media had a hard time finding them because everybody knows everybody and they weren’t giving it up. When we went in we were able to find a few of them, talk to them. We had to network our way through and we had to spend a lot of time doing that. If you had to report that night, you never would have had the chance to find who you need to get their story.”
Over time, the girls began to open up, even finding a form of therapeutic release in sharing their stories with the camera. As the filmmakers became acquainted with their subjects, they began to shed many of their expectations. “You learn something about yourselves while you’re making a documentary and we realized we had a lot of preconceived notions. We thought we were going to see a certain type of teenage girl and we were shocked by the personalities of the girls,” Elworthy reflected. Many of them are shy and inarticulate, at times unable to explain themselves, leaving their accounts of motherhood half-formed and imprecise. One wonders if these are merely affectations of adolescence or if they all share a common thread of experience that has left them shell-shocked and tongue-tied.
One of the girls with her mother and son.
Williams’ camera is honest and searching through these moments of hesitation, and these images speak volumes about the characters. The effect is one of sincerity and concern. After all, these young mothers are still children themselves and Williams shows sensitivity to that. His prior films have adapted children’s literature for the screen, and I wondered whether this had governed his approach to subject matter that hangs so problematically on the boundary between childhood and adulthood. “I loved kid’s books, I love kids and certainly these girls are still children to me, they’re adolescents. I think everything you do in your life, you carry some of that with you into your next project. I think it all brings bearing,” John said in our interview. In a storyline blown open by the brute mechanics of modern media, it is refreshing to see the trials of these girls treated with a gentler touch.
Williams spoke about the hardships some of these girls have endured: “When your mother gives you away at thirteen and puts you in foster care, when you never knew your father, when your grandmother, the person taking care of you, dies when you’re twelve…there are kids never stood a chance and were looking to create their own families and there is an issue with that.” However, this narrative of abandonment describes few of the girls featured in the film. Most appear to have stable homes and supportive families. Although the girls unanimously deny intent, Elworthy conjectures that bearing children was a deliberate act of empowerment for many of these girls, regardless of their background or upbringing: “Every woman is told you can be a good mother, it’s the thing we’re all supposed to be good at. I felt that not all, but some, of these girls maybe believed that this was a life plan for them, that they could be a mother and they could raise a baby and that they could do well.”
Elworthy and Williams both advised against drawing conclusions based solely on the external conditions that a character seems to inhabit: “What is hardship? We can never know the kind of experiences someone has had. You can only look on the outside of somebody’s life and say ‘You have two parents, you have a house, you have food on the table every night, you seem to be comfortable’…but we have no way of going in and saying ‘Well did anything really happen to you? Is there something you’re not telling us?’”
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching storyline in the film is between one of the girls and her mother, which surfaces towards the film’s conclusion. Both witnessed grizzly suicides at a young age, and have been struggling to process the experiences ever since. In an outpouring of emotion, the mother confesses that she failed to come to her daughter’s aid because she was incapable of coping with her own trauma. How could she guide her daughter through something she had never overcome herself? The two filmmakers disagree about the relevance of the segment to the main narrative of the film, but the inclusion of the subplot in the film is a pivotal choice. It provides a brief window into a deep well of pain that may remain concealed from any one of the characters’ testimonies. Williams explained his reasons: “Who would have thought that [she] was trying to compensate for a gaping loss that was this horrific tragedy? And you wouldn’t have known it. I felt like it was relevant. Maybe this family was just more transparent and was more willing to share what happened to them. Who knows what someone’s experience is? I thought anyone who would reveal something that intimate, that personal…we couldn’t resist that.”
The greatest strength of the film is its capacity for restraint, abstaining from hasty verdicts in favor of a receptive candor that invites the girls to speak for themselves. A series of matter-of-fact art titles at the end of the film are the only external commentary. There is no voice-over, no generalizations drawn from the specifics, no imperative to resolve the question of whether or not a pact caused the pregnancies. While the girls vehemently deny that they intended to become pregnant, let alone make a pact, the filmmakers openly acknowledge that the full truth has probably yet to come to the fore. “We have an extremely high rate of second pregnancies, normally it is 25%. In our case it is 90%. Almost all of them have at least two [babies]. Something weird went on,” Elworthy concedes. Yet Williams and Elworthy don’t feel it is their place to pressure their subjects and pry out the answers the media has been clamoring for. They acknowledge the limitations inherent to any documentary practice, especially in terrain where openness is restrained by taboos and controversy.
Williams and Elworthy are hoping a more open dialogue will emerge in a sequel in which they plan to examine the reasons behind the high rate of second pregnancies among the original group and to explore the fathers’ roles in their children’s lives. Now that the girls are older, Elworthy hopes they may have gained some perspective on the choices they made four years ago: “I actually wonder what they would say now about themselves then. I think at the time I said ‘If there was a pact we’ll never know because these girls have been chased down by the media and if they ever said the word ‘pact’ then they were going to be all over them again.’ I don’t think there was a pact the way everyone thinks there was, but I’d be interested to go back and ask them again — ‘Did you intend to get pregnant, what were your reasons?’”
Elworthy is interested in examining the roles of the fathers in raising these children.
For now the film is still searching for a wider release. It is currently hosted on Prescreen, a screening and fundraising platform imagined by one of the founding members of Groupon. The prescreen period ends at the end of November and the filmmakers are excited about what they may learn about their film from a marketing perspective and the insights they will draw about the next phase of the distributions process.
January 20, 2012
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