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Of course there's retail therapy,
but I really wanted to be an actress,
and he said, why don't you do what I do?
and I said, well what do you do?
He said, well I go to the comedy store every week and tell blind jokes.
And I said, well Alex, that may work for you,
but I don't think I can get away with that,
my sight is
perfectly fine.
He said, you dork!
You go on stage and you tell a comedy joke.
So Alex,
I give the credit and the blame for me.
So that's what got me anywhere, and it worked.
Alex was an angel in my path
that guided me to a goal
and I was doing stand up comedy and Lior Leon were in my audience one night
in 1980 and I was doing stand up comedy and he
introduced himself to me after the show
and one of the things he said to me when he first met me, he said,
you know, I've never seen anything quite like you.
He said, you're really cunning, but you're way before your kind.
And I thought he was talking about a couple of months- so what?
I had no idea he meant
a couple of decades!
So that was my journey.
I did it first, and I'm really
proud of that.
And I never ever not give credit
for the people that opened those doors for me
because it was a gift. And I hope
that by walking through that door I've been able to give that gift to others
that would their doors can open also.
I feel like I've seen you do standup on television before I saw you in the show.
- Yes you did. -I knew you were doing standup before you did the show, I just wanted to make sure.
Oh, was that funny?
No, I'm not taking away from your time.
Do you think people caught up? -Pardon?
Do you think people caught up?
The audience was caught up.
Yea, you know what's really
interesting is that
when I went back, my name wasn't Jewell.
And then when I got Deadwood,
and I didn't even audition for Deadwood,
all I had to do was
stand in line at a pharmacy
and this man turns around he says,
are you Geri Jewell? and I didn't really want to admit I was,
because I really looked like *** that morning,
and I said, well yeah...
And he said, well I'm a huge fan of yours, I love you, you've inspired me, you've made me laugh.
And I said, well thank you. And he said, but I haven't seen you on tv in years!
And I said, that's true,
because I'm always in pharmacies.
And then he said, well you do you want a television show?
I said, excuse me? And he said
well don't you want to be on tv?
And I said, look just because I'm in a pharmacy,
it doesn't mean that I'm on drugs!
And he said, no, in case you don't recognize me,
my name is David Milch.
And I said, the producer of NYPD Blue?
And he said, yep. And I said,
well Mr. Milch,
I'm flattered that you like my work,
but let's be real, I'd be a really *** cop.
And he said no, I'm doing a western for
Deadwood.
You wanna do a western?
And that's how I got Deadwood.
And so, you never know.
I recently was on Alcatraz,
which is a
new series on Fox,
and my name is Geri again, by the way.
It was Geri, then it was Jewel, and now it's
Geri again on Alcatraz.
People think I'm talented enough to remember lines
but they don't think that I can remember any names.
So if we were to
think about doors that open,
and where things have gone,
Dani here who has asked where you are going next,
and you are probably best known for playing Mikey on Seinfeld,
and you've been on Passions,
and worked with the Screen Actors Guild on the Disabilities committee,
and we were talking a bit before,
and you mentioned you were in a film coming out at the end of March,
called Mirror Mirror, with Julia Roberts,
and a film called Bad *** with Andy,
which I can't wait to see.
So in your experience,
cause you came to tv and to do those a little bit after Geri,
do you find doors opening up? What is your experience?
Well I think, when you do a show, Seinfeld was my very first sitcom
I had done an episode of *** She wrote,
I had done an episode of Hunter, but I had not done a sitcom yet.
So I went through the audition process and
I think it was 1993, my first episode. So I went through the audition process,
battled it out with a lot of other guys, and on the last day of the audition process I found out
that I'd booked it, and was going to start right away. -Where they casting specifically a shorter person?
- Yes, for the story line it was pretty much around socks at the time.
And not all the episodes have been like that,
but that particular episode was called "The Stand In"
and it was about standing in
for kids on soap operas,
which a lot of little people did during the early
stages of show business.
Cause kids could only be on the set for like six hours.
They couldn't be on set for a long while, so they'd use
little people to do off camera work after they sent the kids home.
So I booked the sitcom and that time
there wasn't a lot of cable shows,
there wasn't a lot of
a lot of things
beyond
network television
that people were really watching.
It was the early 90s, and cable had not really become what it is now.
So back then, you were getting 20 million viewers,
and the kind of ratings that American Idol got when it first came on
and the impact that that has, when you appear in that little tiny box,
that's what opened the door for me.
Back then, being on that show, was confusion.
The very next day after it aired, I was parked in a red zone, and the cop refused to give me a ticket.
He was like, stay there as long as you want! And I'm like, okay.
And I'm riding around in my
little 1990 blue Tusel and
people would recognize me
behind the wheel of that car.
And I mean, I could understand when you could see me three blocks away when I'm walking,
But if I'm in a car,
it's a lot harder to tell that it's me, I think. Cause I'm not so far down behind the wheel,
I have to raise it up, otherwise people would die.
Yes, so that for me
was really a big turnover.
Growing up, I had seen, as I said in the film,
other little people
represented on film,
but there was never really anybody, other than say, Michael Don or Billy Barty,
I recognized actors that were portraying roles portraying characters with dimension, and emotion and feeling
and I admired them for that, but I didn't relate.
I literally related myself more to Sydney Poitier than I did to
Billy Barty.
Cause I saw myself as this guy
that experienced a lot of the same kind of prejudices
that African Americans experienced in the 70s,
for me. So I really understood.
"Guess Who's coming to Dinner"
is one of my favorite movies.
And when I first got together with my wife,
that was our ongoing joke, when I go to media halls, it's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"
Now, I'm curious,
do you think that's because you haven't seen your own experience
reflecting in the characters?
No I think it's because
I had never seen myself in a mirror and did not know I wasn't black.
And how has that helped your career?
Well, I found that experience,
that life experience very inspiring, and I really latched onto that.
I try to get into those clubs but they don't let me.
I really connected to that emotion and that
experience, and
I watched all these amazing movies from the 50s and 60s
"Blackboard Jungle", and like I said-
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner",
and all of these
sorts of
race relation movies,
and I've always felt like, that's me in a lot of ways.
So for me, that was
a film that really inspired me as an actor.
And now you watch movies like
"Gentleman's Agreement"
a lot of these movies
that address race relations
were very inspiring to me.
Because there wasn't a lot of movies about disability when I was growing up.
There were some in the 70s, but they weren't as prevalent as movies regarding race.
So what would be a movie that you would like to see?
What's that?
I said, what's the movie you would like to see in regards to disability?
At this point,
I think, there's a rareness out there
But I just
want to see opportunities change.
When I go to an audition,
and I go to an audition
on a studio block,
say Paramount, or Warner Brothers,
one of the older blocks,
a lot of the buildings are not accessible.
And they're historical buildings, so they're
not making any changes, and they don't have to.
But that inaccessibility, right off the bat,
eliminates anybody with a mobility impairment from getting to the second floor to audition
So when that awareness becomes greater, that consideration will come into affect
and that's one of the things Anita and I hope to achieve with our
force in the Screen Actors Guild
is going to work directly with
the powers that hire.
At AMPTP, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers,
SAG and AFTRA,
one of the things we're going to talk about is that accessibility.
That needs to be job one.
And then also, job one
needs to be access.
Job one and two need to be interchangeable.
Access, inclusion, and accuracy.
Access, meaning to auditions and to the set,
to be able to get there, get to the building and into the room.
Inclusion, being thought of as, like they said, "we never even thought of it"
Inclusion in the thought process.
And accuracy, which is one thing that we bring to it that
really, nobody else brings to it.
As they was saying to bring it back. -Exactly what they were saying about that.
You know there are creative ways of thinking about it too.
If you look at somebody in the scene who is sitting behind a desk, and they never get up in the whole scene.
Why isn't that person perhaps someone who is disabled,
or has some sort of mobile disability?
Why isn't that person considered?
They are ultimately never considered,
they are just never thought of.
So right, why can't the little person
be the stock broker?
- I think that's what was so great in the clip, what William H. Macy said, that he had never even thought of it.
Even though he himself has had the experience of working with cerebral palsy.
Even in that experience, he had never even thought of using,
or even creating characters with disabilities in the script that he's writing.
And I think that's why when push comes to shove and the projects gets generated, when people come to casting,
we're not even considered from A, we are certainly not considered the rest of the way down the line. The process just snowballs.
When a project gets green lighted, a project just snowballs from there. We need to be thought of all the way down the line, in every section, from the writers to the executive producer, to the network to the casting director.
- Yeah, I wanted to plug into what Christine is talking about,
Law and Order has been very good about that.
All the Law and Order series.
I've been a clerk,
You know,
a law clerk,
a court
clerk!
That's the word! A court clerk! That was the word!
And the funny thing was that they-
Well I've always been thinking that judges,
most of the time on law and order,
you don't see... unless they are the stars and celebrities and come on as a judge,
you don't see them walk away and going to their offices.
But the other judges, like Charlotte, my friend Charlotte,
who played a judge for years,
never came out from outside the desk.
So for all the years I'm like,
that's the perfect job for me! So finally they called me back,
and I went in without my leg,
thinking, this is my twentieth audition
in twenty years for Law and Order,
they're never going to cast me!
They're just calling me in so that
they could say they did.
So I go in, and it was 90 degrees out,
if I were to wear my artificial leg,
it was going to sweat right off right there in the room.
So I went without it, cause I wasn't going to get the part anyway.
It's 90 degrees out, I just decided I'm not going to wear my leg.
Because it was going to slip right off anyway.
Like, does that even happen? No, but it doesn't feel nice.
I just didn't care. The truth was, I could have come in there naked,
they just were like, we want you to do this part.
And I got it- the court clerk. Nothing to do with walking with two legs, nothing to do with anything,
it was not a disabled role.
In theatre, I play those roles all the time.
Aunt Eller, in "Oklahoma", Gorgeous in "The Sisters Rosensweig"
Grizabella in "Cats",
which I did play as a three legged cat.
I'm just saying that most of the time I get cast
in roles that aren't thought to be-
basically it's roles that don't have disability.
But then in film and in television I find that doesn't happen.
- I would say the same thing, because I have the same experience.
I rarely play a character with disability
on stage,
with the obvious notable exception
of Laura, which we've all-
all three of us
have played
at one time or another.
This is "The Glass Menagerie,"
a play by Tennessee Williams,
Laura is the girl with the limp.
So I'm going to end here,
I know Mitch and I were talking before and he aspires to that.
Someone that started out as a fashion model
for Ralph Lauren right?
Yep. - You've done soap operas, you've done Another World, General Hospital, Law and Order,
things like Desperate Housewives, but when we had a conversation before,
you said something that I think is really important here,
that you were getting frustrated about the roles that you were getting,
and you weren't feeling satisfied, and started
creating your own work. Can you talk a little about that for us?
Well I'll just talk about it in a nut shell.
My career started almost over night, with this Ralph Lauren ad that I did.
Modeling was never something that I aspired to, but people thought I should try it.
And then after my car accident when I was 17,
I kept myself in shape,
and I thought, okay well that's an option, and then this wonderful opportunity had come up.
So to make a long story short, I met Bruce Webber, he photographed
me for Ralph, in one of Ralph's suits,
they put it in a bunch of magazines, ***, zoom,
I'm auditioning for soap operas in New York City,
which I did about 30 episodes of,
but so much had happened so quickly,
kind of in an unrealistic way, even though I had planned on it
ever since I was a child, to be an actor, and so I left the business,
cut all my hair off, and went to do some research on Native Americans,
and I went to LA after that,
and started over.
I said I didn't model for Ralph Lauren,
people were like, you're that Calvin Klein model and I'm like, yeah!
And I was a background extra
on commercials, cause
they paid so well.
Then a couple of jobs came up, and then this contract came up,
for another soap, on Port Charles, which is a spin off of General Hospital.
And they wanted one of the young interns to be disabled.
And I was fortunate enough to get that part,
and they turned everyone into vampires
about 6 months after.
But to make a long story short, as I was starting over,
my career in my mind,
I didn't feel like anyone was writing
the right part for me.
I kind of realized that I had to create my own work
and create my own
voice.
And the easiest way to do that was
to have a one man show about what had happened to me.
After my car accident, rehabilitated in NYC,
at Rusk Institute,
and then I played about
twenty characters that
came up to me in the streets of New York
and had said something spontaneously to me
and a lot of them are homeless folks,
or prostitutes,
alcoholic people.
The people that felt
forgotten, and
they bonded with me.
I'm not afraid of anybody so I caught a good rap with a few of them.
We didn't go camping, - but New Yorkers don't do that anyway. That's right.
So in writing my one man show,
and putting it on stage, and paying for it myself,
and producing this project, was really an epiphany for me,
because within 24 hours of my last show, I got offered that contract
for Port Charles. But nobody from Port Charles saw my show.
- It was you telling the universe that you are ready to work.
And you have to do it yourself
sometimes.
At least in the beginning,
or at least when you don't have anything going in your life.
You need to be bold.
I'm going through it right now, because I moved back to New York two years ago.
I can't audition for anything, and I have a couple of projects I need to do.
And you'll all be invited!
Because I work now, I have a nice resume,
something to fall back on.
And to come here and talk about it with you.
But it's a crazy business, and it's not a business to feel like you're a victim.
Because once you start feeling victimized in our lives,
we loose our enthusiasm.
I urge you to not fall into that pattern
of feeling rejected,
unless you reject your own self.
But this is a theme,
a message, that keeps coming up in our lives,
whoever we are, and whatever we go through, I think.
I just have to say,
that I am so happy to be here tonight
because I did the "I am PWD" campaign,
I was in LA just a few weeks ago,
and I don't like LA anymore.
But I had a great time, good people there,
at least some of them. But I felt such an energy there,
I felt this energy in New York
when we were skyping,
and Christine was getting emotional when she began the session,
and I'm like,
what am I doing in LA,
when I need to be there with these people?
And now I'm back.
But I have to do it myself again. One quick example that I always think about is
when I heard Billy Bob Thornton tell a story,
that he was catering for big Hollywood parties,
and he guttered a producer
in the corner of the room,
and he goes, hey! how do you break into this business? I'm an actor, I'm good, I'm funny,
and the producer looked at him and goes,
well you're not good looking.
Write your own project.
And Billy Bob came up with "Sling Blade".
The character he wrote and played in "Sling Blade" was
based on a real life person in his home town
that he had mimicked
in his standup for years.
So he wrote what he knew,
and look what happened.
Whether it's good or bad,
he's had a great career.
And he's not struggling now.
So for me it's something about-
cause there's a constant struggle.
Especially when some days you don't
feel so good, or whatever.
But it's a wonderful thing to pull yourself up and produce something,
and put it in front of people and see what happens.
And you don't have the same worries about them getting involved.
No, you're not going to get it wrong.
You might forget a line, but that doesn't matter.
You told the universe once again that you're prepared for something
bigger and better.
You'll get it, one way or another, I believe.
- Thank you.
Jeni Gold, you've worked in the industry for a very long time,
on a number of different films,
I remember one I saw back when I was doing
the Dismiss series, which was a true disabled view, I'm talking we had
taken on pistol packs and semi trucks,
and zipping down the zip line called
"Running, Willing and Able" and
I'm curious to know,
in your evolution,
body who has been in the industry, who has worked in the industry,
what led you to finally say,
I'm going to make CinemAbility, I'm going to make this film.
That was a great question, can you hear it?
- While we're waiting,
I'll just let you know I skyped one time with a blind Korean filmmaker,
and when his picture came up, I said the natural thing, Mr.Lin, can you see me?
- I hear you, hi.
Hi Jeni.
I don't think she hears you. She does.
Did you get the question?
Which mic is working?
You just need to speak louder, and can you repeat the question?
Sure. I was saying, you work in the industry,
can you hear me now?
There is no audio.
Can you repeat the question?
Can you type the question?
We can just send it to her through skype.
Yes, Issac is messaging her.
Just repeat it please.
Okay so the question is,
as someone that has
worked in the industry for a long time, and done out of the box films like
"Running, Willing and Able," what was the thing that made you, Jeni finally
say, I must make CinemAbility?
So what was the catalyst? And what do you want to see come from it?
First off
let me say that
I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person,
we've been really busy here,
putting the rest of CinemAbility together,
but thankfully we were able to
set this up via Skype.
I'm sorry I couldn't be there, it looks like you are
having great fun.
Hey guys, I'm glad to see you.
Glad that all your flights made it there,
thats fantastic.
You say I've been in doing this for so long,
but I'm not that old.
I still feel like I'm
kind of experiencing
everything on the
newer side.
What made me do CinemAbility?
It's not like I started out wanting
to change people's
perception, or anything, it's just that I'm curious by nature.
I actually don't really
consider myself a
documentary filmmaker,
but it sort of happened.
Lucky that I'm curious and
started doing this and
it just snowballed.
I got deeper and deeper and realized
how important it was, and how rich the material was,
and that I knew a lot of the people that
I could reach out to and get involved with,
that this would be an important film to do.
- So where are you in the process?
You could say that we're actually
ending right now,
which is why I couldn't fly to New York,
because I'm literally in the editing
all day every day.
We are under a tight timeline
to qualify for some of the
Academy Award runs for 2012,
and so we are currently editing.
There were a couple of interviews we'd like to work out,
we still have some things to do,
but primarily we're in the post production stage.
Fantastic. And how could people find out more, and follow the progress of the film?
Well we recently put up a facebook page, and there's a twitter
CinemAbility link as well,
and we just finished with our website last night,
cinemability.com
It has links to facebook and twitter right there on the main page,
so there you can
get all the information,
you can follow us throughout our progress
as we go along, and we are still
actually, as you know, we
are limited in filmmaking
and it is always a struggle,
if you have tons of great people in it,
so we are still in the process of fundraising,
and doing funds,
we also have
a link on
imdb.com
if anybody wants to see a complete cast.
So it's been sort of a
big task of getting
a combination
of getting the
word out there of what we're doing,
which is starting off
tonight, with
this event, and we hope that we will
not be under the radar with
getting this movie out.
So watch for it on facebook, twitter, and cinemability.com
So people can go and get a little
bit of information as we
get ready for the big release, once the film
is completed. So that people could see instead of 9 minutes, 90 minutes.
Fantastic, thank you. We are all looking forward to seeing it.
Thank you.
So did you go on to
youtube, seeing as it got so big,
you could see some very funny promos
that we just did,
with Jimmy Jole,
You should see them,
they are a lot of fun.
Yes, they are fantastic, I hope we get to see more of those.
Lewis was amazing, that's all I'm going to say,
you have to check it out for yourself.
Thank you so much. Lana, I want to
get you in here.
You've done a lot of work in Australia,
that accent isn't Brooklyn.
The founding director of
the other film festival,
which is the only international
film festival that deals with exploring the contemporary life of disability in Australia,
and you've been doing that since 2004.
I'm curious because I think that
now with ReelAbilities really taking off, going to different cities and expanding
beyond New York City the way that it has, what's your experience been, what was your idea when you started
The Other Film Festival, and what has occurred, what is the trajectory of that,
what were you surprised by during the process?
Well first off, I just want to
acknowledged the wealth of
talent and information that is sitting at this table, I'm just kind of overwhelmed
by these fantastic stories, and I
feel very privileged to getting a view into the inside of what
is going on here, and I hear a lot of things
echoed of what people are experiencing in Australia, and some things that are very different.
The Other Film Festival started with a simple premise,
which is
that there isn't a film festival where
films are about or by people
that are with a disability.
There is no festival like that.
There is a festival for damned near everything else,
but there is no disability film festival.
Which leads to the natural thing, well let's make one.
So it started with a very
simple premise,
and some of it, I'm actually
embarrassed to talk about,
because
it was
ignorant.
It was ignorant at the start of what the
experiences and aspirations of
members of the disability community is.
It started simply with the premise to go,
we don't see the representation of people with a disability on our screens, in our cinema,
or on TV, and we need to see it up on screen.
But we didn't think about the accessibility of the
cinema very much, we didn't think about captioning,
we didn't think about audio description.
And very fortunately the organization that I worked for
started to insist on that,
putting those things in order.
I was resistant of-
against all that,
because I thought,
well how do we know people are going to come and use those services?
and I don't want to spend money on services that I
don't know will be used.
But they said no, you have to provide the services,
and people will come,
and you build that.
So we started with an audience of 500 people in 2004
and the last festival we had 2,300 and came
over a five day festival.
The festival has evolved in it's own way, please don't clap, I think that's record small.
I didn't mean the applause, I mean the audience was record small.
How small was the audience? - That small.
Thank you for embarrassing me.
So the festival has evolved in several significant ways.
So it's evolved, at first it started with the idea of films by with and about people with a disability
Now we are articulated
as films
which represent the lived experience of disability
So we really have that
authenticity that's been talked about here.
We want to see characters that are real,
we have a lot of documentaries, we want to see
representation of real experiences.
Because it feels like no other median, it opens the door that you could go into someone else's experience.
It's a beautiful thing in the cinema, when it works, it's fabulous.
We also think about- what is the experience that people with disabilities have
when they go to the cinema and they go to film festivals.
Do they have the same opportunity to go into the life of the film?
If you feel that you're different, or that you're treated in a different way,
or you're made too much of a fuss of when you arrive,
or that the captioning isn't good quality, or the audio description isn't,
that prevents you from going into the life of the film.
So we think about, what is the destination?
We realize that we talk a lot about access,
but we haven't talked about
what is access?
What is the access to?
We think of it in the wrong way, really. We prioritize access
rather than, what is the experience you want
that the access should give you access to?
So it really freed us up to think about access in really wild ways.
So this brings out,
I love your festival, but I can't sit or stand for any length of time, do you have a bed?
- I was going to mention that, because I was looking at Rick's PDF from the 2012 festival,
and I met Rick in 2009 when I was in Australia
for an Arts and Disability Festival
speaking and performing, and I looked at the PDF yesterday, and it said,
we have a bed available for those that cannot stand or sit,
which I thought, wow. I saw that and thought, whoa, that's amazing.
- I just like to watch movies in bed.
Of course, and we're going to have
an all night special with
bean bags on the floor,
and beds,
and if the movie is boring, just sleep!
So like this festival, and I see
many parallels with ReelAbilities,
we're a festival that's
dedicated to social challenge.
We have to branch out, and that's what we gotta do.
I know I went in a specific direction,
but it was mentioned that this thing was
a talk about access, and the decision makers are probably not in the room,
so we're all going to be in furious agreement with each other today,
but the people who are making the very serious decisions, who basically have the money
the advertisers, the producers, those are the people
we need to be talking to.
So. Australia.
Compared to the United States, we're in a much worse position. We are like Mexico,
you know, they have a problem with Mexico,
all of Mexico, so far from
Goa, so close to
the United States.
So think
of Australia in the same way,
about 95% of the films that are screened in our cinemas are
produced in this country.
So we have no control over that, but they
dominate our screens like no other.
I'm talking about 95%. So 5% of the product
that Australians see
is made in Australia.
We've had a bravely shrinking
film industry
for probably about 30 years.
and the biggest thing, is that every year it gets smaller.
So what we've got is a pie that's getting smaller.
This is the biggest challenge for social justice to say
here we've got a pie that is shrinking, and it will continue to shrink
with this financial crisis,
how do we get the fingers of the people with a disability into that pie.
It's a big challenge because everybody in the industry is
running scared, there's a million people out there that dream of being actors,
some of them have disabilities, but you know,
we're all in this together.
-And they can't act.
That's the biggest disability.
-That is a big disability.
So the biggest film made in Australia last year
was a film about a dog.
It's called "Great Dog" and I'm sure it will come to the US and it will have a small run here.
So I'd like to say, you've got more of a chance of getting to a
feature film
as a main character if you're a dog
than if you use a wheelchair.
So yea,
that's the state of play in Australia.
So we're really behind.
We're not even making the product that we're getting to see.
So for actors with a disability,
there are very few. And there are probably..
I'm just so happy to be here, and to hear of people that are getting gigs
This might be between gigs, different times,
you have a whole lot of other things going on,
but in Australia, there are no,
I don't know any,
I don't know any actors with a disability,
besides in my old theatre company,
in the theatre world,
and if you don't work, you're an extra.
Your craft does not develop.
You go backwards as an actor,
You have to be working
and do the work.
And a lot of people make their own films,
they make documentaries, but its very difficult.
The film festival this year is going to run a whole lot of work shops
for further professional development
and we are also really trying to screen the film that we've just seen
at ReelAbilities.
Our job at the festival is to try
to get the decision makers
to the table
to talk about the obstacles that are on your side.
How can we help you address the obstacles that are on your side.
I've spoken for more than enough, thank you very much.
Let's talk a little bit about the obstacles,
and also about the solutions.
You work with "The Alliance for the Inclusion of the Arts,"
You're really the vanguard of trying to
connect actors with disabilities
with the industry, and in fact,
you keep giving to people in the industry that have disabilities as well.
It's not just actors, but it's producers, directors, casting directors,
it's show-runners, it's all of the above.
Tell us a little bit about
what you're finding through
your work in the alliance, and also with your work in "I Am PWD"
was incredible as well, what do you see as the bigger picture here?
Where should we direct out attention so that
these things
could really work?
Well I first want to say to piggy back off of something that Rick just said,
I was very struck when I was in Australia, that there is a serious lack of training
for artists with disabilities, at least that's my perception, I don't know- you can confirm that or not,
but there is no training for a person with a disability who aspires to be an actor. At least here you could find training programs, you could pursue an independent acting class.
So I was really stuck by the lack of even less access for opportunities than we have here.
I think exactly what Rick just said about where
they want to go in Australia is targeting decision makers,
is right where we are right now in the U.S.
in terms of where we need to be, in terms of targeting
the industry, and decision makers.
Particularly those people who are potential employers of performers with disabilities.
That is where we need to put our attention now. Which is the work that Danny and Anita and I would be doing on the "PWD"
Getting into a room with those decision makers and asking, what are those obstacles, the perceived obstacles that you have with working with performers with disabilities? Because up until now, we haven't been able to break through that wall.
This is just an example, there is something called the "Casting Data Report" that has been made
to count the number of people with disabilities that are on sets,
tv sets, film sets.
According to the U.S. government, there are
four protected groups,
seniors, people of color,
women, and people of disabilities.
On the "Casting Data Report,"
three of those groups appear. People with disabilities do not appear.
We've been trying for 15 plus years to get on this "Casting Data Report"
and now is the time when we're going to demand that. That's one of our biggest demands in the "PDW" task force.
It is to demand that there will be an accurate record of people with disabilities.
Then they will start to see that
we're not one half of one percent
of all
lines that are spoken
on tv, that are spoken with people with
disabilities.
One half, of one percent, according to a 2005 study,
are spoken by
people with disabilities.
Carrie, you did so well in math, why don't you tell us what that is.
Anita, I could see you
biting your bottom lip over there.
- I just wanted to say that as
of yesterday, I think it was,
or the day before,
I got an email from
the office of
Employment Accountability,
or Contract Accountability in Washington,
where employers
for government positions,
government jobs,
are now
being required,
they just got this passed,
sorry if I get this wrong,
- I could correct you, I know.
Oh, okay. It's 7%. -It's a goal.
The goal is 7% of your
hiring pool,
if you're a government contractor,
7% has to be,
should be,
the goal is to have 7% of workers with disabilities.
But what I found fascinating about this email was not the numbers
or anything, but that they used a phrase that said
those who are measured as those who work.
Something like that.
But that's what we've been saying all along.
If we're counted, then we have a statistic,
by which to say,
look at this statistic, it's poor,
and then
something
could happen.
When we are counted, we count.
Do you see what I'm saying?
And I was happy to see that,
and you know more, you're better at quoting this,
she used that language. And she
also used the language, level the playing field.
My point has always been, once we have
leveled the playing field,
actors with disabilities are auditioned,
- Once we make it accessible, well, go ahead.
- Well yes, that's literal. So physically and mentally,
we have to level the playing field,
meaning that we can all audition for a
number of roles,
whether we have disabilities or not.
Then I'm okay with who
plays what role.
What I'm not okay with is when
we have a closed door in front of us for all kinds of roles, and roles with disabilities.
If we have no hope of being seen for roles with disabilities, we have no hope of being seen for any roles.
So my feeling is,
when they use the phrase, leveling the playing field,
we are all aiming to use that same universal language,
which I see in a
positive way,
as a move towards positive change.
Also, I just want to say to Mitch,
I think there is a number of us on the panel who
have written our own shows, and have moved in the right direction because of it.
I was one of them, I wrote a musical.
I was going to say, a lot of you might be asking, why?
And one of the reasons,
believe it or not, is the Americans with Disability Act.
When we negotiate with the producers,
you don't actually sit down
with producers.
We sit down with
their lawyers.
And their lawyers are all about
wording, and semantics,
how can we not be seen?
What the ADA has allowed
people with disabilities to do is to say
I need access, I need access to employment,
I need access to everything.
And when that access is denied,
people with disabilities have the legal right to sue.
So their fear is that the use of this
"Casting Data Report"
could be used for litigation, so that's
why they don't count us.
So what we are trying to do is
obviously we count ourselves,
we try to get around that, and present that,
and the more opportunities we get to be in a room with them,
with the lawyers and the producers, the more
opportunities, I think, we're able make.
And counting ourselves is so important.
We counted for them, we counted.
We gave them the numbers and then
they put it out there with their numbers.
The Glat study is where we are on TV.
Gay, Lesbian, Attribute Team presence on TV.
They included people with color, women, seniors
in the past,
but as of last year,
2010, they came to us
during our campaign,
and said, we want to include you.
And that's when we got numbers.
And that's the first place that we've been counted.
The Hollywood Reporter, Backstage, The LA Times, all
picked up on that.
Suddenly, hooray! Our numbers are out there.
And that's what matters.
Interestingly enough,
senior citizens are not suing Hollywood.
Isn't that interesting?
Because they were identified as senior citizens.
Beth, from the National Endowment of the Arts-
I just wanted to read everyone a sample, The National Endowment of the Arts is very
committed to employing people with disabilities to the arts. We've held a couple of
summits in the last couple of decades on employment of people with disabilities.
Careers in the arts for people with disabilities.
And this is the non profit sector as well
as being a public sector
where Broadway and Hollywood exist.
I actually came from the labor
department
which collects a lot of these statistics
on employing people with disabilities.
I just want to clarify what Anita was talking about,
about federal contractors having goals in hiring,
it hasn't been set yet,
but we hope that it will pass.
I just want to say that we
are committed to working on this.
Our requirements are that
art organizations have to be accessible for anyone with disability,
and that includes employment.
We are behind this.
Just let us know if there is anything that we could do to help.
What I would like to do now,
because I know we're running short on time, is
take a couple of questions.
Sydney here in the front, author, filmmaker herself.
Thank you all, this has been very interesting.
There has been a lot of focus on actors,
as there rightfully should be, and some on filmmaking,
but I wonder if we could also
look forward to thinking
about production on films
that not only look at the lived experience
of people with disabilities,
but open up the
whole topic
of ableism.
You said that "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" had a profound effect on you
because it opened up racism for you
and for the public. Although there have been wonderful
examples of films,
and horrible examples of films,
that look at the lived experience of individual conditions,
if we are going to move to certain
justice issues, and to transformation,
it seems to me that we have to
conceptualize
films and other artistic productions
that open up ablism. Where do you see
that happening? Who is talking about it?
Anyone in Hollywood? Anyone who is producing?
I'm curious about your perspective.
There were a few films actually that came up this year,
that we weren't able to put in the festival, and one of them, Itsy, sorry, Issac,
was it "The While Balloon?" that we weren't able to put
in the festival,
because it was already being distributed.
- It was already out.
So legally we couldn't.
But I think that was a pretty good example of ablism, wouldn't you think so?
The way that people responded to the characters, we started to see...
- Actually, could you define, Sydney, what ablism is?
There are a number of different ways to talk about ablism, but one of them is to
raise awareness to racism, to sexism, and to think
the way that antipathy towards another group
from the dominant group
produces
discrimination,
produces
alienation
among groups.
I also like to think about,
to use the terms
homophobic and heterosexism
as two sides
of a coin.
Where heterosexism
is the sort of centering of heterosexuality
as the normative,
and homosexuality
which is a quaint term, but let it go for now,
as the "othering". But there is also homophobia, which is
hatred and antipathy, and I think
both are operative in ablism and
I think that they both have to be understood.
I'd like to also say that "Body and Soul" is one of the films that we have in the festival has a fastinating
study of ableism. An example, is in Mozambique, Africa,
I've been speaking at a number of screenings for that,
it's a fascinating example of that, it's a documentary
and the audiences response to it is fantastic.
Because it really does show about the real life, every day
what happens if you get out there,
if you're an entrepreneur, if you work in a shoe shop,
if you're a dancer,
if you just want to get on a bus,
and in Mozambique,
they really will go without you.
And I'm not saying that
it covers everything,
but I think that we have more than one film
in this festival about ablism.
Can I say something?
I like the term ablism.
I've been disabled for almost 30 years and I've never heard the term.
But I heard it here tonight. And that's because this festival is here tonight,
for me to come here, and keep learning. I think that there is something that I want to say,
about being more proactive, a little angrier with the powers that be.
When something happens that's as insulting
as what happened with "Tropic Thunder,"
some people don't really realize what the
problem was.
It's not Ben Stiller pretending
to be disabled,
it's the fact that Paramore
and Dreamworks
were allowing the word retard to be used in their ad campaigns.
Not in PG movies. You go to PG movies, you see the preview for
Tropic Thunder in a PG movie, they don't use the word retard.
They only use it in R rated movies.
Now.
Who is deciding to making fun of us
to the older population,
where it's funny.
We're going to make money,
off of this word, retard.
And they did make money. Let me just finish.
What happened was that there was this incredible reaction
and it was in the paper every day for over three weeks.
I was part of the strategy meeting before going in to meet with Stacey Snider,
and I'm a name dropper, good and bad,
and she's bad.
And what she said was, well
if you're going to demonstrate
across the street from our premiere,
have some civility.
We hope you're civil.
- Ohhhhhh. Yes, that's what she said.
And I still haven't heard anything from Mr. Spielberg about the incident, not one word.
So I don't have a problem boycotting people,
networks
and studios.
I don't have a problem picketing.
I wanted the actors
to go on strike,
but they didn't
because the writers went on strike first.
See, so it's like,
let's get a little tougher.
Let's talk about our
economic power,
our collective power.
And not just the numbers.
Let's make, I'll be the first on line.
I'm desperate for attention.
But let's make the point that we're freakin' pissed.
And that that we've got money to spend,
and we won't spend it on you.
Once they realize that, then
all of a sudden,
it's like the bottom line money thing
is what we will represent to them.
And we've never represented anything
except somebody to kick around and make fun of,
and when they realize that we're going
to boycott your ***,
and we're going to kick your *** in the parking lot when you come out of that meeting,
cause we know what car you drive.
Your name is on the license plate!
Don't be nervous about being angry.
I never got angry. Cause my father was so angry and I didn't want to be like him,
I love the guy.
And now I'm like him.
I'm like oh my god, I'm like him.
We're so, I don't want to
say passive in a bad way,
we're at peace, disabled people
with ourselves for the most part.
We love ourselves.
Okay, so that is
maybe part of writing our own projects, showing
people that we love ourselves.
And how insane it is to make fun of this group of people.
But they still make fun of us
because they think that they can get away with it and they have
been able to. But this is going to change.
And I'm excited to be part of it.
It's the first time I've heard the word ablism as well.
Thinking about it, I think I've always had an awareness of it,
not necessarily put into words quite the same way,
But I know that the
world will not accept
a Caucasian actor
portraying an African American.
I mean, we will not accept that.
We would call it "black face," that's what we would say.
But at the same time we are okay with
an able body actor portraying
a person with a disability.
We over look it completely,
we are okay with it.
We'll reward it.
We'll give an Academy Award for that person.
It came to life for me, because I am self centered, I'm an actor, I only think about myself,
it came to light for me
when "The Lord of The Rings"
was casting.
In the breakdown, and I have it, it said
that they had a height requirement
for the roles of the hobbits.
And as I remember it was 5'6 - 5'9 but they were going to shrink down all these actors.
And it said, literarily, no little people, in the breakdown.
So I wrote to Peter Jackson,
and I said, you know,
in reading this,
you have this ultimatum,
I guess that's not
quite the word I'm looking for,
but
it works.