A familiar scene to anyone who regularly watches the nightly news on television: lights flash and yellow police tape flows as a TV news reporter explains to viewers what is known about the accident or crime scene behind them — often in sordid detail.
What most TV viewers probably don’t know is the toll that this kind of reporting takes on the reporters, camera operators and producers who do the work. Do they become inured to misfortune and death? Overwhelmed by it?
Scott “Silent K” Knowlton and Michelle Elise Harding know something about this side of the job. As behind-the-camera veterans of TV news, they have been a part of many such scenes. And now they have collaborated on an award-winning short film, “Pressed,” a work of fiction that aims to offer viewers some insight into that end of the process.
“Pressed” premiered last month at the Wolf Tree Film Festival in Marshall, Michigan. The eight-minute film starring Hannah Putnam and Adam Wahlberg was shot last year at the Pennington Shopping Center, with Knowlton and Harding as co-writers and co-directors.
Knowlton, a graduate of Hopewell Valley Central High School, lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a producer for CBS News. But when the script he co-wrote with Harding called for a suburban location in which to film the story, he immediately thought of his hometown.
“My family still lives down there,” Knowlton, 45, said in a recent phone interview. “My dad (David) still lives on South Main Street with my stepmom (Diane Zompa). My mom (Carol) still lives in Brandon Farms. One day when I was down there, I happened to notice that there was a vacant space in Pennington Shopping Center. I reached out to the people at the realty group and they said, ‘We’re not using the space, so as long as you leave it the way you found it, you can use it.’”
The principal roles in the film went to professional actors from New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware. But for extras, including some of the first responders depicted in the film, Knowlton and Harding turned to Hopewell Valley locals.
“I went to high school with the chief of police. My dad was a volunteer firefighter in Pennington. So I knew I would have connections I needed. Being able to use those guys was so great, especially the firefighters. They didn’t care how many times I asked them to run with a ladder or do whatever. That really helped me out, being so willing to do all of it,” he said.
Knowlton describes “Pressed” as a story about a reporter who arrives at the crime scene of a double homicide and realizes she wants to be a different kind of journalist than the one she has been. “While it’s important to tell people’s stories, there’s a way to do it without monopolizing people’s emotions, without profiting off of someone’s terrible situation, which is how a lot of people think the news is,” he said.
Knowlton studied journalism at Rutgers University after graduating from Central. Although he has had a long and Emmy-winning career as a TV producer, his dream has always been to make films.
“My brother (Craig) is actually the one who went to film school,” he said. “He went to Tisch (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts), and my experience on film sets was mostly on his stuff. I was an assistant director helping him on his projects. He encouraged me to keep it up because he liked doing it and he knew I liked doing it.”
And the “Silent K” nickname that Knowlton now uses professionally? Bestowed by Will Ferrell, believe it or not, during the time when Knowlton worked as an entertainment reporter.
“I interviewed him for the movie Elf,” Knowlton said. “When you sit down in those junkets, the actors ask ‘What’s your name?’ And I always had to spell my name out for them. He said, “Where’s the K?’ I said, ‘It’s right at the beginning.’ And he said, ‘Wow. Your rap nickname should be Silent K.’
“Now I have Silent K Studios, the license plate on my jeep is Silent K. It just kind of stuck.”
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In 2017, Knowlton was working at a news job that he describes as toxic, and in a personal relationship that he says was “not exactly a healthy one.”
So he got out of the relationship, packed up his apartment, quit his job, and drove around the country for a four-month solo trip to visit a national landmark in each of the lower 48 states. “A Jack Kerouac kind of sojourn,” he said.
The trip almost ended in tragedy in the Grand Canyon. One night while there he ended up stranded in the canyon without any overnight gear. “That was a rough night,” he said. “Basically yelling for help in the darkness for 45 minutes.”
Fortunately for Knowlton, there were some German tourists within earshot who climbed down to him and fixed him up with some sustenance and an all-temperature sleeping bag. “They were the nicest guys,” he said. “They literally just did the trip down to me in the dark to help me out. I wasn’t sure I would make it through the night — the temperature dropped so much. About a month later, a woman died in just about the same place I was in.”
After returning to New York, he settled into a job with CBS News that was a better fit. But the survival experience helped to remind him that the clock was ticking if he ever wanted to have a career as a filmmaker. He made a promise to himself to do more creative writing and to share that writing with more people.
In 2020, he came down with a bad case of Covid, and had to be hospitalized. “I wasn’t on a ventilator, but it was scary moments,” he said. “After two back-to-back near-death experiences, I was like, ‘You need to do this stuff if you’re ever going to do it.’”
Not a month after he recovered from Covid, he learned that one of his CBS News colleagues — Harding — was also an independent filmmaker. They met up, and Harding told him about a film she wanted to do about a TV news reporter, but she wasn’t sure how to get the story into script form. “She had the middle, she just really didn’t know the beginning and the end,” Knowlton said.
Knowlton offered to take a crack at writing a script, and 24 hours later he had something to send her. “This is Michelle’s story. She experienced these things while being a photojournalist for the news in South Carolina which is why she wanted to tell this story. I understood right away because I, too, have been in the field and seen these things happen,” he said. “Once she read the draft I did, she said, ‘You get the story. I want to make this movie, and I want to make it with you.’”
They shot the film over Easter weekend 2022. “Over the course of Friday and Saturday, a lot of shooting. Twelve hour days, but we didn’t have an opportunity to do it any other weekend,” Knowlton said. “One of the retired firefighters let us use their farm for a second crime scene. It meant a lot that the whole town, every person we talked to was like, ‘How can we help you?’ It was really a great thing.”
Once shooting was finished, it took Harding from April until Thanksgiving to make a final, eight-minute cut of the film. In the end, the pair made the movie for the relatively paltry cost of $10,000. “When people see it, one of the first things they say is how professional it looks,” Knowlton said. “Michelle’s film school professor said, ‘I can’t believe how good this looks based on the budget.’”
They started submitting the movie to film festivals across the world once it was completed. Immediately they heard back from the Alternative Film Festival of Canada, where it won Best Drama for North America. But that festival only screened 10 films in total, meaning “Pressed” did not have its world premiere there.
Next, they found out that they had been accepted into the Cannes Shorts film festival, where they were nominated for Best Drama. But there again, there was no opportunity for a screening.
It wasn’t long before the Top Indie Film Awards checked in with four nominations and two awards, for Best Writing and Best Message. And finally came word came from Wolf Tree that the film had been accepted to screen in Michigan on Jan. 21. Knowlton was on hand for the premiere.
“I just needed that moment to break through in my psyche, that this is something I could do,” Knowlton said. “I give such kudos to Michelle, because she’s known that she wanted to do this for a while, and this is her fourth movie. But for me to get this response from the film festivals is satisfying and reaffirming. What it’s done for me is made me more vocal about the stories I want to tell.”
Since completing “Pressed,” Knowlton has written a draft of a feature-length film script, and is already in preproduction on another short film he wants to shoot first.
“Once people heard that I got nominated for Cannes Shorts and heard that we won best drama at the Alternative Film Festival, that opened a lot of doors,” he said. “People are taking it seriously that this is what I want to do.”
Hannah Putnam starring as lead character Sylvia Stewart in a scene from the short film “Pressed,” by Michelle Elise Harding and Scott Knowlton. The film was shot in Hopewell.,
