Organizer’s Forum Topic: Disability Portrayal in the Media
We will hear from speakers and discuss this topic on October 15, 2013. Please join us!
From casting non-disabled actors to play a disabled character and linking bitter villains to a physical disability, to pigeon holing disabled characters within a heroic or pitiful frame of reference, disability portrayal in Hollywood and popular culture has often misrepresented the at-large disability community. Though realistic disability portrayals exist, the media, popular culture, and Hollywood continue to pose barriers to inclusion by reinforcing disability stigma. Members of Little People of America will give a brief presentation on dwarfism in the media and popular culture as a launching pad for a broader discussion on disability, media, and popular culture. In addition to the Little People of America Members, experts in the field of media and disability have been invited to present for the Organizers Forum.
Speakers
- Leah Smith, Public Relations Director, Little People of America (LPA)
- Special Project Coordinator, LIFE/RUN Center for Independent Living
- Michelle Krauss, Advocacy Director, LPA
- Intake Coordinator – Disability Justice Program
- Gary Arnold, President, LPA
- Public Relations Coordinator, Access Living
- Lawrence Carter Long, Public Affairs Specialist
- National Council on Disability
- Tari Hartman Squire, CEO
- EIN SOF Communications, Inc.
- Disability-Inclusive Diversity
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1-2 pm Eastern time, 12-1 Central time, 11-12 Mountain time, 10-11 am Pacific time
- Call in number: 1-213-342-3000
- Code: 193134#
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Background
The Organizing Workgroup of the National Disability Leadership Alliance hosts these calls the third Tuesday of every month as a resource for disability organizers, in an effort toward building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country. They generally follow the format of a Welcome followed by 2-3 experts in a given area speaking for a few minutes on their experiences, advice and challenges. The calls include a 20-30 minute question and answer period.
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- Say your name before each time you speak
- Speak one at a time
- Speak slowly and as clearly as possible
So you can mark your calendars now, Organizer’s Forums are held on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. If you have suggestions for call topics or presenters for upcoming topics, please email them to jlehman7@gmail.com or dcoleman@cdrnys.org.
Looking forward to talking with you all!
Date: 10/15/2013
Event: NDLA Organizer’s Forum
Topic: Disability Portrayal in the Media
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> Hi, this is Candace Gable from Truckee, California and I work with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.
>> This is Rianna Gross from the American Association of People with Disabilities.
>> Jessica: So I’m realizing it actually is after the hour so we’ll go ahead and do more formal introductions in just a second but for those of you that are on already, we also have a spreadsheet where you can go on and kind of register so we can keep track of who is here so if you haven’t done that yet, please go ahead and go into the e mail about this call and just click on it’s a Google doc so you can just click there and enter your information as well.
And actually yeah, I’ll give people a couple minutes to get on before we start talking about what today’s call is so we can do some more introductions. Let’s start with the West Coast, which is usually a little smaller so folks from the West Coast, go ahead and introduce yourself.
>> Diane Coleman, sorry, just joining.
>> Diane, are you on the chat today, by the way?
>> Yes, I am.
>> Great, thank you.
>> Boris.
>> What was that? Who was that?
>> (Indiscernible).
>> Can you hear me?
>> I didn’t totally catch that but if you can register online as well, that would be great.
>> I can’t find the place to register online.
>> Did you get the e mail announcing this call?
>> Um, no, someone else had told me to take the call. RVSA representative in Arizona but so I didn’t get an e mail about it.
>> Oh, okay. So if you want to be connected and you don’t have the e mail you can also just e mail me directly and I’m Jessica Lehman and my e mail is
>> Okay.
>> I’m hearing a lot of background noise. If you have noise in the background, if you can hit star six to mute yourself, that would be great.
>> Okay, what is your e mail again?
>> My e mail is JLehman.
>> JLayman, L A Y M A N?
>> L E H M A N, JLehman7@gmail.com. Back to introductions. We’ll expand to anybody from the west more broadly. Oh, my gosh, we’re missing an entire half of the country. What are we doing?
>> Who do we have from the Midwest?
>> Gary Arnold, Access Living and LPA.
>> Great.
>> What about the south?
>> it’s in St. Charles, Missouri.
>> Oh, great.
>> How about the south, all the way down to Florida if that counts as the south?
>> Mark Johnson.
>> Jessica: Hi Mark.
>> Hey.
>> Jessica: How about is it the Mid Atlantic region, is that what we call it, going up on the East Coast?
>> This is Lawrence Carter Long, Washington, D.C.
>> Jessica: Yea, glad you’re here, Lawrence.
>> How about the rest of the East Coast?
>> This is Kristen.
>> Jessica: I heard Kristen first from where?
>> EINSOS Communication.
>> Jessica: Oh, great. And there was someone else there.
>> Brad Williams.
>> Jessica: Brad, where are you from?
>> New York State Independent Living Council.
>> Jessica: Oh, great.
>> Michelle Krauss from LPA and New York Lawyers From the Public Interest.
>> Jessica: Great. Any other New Yorkers on?
>> Dave from Center for Disability in Rochester.
>> Jessica: Great. And anybody else on the call who hasn’t introduced themselves yet?
>> This is Brianna Gross from the American Association of People with Disabilities.
>> Jessica: Great. And I guess that does it. All right. Oh, we are late. We had a lot of people introducing themselves. That was wonderful. So I’m going to move this along. So again, my name is Jessica Lehman and I’m one of the co chairs for the Organizer’s Forum along with Diane Coleman from New York, and Diana is with Not Dead Yet which is a project of the National Disability Leadership Alliance which is a national cross disability coalition. And the Organizer’s Forum is really about building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country so we do a call every month and we focus a lot on different community organizing skills as far as how are we getting people and keeping people involved in disability activism, how are we really building a movement, how are we developing leaders and how are we connecting with different communities within the disability community. So we have shifted to a format where every other month our call is hosted by a different organization that’s on the steering committee for the National Disability Leadership Alliance so we’re delighted that Little People of America has volunteered to lead this month’s call on disability portrayal in the media. Before I turn it over to them, a couple other things. So the focus on the Organizer’s Forum are these monthly calls and it’s always on the third Tuesday of the month at the same time so please go ahead and kind of have that date in on your calendars. We would always love to have you join us. We are always looking for ideas for a new topic so if you do have ideas, please let me know. This call is captioned to make it accessible so the website is in the e mail that went out. Please log on and you can type questions there and then Diane Coleman is on that page and so she can read those questions on the call.
Please remember to speak slowly and clearly.
>> Sorry, this is Diane. There were a couple people that were signing on or answering your question about who was on through the CART and so I wanted to just mention.
>> Jessica: I’m sorry.
>> Diane: No, it’s my fault. But Paula Durbin Westby came on that way and she encourages as you have that people definitely identify themselves before speaking so that the captioner can get that information. In addition, Keith Murfee DiConcini from Tucson, Arizona signed on so we do have somebody out west so I just wanted to add that. Thanks a lot.
>> Jessica: Thank you, Diane.
>> This is AJ French with Sacred Creations. I had trouble logging on for some reason but I am on the line.
>> Jessica: Thank you. Thanks for joining us. So we discovered that a one hour a month call, not surprisingly, is not enough to really delve into a lot of the disability organizing so we are trying to build some ongoing discussion. We have a Facebook page now, just Organizer’s Forum and we also have a lister which is Organizer’s Forum at YahooGroups.com so if you’re not on those groups, please do join. We do invite people after the call to go ahead and post thoughts, post questions, you know, any kind of thoughts that are in your head from the call of something that stood out to you or a question that you may have. Go ahead and post that on the ListServer on the Facebook so we can continue the discussion that way. And we also have a website, huge thanks to center for disability rights and Kristen who has helped accept up the Organizer’s Forum page on the NDLA website so it’s www.disabilityleadership.org and we now on that page have posted all the information about the calls for each month and we have recordings and transcripts that will be on that website so if you’ve missed a call or you want to pass it onto somebody else or you’re trying to find out about the next call, please check out that website and you can get some more information.
I’m going to mute everyone in just a moment and then you can always hit star six to un mute yourself. We will have some Q&A at the end of the call so you can un mute yourselves then. We do ask people in general to stay muted and please whatever you do, make sure you don’t put us on hold. We’ve had some problems withhold music playing and we can’t hear over it so if you need to step away, just hang up and you can always call right back.
I think that pretty much covers it. I always ask Diane to remind me what I forgot. Did I miss anything, Diane?
>> Diane: Not that I can say. In addition another person just signed onto the cart and that’s Jenovesia Porteo. She didn’t mention what part of the country she’s on.
>> Jessica: We’re going to stop taking introductions now because we’re going to move on. I’m going to go ahead and mute everyone so hold on one second.
Okay, I’m sorry. It always takes me a minute to figure out the technicalities of this call. So everyone should be muted. I’ll invite our presenters to go ahead and hit star six to un mute yourselves and at this point I’m going to turn it over to Gary Arnold, the president of Little People of America to go ahead and introduce today’s call.
>> Gary: Hi everyone. Thank you so much, Jessica. And thanks to Jessica and Diane for organizing these calls each month. My name’s Gary, Gary Arnold. I am the president of Little People of America and I’m the public relations coordinator for Access Living and Little People of America is a member of the steering committee for the National Disability Leadership Alliance. And as a member I really wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to have a discussion during the Organizer’s Forum and focus on media portrayal and kind of all sorts of issues that go with that for Little People of America, a lot of our external work is really around portrayal issues. Unlike in my work at Access Living, I never have to worry about with LPA getting exposure in the media but oftentimes that exposure isn’t the type that we’re really looking for.
So I wanted to have this call to really kind of talk specifically about Little People of America’s work around media and awareness outreach but kind of put that in the context within a larger disability community frame context and, you know, bring in other issues along with it. So for this call Tari Hartman Squire is going to give some historical background on this issue and then we’re going to go specifically into some of LPA’s work, Leah Smith, the public relations director for Little People of America is going to talk a little bit about our work and our outreach effort and then Michelle Krauss, the advocacy director for Little People of America is going to talk about a specific campaign that we are working on and depending on the strategy that we develop and that we choose to take, we may be asking all of your help within a couple of months on that campaign. And then after that Lawrence Carter Long who is joining us today in his private capacity as an expert on these issues will be kind of following up on that, talking about some current issues in terms of portrayal and media and disability and then we’ll open it up for a conversation and a discussion so we’ll try to move it along so that we have plenty of time for questions and answers but at this point I think I’m going to turn it over to Tari Hartman Squire. Are you there?
>> Tari: Thanks, Gary. Can you hear me okay?
>> Gary: I can hear you.
>> Tari: Thanks a lot and for Julie, thank you for the subject which I think is really important and I’m going to ask Lawrence as a private citizen to chime in on history and background and then we’ll go through some current events later in the call. In the mid 1970s California Governors on Employment Disabilities wanted to look at disability in the media as a draw they thought that Norman Leer would be an excellent draw and people with disabilities said, you know, you always come to us for questions but then you do whatever the hell you want to do and you don’t show our portrayals as accurate and so Norman came to this event and his publicist said, well, you are going to give him an award, aren’t you? They said of course we going to give you an award. That was the accidental birth of the (indiscernible) awards of which the next one will be this Thursday. They were concerned awards are fine but there needs to be a presence in Hollywood that would work very closely with the networks, studios, the content creators and to look at media advocacy so we started the media access office and there was a convergence of efforts in the late 70s and early 90s. Actors with Disabilities had already experienced discrimination like Alan Toy, Zena Rubenstein and Lynda Boge (sp) and they were organizing in New York items on discrimination in the casting process and together we all formed the committees of disabilities and the Screen Actors Guild in 1979. In 1980 there was a strike that shut down Hollywood with the writers, actors, producers, the musicians and the directors.
As a result of the advocacy that was going on at the time, the collective bargaining agreements in 1980 which was a full decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act for the first time included disability in the affirmative action and non discrimination clause so we had a platform from which to organize. So the media office started in 1980 after that round of strikes and we wanted to deconstruct the pushback and the myths and stereotypes to shatter myths about disability and to increase employment in front of the camera and behind the scenes. We set up a casting clearinghouse for Actors with Disabilities, an Advisory Committee, talent showcases to prove that performers and musicians and writers and directors have the jobs and we continued with the awards. The casting clearinghouse we all cringed around when the Christmas commercials were being shot because that was really the only time people were requesting little people, for dwarfs in commercials and it was pretty awful.
But the media advocacy part of it was very important because we brought in people with disabilities and there were some events that happened in the mid 80s, Elizabeth Buvia (sp) was a woman with disability and she wanted to commit suicide so this was the first time that a lot of us organize in LA to try and reframe the debate with the press, Paul Longmore, Kara Gill, Barbara Waxman, we all went down to the courthouse media to tell the real story about disability. And Brian, I don’t remember whether you were in LA at the time but those efforts that preceded then with Larry and on to Bri (indiscernible) with the FCC complaints so we were a lot of media advocacy and organizing with the context that people with disability should be telling their own stories. So that was a lot of the early groundwork and history in Hollywood and people with disabilities organizing to tell their own stories.
Lawrence, do you have anything to add to that time? There was actually one more beep and that was with the telethon that Chris Masters and his sister had organized Jerry’s Orphans and in the mid 80s there was a lot of protest against the Jerry Lewis Telethon. And ironically, the telethon was started by Leonard Goldmanson who had founded ABC broadcasting because when he went on vacation his daughter had CP and they were turned away from going to hotels and restaurants and his original idea was to glamorize it and then there were the subsequent protests by people with disabilities. So I’ll turn it back over to Gary.
>> Gary: All right, thanks. And this is Gary again from LPA speaking and just a reminder to all the speakers in order to un mute yourself, hit star six and always try to identify yourself before speaking for the CART and captioning. Just a little addendum to Tari’s talk there, Jerry’s Orphans, the other person is Mike Irvin. I want to give him a shout out since he’s a fellow Chicagoan with me now. He’s done a lot of great work around the telethon and Jerry’s Orphans. At this point I want to go into specifics right now with Little People of America and their work and for that I’m going to turn it over first to Leah Smith, our director of public relations for LPA. Leah, go ahead.
>> Leah: Hi, this is Leah. And like Gary said, I’m the director of public relations for LPA and just to go off of what Tari was saying, kind of our background with media is we’ve always faced stereotypes of what it is to be a little person. We’re constantly facing L’s and that kind of stereotype. Every year at our national conference I always have someone from media come to me and ask which munchkin they can talk to so it’s always frustrating. In the media some of you will remember Snow White and the Huntsman which was an example of one instance. They used non LPs, little people, I’m sorry. In tradition I guess you could say LP roles and so that was kind of problematic. It was also sensationism and stereotypical roles. They were dwarfs and, you know, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs role.
Another example is with the Huffington Post we have a really great working relationship with the Huffington Post and I always feel like they really get it when I talk to the need I can’t with them and if whatever campaign we’re on, I feel like they get it and they understand and then they put us in under the weird section and so that just takes away anything that we’re pushing for just because it’s in that section and we’ve really tried to advocate to get out of that section and just haven’t been able to do that. However, there’s some really good examples of media in pop culture right now. Peter [NAME], I don’t know how many of you are familiar with that but he plays a really strong character with that. That is little but that’s not the main focus. He is a flawed character but so is everyone else on that show so that makes it all the more brilliant. He was also the first little person to win an Emmy. Another example right now is [NAME] he is performing with Miley Cyrus actually as just a band member. He plays the guitar. He was recently on SNL and the Ellen DeGeneres show. There’s really nothing other about him that’s specific other than he’s showing his talent as being a guitar player.
Another example is Meredith Eaton. She was on Law & Order. As an actress she refused to take any roles that were specific to her being little. She wanted to play only roles that were just everyday people so she played a lawyer who happened to be little. So those are just some examples right now of good things we’re trying to combat, some of the stereotypes that we faced. We’re really trying to combat these things through our Dwarfism Awareness Month and that is actually this month and so that’s our month to try to really get it out in the media of what we’re doing and what we’re fighting I should say.
>> Gary: Okay. Thank you so much, Leah. Before I turn over to Michelle, I just want to backtrack a little bit on a few things that Leah said. I’m glad that Snow White and the Huntsman was brought up because I think that kind of resonates in a larger context right now with the disability community. I’m sure many of you know about the reemergence of the Ironside network show, prime time show in which they cast a nondisabled person to play the role of a wheelchair user. She cast Blair Underwood and that’s been kind of an ongoing issue within the disability community of casting nondisabled people to play the roles of people with disabilities. And up until the time technology started to advance, little people didn’t really have that issue because they obviously had to cast a little person to play a little person but now with computer technology there is the option to cast average stature actors which happened with Snow White and the Huntsman but the interesting thing about that was even though they’re casting non little people to play that, it still wasn’t really roles that we were too excited about, as Leah mentioned, because they were kind of these traditional, fantastical roles, stereotypical roles of little people and so we were actually approached for comment on it and we knew it was kind of a no win situation so we ended up sending back this very, very generic statement that didn’t mention Snow White and the Huntsman at all and didn’t mention, you know, the issue at all but kind of just the generic statement about casting and the headline of the story that ran with a partial statement was something like, you know, Little People of America pissed off about Snow White and the Huntsman, something like that. And we ended up getting you know, our phones ringing off the hook, every radio station and so forth wanted to get comment on further comment on that. And then the same thing with Miley Cyrus. In addition to Frankie performing with a group of non LP musicians and some of Miley Cyrus’ music she sometimes uses a backup band made up of only little people. Some people said is that objectification, is she doing it for effect. So we know it’s a lose/lose so we’re staying away from that. But right now I want to turn it over to Michelle Krauss, our director of advocacy, to talk a little bit about a specific campaign that we’re kind of working behind the scenes now but at some point we may go forward with a public campaign on so Michelle, you can take it away.
>> Michelle: Thank you, Gary. My name is Michelle Krauss. I work at New York lawyers for the public interest which is a production advocacy office for people with disabilities as well as being a newly appointed advocacy director for Little People of America so I wanted to talk with you about a movie called that that is coming out called the Wolf of Wall Street. One of our LPA members called our attention to it. It’s being advertised as a blockbuster film. It’s right now scheduled to come out in December we think, although there have been rumors maybe later, maybe earlier. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is directed by Martin Scorsese. The story is based on [NAME] who started a brokerage firm in the 1990s which served as I guess their boiler room where they were doing fraudulent stock selling and trading, I don’t know. I’m not so familiar with that lingo but and also the movie shows that in this office there’s a lot of partying going on and partying going outside using the money in a very decadent way. So in the trailer for the movie there is a scene where a person with dwarfism is being thrown by two people. One of them is Leonardo DiCaprio and he’s being thrown towards a dart board and there is accompanying sound where someone is explaining to Leo and his cronies about how it works and says, quote, this is their gift. They are built to be thrown like a lawn dart. And then Leonardo adds, safety first, we don’t want to get a bad reputation. And this, you know, was really I mean, not that context would help but with no context, certainly I think that’s the community it’s an extremely dehumanizing portrayal and it certainly perpetuates the stereotype of LPs being less than a human being and shows that what we’re good for is being thrown, even more debasing than what we are typically shown to be good for, which is assisting Santa as an elf or being the lucky charm on St. Patrick’s Day so clearly this is a very dangerous message for us to allow to be broadcast. So the advocacy committee has come together and basically our objectives are to get this thing out of the to get the scene out of the trailer and certainly the movie. We tried to contact both DiCaprio’s production company and Scorsese. We thought we could appeal to them from a more humanistic point. We thought they would be concerned about their financial. We didn’t get a response back from the production companies so we immediately went to our next strategy which was to write a letter requesting the studio to take out the scene, explaining why it can be harmful even if the portrayal of the main character is meant to be farcical and a joke. Harmful because certainly this characterization and the potential to motivate serious bodily injury of the dwarfism community, meaning that, you know, showing that this is like an event, an activity, a sport that, you know, people the people in the scene look like they’re having a whole lot of fun with. We have about 20 national and local organizations signing on the letter which include the (indiscernible) organization and basically signing on to show support to our request and basically I think really major disagreement with having this scene in the movie and in the trailer. So that’s where we are and we’re hoping
>> I would like to speak.
>> What studio is it?
>> Hello.
>> Gary: This is Gary speaking. It’s Paramount Pictures. And for the person who wants to speak, if you could hold off on your questions just a few more minutes, we have one more piece of the agenda and then we’re going to open it up for Q&A and for discussion. Go ahead, Michelle.
>> Michelle: Sorry. I’m actually done.
>> Gary: Thank you. This is Gary again speaking and it’s echoing a little bit of what Michelle said. I want to thank the support we’ve gotten from some of the organizations that are on this call today, kind of similar to the Snow White and the Huntsman and the Miley Cyrus, this is going to be a tough one when it plays out in the media, if it does. I think our thought is that we’re going to keep it as an inside game until A, either the movie is released to the public and then or B, we are our request for an advanced screening of the movie is granted and so we’re able to see the full movie and put the scene in the context of the full movie. At this point I think we’ll just be doing outreach and awareness to try and put pressure on the studio to not do something like that in the future and perhaps cut that scene for DVD release or things like that. But we know it’s going to be an uphill battle. We’ve got a few things going against us and that is this is kind of a historical representation of something that actually happened and B, usually typically with us, whenever we try to raise awareness about roles that might dehumanize people with a small stature, dehumanize the fact that people chose to take the role so what are you going to do.
So at this point, Lawrence Carter Long, I want to invite Lawrence to join the discussion and Tari to chime in at this point too. If you could kind of put it into put the contrary media issues in the context of the larger disability community, what are some trends you see now or what are some other issues happening in media, popular culture portrayal and disability these days.
>> Tari: This is Tari. Lawrence, are you there? Gary, do you want me to start until Lawrence gets online?
>> Gary: Yeah sure, go ahead.
>> Tari: Okay. Thanks Michelle for sharing that. I think they’re some good examples of media advocacy around portrayals. In the 1990s, Calendar Girl was a movie that Penny Marshall did. There were two roles for deaf actors that were not auditioned for the role and NAD launched a campaign and protest the opening weekend in about five or six key cities that got picked up by The Washington Post. I think that you can request to see the scene. We did that with monkey shines with Orion in the mid 80s where a monkey was playing a PCA and it was just a ghastly portrayal. So there are opportunities that you can have to go and see it because it does affect a constituencies of little people and yes, they will tell you about the historic representation and creative license. But I think you do have some opportunities. Gary, you’re right, with home entertainment DVD that’s done, they are experiences that announcements or disability awareness, what amounts to like a PSA have been done and there might be something that can be done in the credits.
As far as trending goes, the media access office unfortunately was closed by the state of California last year and the actors with disabilities were very upset because that was our basic casting clearing house. So what happened was we took our power back. We organized, in collaboration with some very powerful alleys. The casting society of America does the majority of casting for division and film and they approached an organization called breakdown services which basically breaks down each script and each character in every script and sends it to the casting directors and the agents to submit the performers for the roles. So what happened now is that on June 28th, assistant secretary Martinez flew to LA to launch the Actors Access Database that was in existence but now we have an opt in menu for performers with disabilities to self identify whether they’re a wheelchair user or you have a mobility disability or you’re deaf or hard of hearing or a signer or a B K and K amputee and there are now 1,667 performers with disabilities that have self identified as having a disability so we want to encourage number one everybody who knows performers to and I can send the information to Diane and Jessica after this call but if you are an actor or know an actor then you might want to register on this actor’s access and it’s free and it gives you the opportunity. And the best spatter that the casting directors will no longer have an excuse to say I don’t know where to find actuators with disabilities because this actor’s access breaks down service, something that they visit every single day as one of their primary tools so we’re very hopeful about that.
Also we’re seeing an upcrease in people with disabilities and filmmakers telling their own stories. We hope you have seen Cinemamobility by Jerry Dance and Invitation to Gold by Cindy Lipton so we’re hoping that people with disabilities will do not tell their own stories in front of the camera and behind the camera as well. So I hope, Lawrence, you are back online. If not then there’s two more beeps. One would be
>> Jessica: This is Jessica. Sorry, Terry, this is Jessica. It sounds like Lawrence is having trouble un muting so I can un mute everyone so we can hear him or if you want to go on, we can do that too.
>> Tari: Great.
>> Jessica: Okay, hold on. Let me try that. One second.
>> Lawrence: Hello. Can folks hear me now?
>> Jessica: Yes, everyone’s un muted now. I would ask people that are not sorry, Lawrence, this is Jessica. For people that are not speaking, for all of our non presenters if you don’t mind hitting star six to mute yourself, especially if you have any background noise, that would be great.
>> Lawrence: Sorry, folks, I’ve been fight, the phone for the past ten minutes here. Thank you for that background. I also wanted to say that, you know, disabled people organizing against portrayals that we haven’t liked is not anything new. You know, back in 1997, groups like NFD were protesting Leslie Nielsen in a live action version of Mr. Magoo that got a lot of attention and essentially the movie didn’t get any box office. One because it was a bad movie and two because of the protests. That didn’t help at all. In 2008 the Tropic Thunder protest led largely by folks with intellectual disabilities and the disability community at large coming together because of the portrayal of a character named Simple Jack portrayed by Ben Stiller in a movie that was supposed to be a spoof of Platoon and spoofing Hollywood in general and Hollywood’s depiction of disability but because it didn’t involve any input of people with disabilities, they got it all wrong and led to dozens of protests and unprecedented media attention.
I think one of the things that has really helped galvanize these types of efforts if you put it in a historical context is that folks with disabilities have been starting to take it back and doing these issues for ourselves and doing events for ourselves so we create the event, we frame the event, we kind of pitch the event as we want it. You know, for decades now, Super 50 has been doing a disability film festival celebrating interesting portrayals of disability in the Bay area. They’ve just launched over the past weekend after a brief hiatus and I was out there emceeing something called the Dissies where we were poking fun at the worst depictions in cinema. It was sold out. We’ve got festivals like Cinema Touching Disability down in Texas, events in Chicago and Buffalo. We had the Dis This event in New York City which I where I came into the movement and that was a six month movement that lasted four years because they wouldn’t let it stop. And then a (indiscernible) and no heroism required so trying to take the notions that people thought they already understood about disability and reframing them and turning them on their head and being edgy and kind of in your face about it.
You know, when you look at current issues and current trends, certainly I think the two things we have to keep coming back to are script and captions. I don’t know how you can divorce the two from each other. So if you’ve got a as I think Gary has said, if you’ve got a disabled actor in a script where the depiction is bad, nobody is helped. If you’ve got a nondisabled actor in a piece where the script is good, you’ve not gone far enough so I think those issues are always intertwined and we have to be very mindful of them in anything that we do.
I also think that when it comes to talking about current issues we have to be very careful and that’s why I’m pleased to hear the approach that LPA is take, the Wolf of Wall Street is that we keep the thing in context. You lose all credibility if you haven’t seen the film yet and, you know, people have to keep in mind that this film is all about excess. It’s about decadence, it’s about spectacle. It epitomizes the corruption of the American dream is what this movie is supposed to do so when we’re talking about it we have to be very careful I think to keep the comments along line with what we want to say, our message but in context. So saying things like behind the glitz and glamor, you can’t forget that exploitation is inherent and it’s the hidden ingredient to the kind of excess depicted in the film. Whether it was cheating investors out of $200 million or sinking a yacht, the characters in the movie care nothing about themselves. There is nothing socially, morally or fiscally redeeming about them. Any way you try to spin it, the movie puts little people on a cart with chimpanzees which is also in the movie because everyone in the universe is viewed as nothing more than this character, DiCaprio’s character’s personal play thing. I think the point we have to make is that hopefully as a society we’ve moved on from that kind of thinking and that kind of portrayal as well. The key point is that we’re supposed to find DiCaprio’s character repugnant and if the movie works, viewers will leave the theatre thinking dwarfism is repugnant too. If they don’t then we fail and they might even be (indiscernible) that DiCaprio’s character is supposed to be warning us about. So I think if we can use the movie’s own message to pit it against itself, that’s going to make the most sense in terms of the viewer and indeed especially in the news media as we’re talking about it because we’re using the movie’s own message to say look, you didn’t even follow your own rule in getting this across. Any of these issues can serve as a lightning rod. You know, when we look at current issues, we’ve still got less than one half of 1 percent of the (indiscernible) on division that are spoken by a person with a disability. Now, we see some growth in the sort of network TV. NBC this year has five regular characters with disabilities, three of them being leads. We’ve got Ironside which we talked about before. We’re just talking about characters here but the Michael J. Fox show, we’ve got a person with a disability. On Parenthood you’ve got a character with breast cancer and another who has Asperger’s Syndrome and on Growing Up Fisher the dad is blind. You’ve also got situations where you’ve got an actor with a disability like [NAME] who plays Brick in the middle where the disability isn’t even mentioned so, you know, there’s certainly room for improvement. Cable is doing a great job. You look at HBO with Game of Thrones and with Life’s Too Short but we have to really always push them to say that, you know, having eight characters with a disability in the season isn’t enough if we’ve got one in five people with disabilities in the United States we’ve got to be representative of the society at large.
>> Gary: Great, Lawrence. Thank you so much. This is Gary again speaking. I think I’m going cut off the presentations at this point. I think we’ve only got ten minutes left so in that time we have available I mean there’s plenty that we weren’t able to get to on this call. A lot’s been going on in the area of mental health and portrayal and popular culture with the 60 Minutes story from a few weeks ago and all kinds of linkages through the media between erroneous linkages between mental illness and violence. There’s all kinds of stuff we didn’t get to but in the remaining time I want to open it up for a few questions or comments so I think now if you have a question you have to star six yourself then announce yourself and go ahead and make your comment or ask your question.
>> Diane: This is Diane. I’ve got a comment on the CART coming in from Paula Durbin Westby. Paula, if you could share your experience which I was very interested to read separately at another point so I think it’s another angle people would want to hear. Paula.
>> Paula: Okay. Can you hear me? I was interviewed for what was a documentary which is maybe a little different than what you’re talking about but it might as well have been Hollywood because there was such a complete distortion of my material and I have an interview that I’ve done as well as some other things that I’ve written about that experience which was somewhat traumatizing. And I put a link to that in the chat room and you can also go to thinking autism guide.com or you can go to my blog and see more about my experience with that film. And I don’t want to take up too much time here but just to make you aware of the article is on autism, media and misrepresentation and interviews a couple of other people who have had this kind of experience to this so called factual film. Thank you.
>> Gary: Thank you, Paula, so much. Anyone else with a question or a comment?
>> Yes. I’m Patricia Edwards. Anybody listening?
>> Gary: Yes, go ahead.
>> Go ahead.
>> I was about 30 years ago in a movie with a bit part with Betty Davis as the star called Skyward directed by Ron Howard and there was this costar was a woman in a wheelchair and I heard the people, the professional actuators and the staff talking about how capable and easily directed and right on she was as an actor but I’ve never seen as an actor but I’ve never seen or heard anything else. It was okay to play a disabled person that was overcoming her fear and her stereotype, which was a good thing, but for other roles and the professionals thought she was great. Just thought I would throw that in. Skyward was a good movie.
>> It’s really interesting they point that out. Sometimes it’s easy to kind of think that all of this is relatively new but even as, you know, we did a history of disability and cinema on Turner classic movies last year, a year ago October and we reached 87 million households with that. We showed 21 films from the silent era up to the time the ADA was passed, which was 1990. And there was a film in 1948 called sign of the ram starring a woman named Susan Peters who was an actor who became disabled and a wheelchair user as a result of a gunshot accident. The studio liked her so much that they liked the they got the rights to the rights to the role and they developed a movie in 1948 so we know if they did do that back then they can do it now and that’s why it’s important for us to keep the pressure on.
>> Tari: And this is Tari. That was Suzie Gilstrap, the actress in Skyward and yes, it was one of the early organized effort of including performers with disabilities.
>> Has she done anything else?
>> Tari: Not that I’m aware of. This is Tari. So I can look that up and circle back with you. And, you know, there’s been some other advocacy cases. JoAnn Greenberg wrote the book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and also Love and Never Silent about her experience with deaf parents and it was all set to be done at CBS as a TV movie in the 80s and they decide they had didn’t want deaf actors play deaf characters so Maryann Reeve who did a lot of movies and [NAME] who was a founding member of the National Theatre of the Deaf pulled the project from CBS, took it to NBS [NAME] and Ed Waterstreep (sp) starred in it and it won multiple Emmy awards. It’s true about people telling their stories and being assertive about it.
>> Lawrence: And Suzie Gilstrap also did episodes of Cagney & Lacey and Little House on the Prairie Right around that time.
>> Thank you.
>> Gary: All right, we’ve got all right, first push. I think we might have time for one final question or comment.
>> Lawrence: Well, this is Lawrence. There’s much more history and I think, you know, that we can get into on an hour so I really encourage people to do as I think Leah was saying and Jessica was saying to, you know, to go to the website, to go to Facebook and get on the ListServe so that we can continue the conversation.
>> Diane: You know, I was going add, this is Diane. I think one cool thing would be if the information about the media access award could be put out maybe in this group somehow because I used to be back when I lived in LA, one of the judges and got a chance to, you know, work with Paul Longhorn and sit there watching and chatting about it as we figured out which ones to award and which ones to criticize and so it would be great if more of the public around the country could hear what’s going on with that award. Tari, I know you’re the one that brought that up.
>> Tari: Yeah. We did that by design so that disability activists and the content creators and casting people could hear dialogue on what makes a good portrayal and what doesn’t. However, the whole format has changed and it’s just the unions, the screen actors guilt, SAG (indiscernible) directors, writing people are giving those awards but I think with Super 50 and real abilities and some of these other things we could engage in more dialogue, Diane. I think that’s a great idea to raise awareness.
>> Gary: All right. This is Gary again. I want to use what Tari said about raising awareness and what Lawrence said about history as a segue to plug a project that’s getting off the ground right now. We, as you all know, we have an important anniversary coming up in just a little under two years, 2015 will be the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In many ways the ADA anniversaries remind me of media portrayal, every time we do stories around ADA anniversaries or ask for comments, you know, there’s always some good to mention, some good things that are happening but there’s always a lot of work yet to be done. But there are a group has come together to form the ADA legacy project and they are working on, you know, putting together a lot of cool events and resources for the anniversary so if that’s something you’re interested in getting involved with, I want to encourage you all, I can send a link out to the National Disability Leadership Alliance, Yahoo, ListServe but also they’ve got a Facebook page. It’s Facebook.com/ADAlegacy. I encourage you to check it out and sign up. They’ve got a monthly newsletter coming out soon, sign up for that and (indiscernible).
>> Gary, this is AJ French. I just wanted to add onto what you said. By the end of the month the ADA legacy project website should be up and running. Thank you.
>> Gary: Great. Great, thanks, AJ. I think we’re at the top of the hour so I think we need to sign off. I really want to thank everyone for joining the call today and for participating and thank our presenters, Lawrence, Tari, Leah, Michelle, thank you all so much for taking time out today to be part of the panel and thank you, Jessica and Diane for all your work to keep the forum going every month. And I think that’s it unless Jessica, is there any final words you need to add?
>> Jessica: I just want to also thank Gary and Little People of America for leading this call. It was an excellent call, a reminder to folks to post more ideas, go ahead and do it right now before you forget on Facebook and the ListServe so we can keep the discussion going. And our next call is Tuesday, November 19th. We’ll send out a topic in the next couple weeks but please go ahead and mark your calendars.
>> Gary: All right. Thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of the week.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you, bye bye.
(End of call)
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.