Princeton University Athletics
Opportunity Knox
June 16, 2000 | General
It's been a circuitous route. Taken separately, each step doesn't seem to be a road on any particular course: Princeton athletic fields to ABC Sports to Yale to Financial News Network to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Where, exactly, was Amie Knox '77 going? Turns out, she knew where she was headed all along.
Today, Knox is the one-woman show behind ABarK Productions, an independent documentary film company based in Denver. It is more than just Knox's job. It is her passion, one that Knox may not have felt she was always pursuing directly, but one she always intended to fulfill.
"There's a link there," says Knox, who is currently working on a series of short films about women artists. "Being at Princeton really set the foundation for all of this. It was a broad-based liberal arts education, and I absorbed it all. I was like a sponge."
She was also an athlete, a very good one. Knox played squash, tennis and field hockey, earning 11 or 12 varsity letters, depending on whom you ask. For reasons Knox doesn't quite understand, the University only credits her with 11, one shy of the record owned by Emily Goodfellow '76. Knox, however, contends that she played varsity on all three teams for all four years, which would tie her with Goodfellow.
"It's neither here nor there, but I did have 12 letters,'' Knox says. "I don't worry about it. It wasn't about winning letters anyway. It was about the total experience."
[Editor's note: The Department of Athletics, under the discretion of the coach, issues varsity P letters to student-athletes. Up until the late 1970s coaches were given the latitude to offer three types of letters: a six-inch orange varsity P, a five-inch orange secondary varsity P and a five-inch black junior varsity P. In the late '70s the secondary varsity designation ceased to be an option. The Princeton connotation of letterwinner refers to athletes who receive a six-inch varsity P.
Athletic Department records indicate that Amie Knox was awarded a five-inch secondary varsity P in 1975 following her sophomore year of tennis. As a result, she is credited with 11 varsity letters in the athletic record book, which recognizes only six-inch letter recipients.]
Regardless, Knox's varying interests of sports and art led to her first job. Before arriving at Old Nassau she attended film series at local libraries in her home state of Connecticut, transfixed by the visual images. She majored in English at Princeton, looking to tap into her love of the arts.
But it was her athletic talents that got her hired out of college. Impressed by Knox's sports background, ABC Sports hired her as a producer, and for five years she worked on everything from football to the Wide World of Sports to the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid for the network. She loved the job, but knew, as much as she loved sports, her heart was in documentaries and stories about the arts. With the then young dream of someday starting her own documentary film company, Knox enrolled at the Yale School of Organization and Management, a graduate program that paid special mind to people who were interested in working in the private and nonprofit sector.
Armed with that degree--not to mention her future husband, Jim Kelley--she signed on with Financial News Network (before FNN was gobbled up by CNN) in New York, where she was a jack-of-all-trades. She did everything from run cameras to edit to actually work on camera.
"While I was working there I found the job I really wanted," Knox recalls. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art did a half-hour program on Manet, and I called them up. They didn't have anything immediately, but within six months they hired me. I actually took Caroline Kennedy's job when she went to law school."
Six years later, when Kelley transferred to Denver, Knox took the leap she had been dreaming of since her college days. She opened her own production company. In it she has been able to combine her love for writing and literature--she writes most of her films herself--with her love for the film industry and the arts.
Knox says she is blessed because she doesn't have to churn out movies for survival. Her husband works for Ventar Capital, a venture capital company, and the family is financially secure. She works only part time because she's also busy raising her children Ali, 12, Nick, 9, and Bryn, 5.
"I'm very lucky. I don't do this because I have to. I do it because I love it," Knox says. "I have periods of great activity and then times when I just don't work as much. Sometimes, sure, it can be frustrating because you'd like to be able to do more. I looked in the paper and saw that one of my classmates, Meg Whitman, is CEO of ebay. I read that and I think, `I'm a total deadbeat, a slacker.' But it's all about the kind of life you want."
And while Knox's job may not be making her life monetarily rich, it is fulfilling her in so many other ways.
She has done a number of different films, including a natural history film, the Tall, Grass Prairie, for the Discovery Channel. But it is her current project that is closest to Knox's heart. A lover of art all her life, Knox relishes the chance to bring visibility and recognition to little-known artists.
And these films will do just that. Though she typically works through cable companies or traditional routes to broadcast her films, Knox instead will distribute these films directly to the end users. Museums and schools, places who will use them as learning tools, will receive them immediately.
"When we're all dead and gone, the residue of our culture will be captured in art and literature," Knox says. "Artists are such intelligent people. They've made really hard choices in their lives. What they're saying about society, our culture is very important. They're treasures and yet there are so many we know so little about. For me, this is a completely enriching job."
by Dana Pennett