from CNN:
Hallmark Movies & Mysteries is diversifying its content.
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Hallmark Movies & Mysteries is diversifying its content.
From Variety:
Pictured is Anna Dzieduszycka, an actor with dwarfism, who starred in the Oscar-nominated film from Poland, "The Dress."
UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report found some improvement in 2022 in regards to hiring women and people of color, but activist group FWD-Doc is demanding that UCLA address other overlooked groups such as LGBTQIA+ individuals and the “invisible minority” — disabled people — in the industry.
Jim LeBrecht, co-founder of FWD-Doc and co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp” (2020), states, “UCLA’s report that stands for promoting diversity is an egregious case of exclusion and perpetuates the misconception that people with disabilities do not exist in the entertainment industry. In light of ‘CODA’s’ three Oscar wins at the recent 94th Academy Awards ceremony, this oversight reinforces FWD-Doc’s assertion that this report is incomplete and not comprehensive.”
He adds that other groups have been under-represented, such as LGBTQIA+ people, but were ignored in the study.
The ninth annual report, from UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences, covers the top 200 theatrical English-language releases in 2021, ranked by global box office, as well as all major streaming films based on total household ratings. The study says people of color rep nearly 43% of the U.S. population and will be in the majority by 2050. POC last year represented 38.9% of film leads and 43.1% of all actors, as well as 30.2% of directors and 32.3% of writers.
Women accounted for 47.2% of film leads, according to the study, and 42.2% among all performers. Women accounted for 21.8% of film directors and 33.5% of writers.
LeBrecht adds that since UCLA’s report is designed to “explore relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry,” it is critical that other demographics be included.
FWD-Doc demands a public statement that acknowledges UCLA’s oversight and the damage it creates, imploring UCLA to commit to releasing a report on disabled representation, including Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse workers, in the film industry within six months. Additionally, FWD-Doc expects that the UCLA report on representation in television (due in Fall 2022) does not repeat this omission.
FWD-Doc says there are globally 1.85 billion people with disabilities, holding $8 trillion dollars in disposable income (this jumps to $13 trillion if you include their families), making people with disabilities the third largest economic power in the world — with more than the countries of Japan, Germany, and the U.K..
Filmmakers with disabilities are key to unlocking these audiences and the org says there are an estimated 500 filmmakers with disabilities and their allies.
The UCLA report states, “America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film content.” FWD-Doc adds that so far there is a dearth of projects related to disabilities, despite audiences’ positive reaction to recent Oscar-nominated and winning films (“CODA,” “Audible,” “Crip Camp,” “The Dress,” “Feeling Through” and “Sound of Metal”).
The group says that by including disability in its research, UCLA can help focus industry attention on disabilities and ensure more projects made by filmmakers with disabilities receive funding to reach audiences.
FWD-Doc (Filmmakers with Disabilities) is a group of filmmakers with disabilities and active allies. The org seeks to increase the visibility of, support for and direct access to opportunities, networks and employment for Deaf, disabled, and neurodiverse filmmakers.
Aside from LeBrecht, group leadership includes co-founders Day Al-Mohamed, Lindsey Dryden and Alysa Nahmias and interim director Amanda Upson.
Madison Tevlin went viral in 2015 when her YouTube cover of John Legend's All of Me blew up.
The Toronto teen had only intended family and friends to see it, but she's now racked up more than eight million views and is onto her next gig: a CBC show.
It's called Who Do You Think I Am, in which Tevlin interviews a roster of guests who are misperceived due to their exterior appearance.
Tevlin has Down syndrome, in which an individual is born with an extra copy of the 21st chromosome, leading to some cognitive and developmental disability. She wants to prove to the public that people with Down syndrome can do it all — and she's flashing her triple-threat status as an actor, singer and dancer to prove it.
"People may think that we can't do lots of things and assume things about us that [are] not always true," Tevlin told CBC News. "That we can't walk, we can't sing, can't dance, can't live on our own and can't do all these things.
"But actually, I'm proving everyone wrong."
As film, television and the arts become more inclusive and social media platforms like TikTok give the disability community a space to thrive and build an audience, individuals with Down syndrome have greater avenues for finding success in the performing arts.
There's still room for improvement, but advocates say representation is getting better.
"Media representation of people with Down syndrome — and people with disabilities in general — it's changing rapidly. It's becoming more mainstream," said Chelsea Jones, an assistant professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., who researches critical disability studies and disability media.
"We're seeing people with Down syndrome cast as more characters on TV shows, for example, which is really exciting, and it has sort of this effect of normalizing disability and showing us that people with Down syndrome are part of our culture and part of our society and part of our stories," Jones said.
According to the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, about 45,000 Canadians have Down syndrome, and one in 781 Canadians are born with it. While television characters with Down syndrome are an increasingly frequent occurrence, the overall landscape has been dry — and some depictions lean on stereotypes, making actors with Down syndrome feel misunderstood.
"I think people think that people with Down syndrome can't do a lot, and they feel sorry for us," said Lily D. Moore, an American actress best known for her role as Rebecca in Never Have I Ever, the Netflix comedy created by Mindy Kaling.
"We can go to college; we can own our own businesses. We want to live independently and we want to follow our dreams."
Like Moore, a handful of American actors with Down syndrome have had success, paving the way for others long after Chris Burke starred as Corky in Life Goes On. In 2019, Zack Gottsagen made headlines when he co-starred in the film Peanut Butter Falcon with Shia LaBeouf, later becoming the first person with Down syndrome to present at the Academy Awards.
California actor Lauren Potter starred in Glee for its six-season run, portraying feisty high school student Becky in the Fox musical comedy. Meanwhile, Jamie Brewer — also from California — has played Addie in the FX anthology series American Horror Story since 2011. Incidentally, those two shows were created by television producer Ryan Murphy.
Part of the push for more nuanced depictions of people with Down syndrome is due to widely held misconceptions about their capabilities. Some media depictions teeter into one-note tokenism, portraying people with Down syndrome as "cherub-like characters who are perpetually innocent," Jones said.
"They should be held to the same standard as other actors who — or as other characters, I should say — who have things happen to them, and sometimes things that make us cringe or make us uncomfortable."
"I feel like it is getting better, for sure," Moore said. "Down syndrome people used to be portrayed as happy all the time and people feel sorry for us … We were not taken seriously. But now the TV and film industry is giving Down syndrome people bigger roles, and it's great."
Laura LaChance, the executive director of the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, said "individuals with Down syndrome have aspirations and dreams, and yet … there seem to be sort of these self-imposed or cultural limitations that people are showing us."
She points to the emergence of TikTok as a venue for performers with Down syndrome, citing Toronto dancer Julia Slater — who has 1.2 million followers on the app — as a particular success story.
"Those [followers] are not all people who have Down syndrome," LaChance said. "She's found a niche for herself in performance on social media. Maybe not on the stage, but in the airwaves."
Tevlin has found additional success through her TikTok and Instagram videos, where she frequently shares educational posts with her 132,000 followers about what it's like to live with Down syndrome.
The app has an "accessibility and useability … that makes it possible to create content and to generate an audience," said Jones.
John Tucker, an American actor who starred in the Emmy Award-winning series Born This Way, a reality series following individuals with Down syndrome as they work to overcome barriers, said the app has given people with disabilities the opportunity to show what they can do.
Tucker is on TikTok himself, where he interacts with fans of Born This Way and elevates his rap music career to an audience of 15,000 followers.
More traditional venues for a pathway to stardom, like talent agencies, are evolving to make the process more welcoming to people with disabilities.
The Toronto- and Vancouver-based agency Ignite Artists offers free training and coaching to individuals with disabilities who have an interest in acting.
"The opportunities are still fairly slim, but the industry is changing very quickly and we have seen an uptick in auditions just this year as productions strive to be more representative," the agency said in an email to CBC News.
LaChance said that the Canadian Down Syndrome Society frequently shares casting calls in search of people with diversity in ability, which she says is a relatively new development.
"I think that [talent agencies] have increased their reach and they've increased their hiring opportunities and they are looking at people of diversity who do apply to Canadian talent agencies."
From The New York Times. Pictured are Deaf actors Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin, who play deaf parents in “CODA.”
A couple of weeks ago in The
Hollywood Reporter, Troy Kotsur compared the opportunities for deaf actors
like himself to one small hair in a beard’s worth of roles for those who can
hear.
With Sian
Heder’s “CODA,” which stands for Child of Deaf Adults, he plucked it
and made history. He’s the first deaf actor to be nominated for an Oscar. In
1987, Marlee
Matlin became the first deaf performer to be nominated; she went on to
win the Oscar, for “Children of a Lesser God.” Matlin happens to be Kotsur’s
co-star in “CODA.”
Kotsur plays Frank Rossi, a deaf fisherman, gruff yet
surprisingly tender, trying to keep his business in Gloucester, Mass., afloat
with the help of his teenage daughter, Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing
member of their family. Ruby has served as the interpreter for Frank, her
mother, Jackie (Matlin), and her brother, Leo (Daniel Durant) for most of her
life. But she longs to go to music school and become a singer, a dream her
parents can’t understand. (“If I were blind, would you paint?” Jackie asks.)
And the thought of having to navigate life on their own is terrifying.
The critical response to Kotsur’s portrayal has been overwhelmingly
warm. Owen Gleiberman of Variety called
him “an extraordinary actor”; Steve Pond of The
Wrap declared him “a treasure as Matlin’s gloriously profane husband”;
and Peter Travers of “Good
Morning America” said he was “hilarious and heartbreaking.”
The role has also earned Kotsur 31
nominations, including a
BAFTA, a
Golden Globe, the first Screen Actors Guild nod for an individual deaf male
actor and now an Oscar for best supporting actor. So far he has tallied nine
wins, including a Gotham Award and a Spotlight Award from the Hollywood Critics
Association.
In a statement on Tuesday after the Oscar nominations were
announced, Kotsur said he was stunned, explaining, “I can still remember
watching Marlee win her Oscar on television and telling friends I was going to
get nominated one day and them being skeptical. I would like to thank everyone
for this huge honor.”
Despite the scarcity of jobs for deaf actors, Kotsur is not
exactly a stranger to the limelight. In 2003, he shared the role of Pap with a
hearing actor in the Tony-nominated 2003 American Sign Language adaptation
of “Big
River” on Broadway. More recently he helped to develop a sign language
for the Tusken
Raiders in “The Mandalorian.”
Still, “I’m so glad that they recognized me,” Kotsur told
The Hollywood Reporter of the accolades that have come his way, “not because
I’m deaf but because I’m a talented actor.”
From Steven Aquino, the diversity,
equity & inclusion contributor at Forbes:
Considering the world is entering into its third year amidst a pandemic, it’s hard to recall what life was like before it. At this point, 2019 feels like ancient history. It might as well have happened during the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
As a tech journalist who’s covered Apple at close range for years, I remember 2019 for the star-studded event the company held in March at Apple Park to announce, amongst other things, the hotly-anticipated Apple TV+ streaming service. The glitzy event was the closest I’ve ever come to covering a red carpet show, only nobody wore their fanciest designer clothing. It was quite something to sit in the audience and watch Apple parade A-lister after A-lister onstage to hype up their new project: Oprah, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Momoa—even Big Bird was there. Afterwards, as I was milling around the press area in the Steve Jobs Theater with Apple PR folks and fellow reporters, I distinctly remember being alerted at one point that JJ Abrams was standing twenty feet away. He was surrounded by other people, but to this day, it’s kinda cool to think I once was in close proximity of a celebrity.
When TV+ launched that November, it debuted with shows like The Morning Show, See, Dickinson, For All Mankind, and more. And the roster has grown considerably since. One of its newest titles is the animated series El Deafo, which premiered on January 7. It shows the journey of a young girl named Cece who loses a substantial amount of her hearing following an infection. In its press release announcing the show, Apple described Cece as “[learning] to embrace what makes her extraordinary.”
Apple’s trailer for El Deafo is on YouTube.
El Deafo is based upon the graphic novel of the same name, written by author and illustrator Cece Bell. The book is autobiographical of sorts, as it mirrors Bell’s own childhood experience with being born hearing and then becoming deaf. In a recent interview with me, Bell said the impetus for the comic started a decade ago. She felt a need to come to terms with her deafness, as she was reticent to tell anyone she was deaf nor discuss it. Having already been a published children’s author, she figured what better way to confront her feelings than by writing for others. “I felt like the graphic novel would be the perfect format to try to share this story,” she said.
As for how El Deafo came to be for the small screen, veteran TV writer Will McRobb contacted Bell and expressed how much he enjoyed the novel and was interested in developing a version for TV. Bell was a fan of his prior work, so she felt comfortable working with him. (Both Bell and McRobb serve as executive producers.) “[It] all just sort of fell into place after that,” she said. “But it took somebody like him being [someone] I already respected for me to really dive into turning the book into a show.” The decision to make the show animated was an easy one as well, given the book is in cartoon form. Another reason for animating El Deafo was, of course, the pandemic. With the animation studio located in Ireland, it was easiest (and sensible given Covid) to work remotely by passing around notes and having virtual meetings. The remote aspect of production came in especially handy when doing the post-production audio work, which includes Bell’s voiceovers, both of which play crucial roles in the show.
Bell described the audio work as a “very complicated, very tricky” process; she worked closely with engineers to get it right. In order to achieve maximum authenticity, Bell told them to “take beautiful sound and make it sound terrible.” The complicated and tricky part was Bell needing to explain to engineers what she hears and what it feels like, and then ask them to recreate it. Characters’ voices on the show are purposefully distorted, almost to an unintelligible level, to try to give audiences a sense of what Bell’s world sounds like. She clarified, however, that what’s heard in the show isn’t literally what she hears—it’s an approximation of what she perceives to hear.
“I was so involved [in the sound design], and I read more notes than you would ever want,” Bell said with a laugh.
One poignant point Cece the narrator makes in the pilot episode is that, although she lost her hearing, she did not learn American Sign Language. She became deaf in 1975, and explained deafness and sign language were not as socially accepted then as they are nowadays. Bell explained how, growing up, she attended a school dedicated to deaf children; communicatively, teachers pushed students to learn to talk vocally and become lip-readers rather than learn sign language. Bell had about four-and-a-half years of typical hearing and language, so she grasped the concepts of lip-reading quickly. Sign language was never an option for her, not only because it wasn’t taught but also because Bell “didn’t want to be pigeon-holed,” she said. She thought of herself as a hearing person, and felt learning sign language would stigmatize her as an official deaf person. Sign language is inherently performative, and Bell didn’t want to be gawked at by her peers. “I just felt like I was that kid who didn't want anybody to see me as a different person,” Bell said. “I didn't want anybody to look at me. That was me as a kid, but I don't think I really understood it [sign language] the way I do now.”
Bell is finally learning sign language, little by little, now that she’s an adult. It hasn’t been easy for her. “I’m very slow,” she said.
The addition of El Deafo to the TV+ lineup is significant not only for attrition’s sake—Apple’s used its nigh-infinite war chest to pour considerable resources into building the service’s catalog, with new content appearing all the time—but for representation too. For all of the incessant talk about subscriber numbers by analysts, the company deserves the utmost credit for being amongst a select few streaming providers to tackle disability representation in Hollywood with tenacity—and authenticity. Bell’s series joins the ranks of See and CODA, as well as the recently-cancelled Little Voice, as positive displays of disability. As disability has been historically portrayed in TV and film as something to be pitied and overcome—too often resulting in feel-good, patronizing fodder that the disability community derisively refer to as “inspiration porn”—Apple instead has positioned disability matter-of-factly. To wit, that being disabled is not something out of a Shakespearean tragedy—it’s simply part of who we are as humans. Put another way, Apple has taken the same thoughtfulness it uses for the accessibility support for its products and applied it just as meaningfully to the shows it bankrolls for TV+. Apple is certainly not above criticism, but again, is deserving of more recognition for its effort to boost inclusivity of our marginalized communities. It gives TV+ an undervalued differentiator as it competes in the market.
As for Bell’s relationship with Apple, she couldn’t have been more complimentary of her dealings with the company. “Overall, it’s just been a terrific experience,” she said. Bell has had “100% involvement” with El Deafo every step of the way, saying Apple has listened to her and given whatever support she needed. Executives never questioned, for example, Bell’s insistence that the lead voice actress be deaf and have similar life experiences to hers. I asked if the aforementioned disability-centric shows were factors into her signing on with Apple for El Deafo, and Bell said her deal was struck long before stuff like CODA arrived—in the days when TV+ carried a fraction of the content that’s available currently. Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, she adores Ted Lasso, telling me it was the first show she watched. “This [being on Apple TV+] has been a happy accident, you know. I’ve ended up at the right spot,” she said.
Bell had kind words to say about Tara Sorensen, who leads creative development of children’s programming for Apple Worldwide Video. Sorensen, Bell told me, was adamant about El Deafo staying true by preserving its authenticity. Bell called Sorensen “a great, great advocate for the book from the beginning.” Bell noted that, although there were hiccups along the way—Bell often was the only deaf person in meetings—“everyone listened and was willing to absorb information,” she said.
The show is still very much in its infancy, but feedback on El Deafo has been terrific thus far. One of the comments Bell receives most often are notes from people who say they love the show, but felt they needed to adjust the volume of their TV because the show’s distorted audio made it seem like their set was broken. She also hears from many parents, who are excited for their children to see what other kids’ lives are like, and to be exposed to esoteric pieces of technology like hearing aids. Deaf children in particular, she added, are “very excited” to see themselves on TV and to personally identify with the experiences the animated Cece goes through. “It’s been really, really fun [working on the show], and I’m very relieved people are enjoying it,” Bell said.
Apple has posted a video to YouTube that features special commentary by Bell.
The three-part El Deafo can be found now in Apple’s TV app.
Pictured: Michael Phelan as Winthrop Paroo and Rebecca Luker as Marian Paroo in a 2000 revival of “The Music Man” at the Neil Simon Theater in Manhattan.
Credit...By Amanda Morris, (Amanda Morris is a 2021-2022 disability reporting fellow for the National desk. @amandamomorris)
Many know Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man,” as a light comedy centered on a cheeky scam artist who pretends to be a musician and sells the idea of starting a boys’ band to a small town in Iowa. The show is being revived on Broadway starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and will begin performances this month.
But several
newly recognized drafts of the musical, written between 1954 and 1957, show
that originally, the story focused more on the town’s persecution of a boy in a
wheelchair — carrying a much more serious message than the final draft. At the
time, children with disabilities were routinely institutionalized
in horrid conditions and denied an education.
In the
version that debuted in 1957, the only character that doesn’t fall for the
scheme is Marian Paroo, a well-read single woman who has a shy younger brother
with a lisp, named Winthrop. But the con man, Harold Hill, manages to charm
Marian and wins her over in part by being kind to Winthrop and including him in
the band.
In the earlier drafts, Marian’s younger brother was a character named Jim Paroo, a boy in a wheelchair who, in some versions of the show, has limited use of his arms and could not speak. Wherever Jim goes, townspeople want to lock him up, and in some versions, this drives him to hide and live in the school basement instead of at home.
Then, Harold
comes along and challenges the community’s assumptions about Jim by bringing
him into the band and finding an instrument he’s capable of playing with his
limited range of motion. An early title for the show, “The Silver Triangle,” highlights Jim’s instrument of choice
and contribution to the band.
“I think
that Jim was very much at the heart of the show,” said Dominic
Broomfield-McHugh, a musicology professor at the University of Sheffield in
England who discovered many of the earlier drafts in 2013 at the Great American
Songbook Foundation in Indiana. These discoveries were published in May in
Broomfield-McHugh’s new book, “The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from
‘The Music Man’ to ‘1491.’” The book explores the musical’s journey from “The
Silver Triangle” to “The Music Man” we know today — and has a chapter devoted
to the various early drafts of the show.
“When you
read the first draft, it feels quite thin until you get to the scenes with Jim
or about Jim, and suddenly it becomes very dramatic and serious,” he said. “I
still feel astonished when I look at it.”
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Most of the
songs and scenes in earlier drafts are also significantly different, according
to Broomfield-McHugh. In one deleted song, Jim, who is nonverbal in this
version of the show, starts to sing onstage alone.
“What Willson was trying to do was to sort of say, even though he can’t physically speak, he has all these thoughts and ideas going around in his head,” Broomfield-McHugh said.
Though
Willson’s writing of disability was sometimes gimmicky in ways that could now
be seen as offensive — in one scene, music inspires Jim to stand up for the
first time — Broomfield-McHugh believes that the playwright was trying to spark
a conversation about how people with disabilities were treated at the time.
He found
evidence that the playwright had visited organizations for disabled children
but couldn’t find any other personal reasons that Willson may have had for
writing about this issue.
Just 10
months before the show opened, Willson dropped the character of Jim, replacing
him with Winthrop at the urging of producers who felt there was no place for
serious representations of disability onstage.
“But I sense
such a frustration in him that he really, really tried for years to make it
work like this,” Broomfield-McHugh said.
One memo urged Willson to change the character, stating that “physical disability in a child is impossible to view in any terms but pity and sentiment, the problem is to find some other form of disability besides physical.” The memo is undated and unsigned, but Broomfield-McHugh believes it was written in early 1957 by an employee of a producer. He found it in Wisconsin Historical Society archives, tucked in the back of a script that belonged to the producer Kermit Bloomgarden, who took over production of the show in 1957.
Another letter to Willson, written in 1955 by the playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, says, “The easy solution is to dump Jim Paroo,” but that doing so “might conceivably reduce a major work to the dimension of mere entertainment.”
Today, audiences
can more regularly see disabled actors onstage thanks to efforts by small
theater companies like The Apothetae, which produces works centered on the
disabled experience; and Theater Breaking Through Barriers, an Off Broadway
organization that regularly casts actors with disabilities.
But on
Broadway, which can elevate shows into mainstream commercial hits, authentic
representations of disability are still few and far between, said Talleri A.
McRae, a founder of National Disability Theater.
There have
been some successes. Ali
Stroker made history in 2019 as the first actor in a wheelchair to win
a Tony Award for her role as a flirty fiancée, Ado Annie, in ‘Oklahoma!’; Madison
Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, played Laura in a
2017 production of “The Glass Menagerie.” There was also the casting
of a disabled actor in the role of Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol” in
2019; a 2015
revival of “Spring Awakening” by Deaf West Theater, which featured
deaf and hearing actors side by side; as well as Martyna
Majok’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 Off Broadway play, “Cost
of Living,” about people with disabilities.
Even with
this progress, many disabled characters are not written in well-rounded ways,
and actors without disabilities are often cast in these roles, McRae said.
To her
knowledge, the character of Nessarose in “Wicked” — who uses a wheelchair — has
never been played by a disabled actress on Broadway, and the same was true for
the character of Crutchie, who uses a crutch in the show “Newsies.”
“Look how
far we haven’t come,” said Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy and the
founder and artistic director of the Apothetae. “Or how far we have yet to go.”
Part of the
problem is inaccessibility for acting training programs, said Mozgala, who is
also the director of inclusion for the Queens Theater’s program Theater
for All, which helps support and train disabled playwrights and actors. In
his own acting program at the Boston University School for the Arts, he was the
only person who identified as disabled and said many actors with disabilities
have been told to sit out of certain classes, such as movement classes, because
professors felt uncomfortable teaching students with disabilities.
Another
barrier is the perception of audiences. Nicholas Viselli, the artistic director
of Theater
Breaking Through Barriers, said audiences still feel uncomfortable watching
disabled actors or characters onstage. For the plays he stages, he said he
often receives donations from people who say they think the work is important
but don’t want to come see it.
“When you
advertise disability, it becomes a turnoff,” Viselli said. “People are like,
‘I’ll feel bad for them. It will perhaps diminish my experience.’”
In the end,
the version of “The Music Man” without Jim was a hit; it won five Tony Awards,
including best musical, ran for 1,375 performances and was adapted into
an Oscar-winning
movie in 1962.
“The Music
Man” has since been criticized for making light of its con
artist’s problematic, predatory behavior, such as a scene in which he follows
Marian home and tries multiple times to seduce her.
The legacy
of “The Music Man” may have been different if Willson’s original vision had
made it onto the Broadway stage in a way that authentically represented people
with disabilities. Many of the stigmas and barriers it tried to confront still
persist, according to Penny Pun, the managing director of the National
Disability Theater.
“A lot of
these works are being put down before they even see the light of day,” Pun
said. “So how do we know if they have mainstream appeal? They never get a
chance.”
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A version of
this article appears in print on Dec. 16, 2021, Section C,
Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Early
Scripts, ‘The Music Man’ Included a Disabled Character. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Note: This is a reprint of Evans, D. (2017). "Please stop comparing disability mimicry to blackface," on the Dominick Evans website, which experienced a breach and was shut down. Reprinted with permission, 2021.
By Dominick
Evans, (He/They), Hollywood Inclusion & Representation Consultant, Filmmaker,
Writer, Streamer, Influencer, and FilmDis Founder. Evans is pictured.
Those of us
who are white in the disability community need to have a conversation about
cultural appropriation. There are black and brown disabled people in our
communities. They often go ignored, are not listened to, and they are speaking
out about the things that our greater community does that are harmful to them.
One of those things is culturally appropriating terms that have been taken from
concepts relating to racism and the oppression of Black and brown bodies. I
know it gets tiring to hear this new term or that new term, but when it comes
to those who are multiply marginalized in our community, we need to actually
listen to what they are saying.
I spend all day, most days studying film, television, and other media. We've
had this discussion before, and I think it's an important one we need to have
again. We as disabled people and our allies need to stop calling the unfair
casting of non-disabled people as "disabled" and the exclusion of
disabled actors from media such as film and television as "cripface."
The term has specifically been taken from blackface, and I see the comparison
between the two over and over again. We spoke about it during our #FilmDis
discussion back in 2015, which was led by disabled POC. They have told us to
stop doing this over and over again, and I don't know if the message is not
getting through to everyone, but I believe we should listen.
I know that we have struggled to find a word or phrase, although, generally,
using "cripping up" has been better accepted, and I've also started
using disabled mimicry, which I think fits simply because mimicry is often
embedded in (often unintentional) mockery. Whether non-disabled actors intend
to mock us is not relevant to using the term, because whether there is malice
or not that is what happens. It is a mockery of disability, through the weird
vocal intonation or accents we hear when portraying CP or Deaf characters, the
twitching, writhing bodies portraying strokes or spasticity, the rigidity of
body posture, curling and flopping of wrists, or whatever physically
stereotypical things these actors take on to portray what they think it means
to be disabled. Yes, disabled bodies do some of these things, but they do so
naturally and organically. It's not something easily done if your body does not
curl or twist or writhe or flap on its own, and often becomes to focal point of
disabled portrayals by non-disabled performers.
Nobody is saying this is not bad or horrible. In fact, it is very harmful. It
harms the disability community, which is why I scoff at the defense of actors
doing it. I recently saw an article asking if we should take away the Oscars
from actors like Tom Hanks and Daniel Day-Lewis for their performances that are
nothing short of disabled mimicry. Even Day-Lewis, who I know some disabled
people support, associates disability with nothing more than physically curling
up his body and contorting it, while using his voice to grunt and growl. All of
these factors have turned disability into nothing more than physical
characteristics, and that is the personification of disabled mimicry. Take away
their Oscars for doing real harm to actual disabled people? What a novel idea!
While it is nice to think of that in retrospect, we need to look forward about
what can be done to prevent this in the future.
I digress.
Going further, I see the comparison between disabled mimicry and blackface not
just in how we talk about disabled people being excluded, but also in comparing
the oppression. Blackface comes from a long tradition of outright mocking Black
people. Disabled mimicry is mocking, but rarely have I seen it done
specifically as a form of mocking. Instead, it is done by people who think they
know what disability is about or they think it is a great way to get to the
Oscars, and they probably aren't that far off. Often, the actors think they are
do-gooders taking on a "challenge" while writers and directors seek
praise for "inclusion."
Blackface has long been done insidiously, not just to remind Black people of
their place in society, but also to remind us white folks of our supposed
"superiority over Black people. Looking back at cinema, the legacy
of Birth of a Nation (1915) has painted Black people as foolish,
intellectually inferior, a joke, a silly child. We see the infantilization of
disabled people in film and other media, as well, but it comes from an entirely
different place. Rather, it is done to make us look dependent, burdensome, or
is even used as a plot device. Both forms of oppression are bad and cause harm
to the communities they represent, but they have such different histories the
comparison becomes problematic.
Consider the fact that there are disabled Black people who not only have to
deal with disabled mimicry, but also blackface. Comparing the two can make
these individuals feel invisible. This is what I've been told by numerous Black
disabled activists, more than once when talking about disability, race, and the
media. Add in the fact that over 80% of roles are male, 70% are white, and over
99% are cisgender and heterosexual when it comes to disabled roles, and Black
and brown disabled women and trans folks are already feeling very excluded from
the media. We need to start including Black disabled people, especially women
and trans folks, not only in the discussion about media, but in the creation of
it. That is hard to do when we consider we may be isolating Black disabled
folks by comparing their/our oppression as disabled people, with their
oppression as Black people.
Disabled mimicry comes from a place where disabled people have no voices
because it is often assumed we cannot speak for ourselves. It comes from a
place of ignorance about disability. It comes from people who may think they
are doing something good for our community, but who are actually harming it
because they have no concept of what our community is or what we believe or
represent. Can it be malicious? Absolutely! Do I think most people are doing so
maliciously? I don't believe so, and I have consumed a large amount of media
that includes disabled characters and storylines. Where the problem comes in is
that these creators don't want to listen. They are not exactly aiming to mock
us. They would have to understand disability to know how. I don't think most of
them even understand enough about disability to knowingly do that, but it does
mock us and it does harm us.
Blackface was always meant to mock and dehumanize Black people, and therein
lies the difference. At the heart of this discussion it comes down to intent.
Whitewashing may have become more insidious like disabled mimicry, but the
comparison is not helping anyone. At the heart of this is the fact that Black
disabled people have asked us to stop the comparison, and we need to listen to
what they have to say.
You do not have to believe me, but please listen to the Black disabled voices
in our community:
Anita Cameron, legendary disability rights activist with ADAPT and Not Dead Yet
says, "Cripface is appropriative and erases the history of Black folks and
how we were insulted, ridiculed and put down by the White film establishment.
When cripface is compared to Blackface, it is insulting, inappropriate and flat
out wrong. Just don't do it. And yes, I'm Black and disabled. If I see that
comparison taking place I will call it out! Blackface was meant to be cruel to
Black folks."
As a community, we as disabled people have plenty of valid reasons for why
disabled mimicry is not okay. Instead of pointing out how other groups are
oppressed and excluded, I believe it would be much better if we chose to
develop our own talking points about why disabled mimicry or "cripping
up," whatever we choose to call it, is harmful, and when we do, let's
include the multiply marginalized voices in our community, in the process.
Edited to include quotes.
You can find Dominick Evans here:
Website - FilmDis
Discord - CripCusader Community
Twitter - @DominickEvans
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Email: bhaller@towson.edu December
3, 2021
Website: https://www.gadim.org/
GADIM partners with
FilmDis; revamps website
FilmDis study shows
that almost 90% of disabled characters on TV are played by nondisabled actors
December 3, 2021 - The Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (GADIM) is pleased to announce its new partnership with FilmDis, a media monitoring organization created by screenwriting and directing duo, Dominick Evans & Ashtyn Law. GADIM, which was founded in 2016 by journalist Patricia Almeida in Brazil, lawyer Cátia Malaquias of Australia, and professor Beth Haller of the USA, was created to promote the inclusion of persons with disabilities in mass media. GADIM also announces its website redesign.
GADIM sponsored the second FilmDis study, which examined disability representation on scripted entertainment television in 2019/2020. The study found 1,198 disabled characters across 30 TV networks & streaming services, but it was rarely authentic representation. Only 128 characters, about 11 percent, were played by disabled actors, which is defined as the actor having at least one of the disabilities they portrayed.
Other significant findings were that almost 43 percent of the disabled characters were cisgender white males. For more information about the study, visit GADIM’s Media Analysis Study web page, https://gadim.org/project/media-analysis-study/.
Evans and Law explain that “there is much more to disabled lives than what we see (on TV), and with Hollywood in desperate need of fresh stories and voices, disabled creators and their ideas for television are ripe for the picking. Hollywood just needs to let the stories bloom.”
GADIM’s revised website has several significant new features such as pages for media Best Practices in advertising, news, and entertainment media and a page about how mass media can make their content more accessible.
“The partnership with FilmDis and the revamped website allows GADIM to better reach its goal of helping mass media globally to improve their portrayals of disability,” said co-director Beth Haller. “GADIM believes that people with disabilities must be involved in all aspects of mass media content to convey their authentic stories.”
GADIM’s mission is informed by Article 8 (Awareness-raising) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). A summary of Article 8 states: “As a change of perceptions is essential to improve the situation of persons with disabilities, ratifying countries are to combat stereotypes and prejudices and promote awareness of the capabilities of persons with disabilities.”
GADIM activities include being judges for the MIPCOM Diversify TV Excellence Awards for the international television industry, providing feedback on disability representation for Lionsgate Films, and co-hosting a conference on Disability, Media, and Human Rights in 2018 in Perth, Australia.
GADIM will become a registered non-profit in 2022.
December 3 is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, and on this day, GADIM joins the international #WeThe15 campaign in an effort to promote accessibility and inclusion globally for the 15% of the world’s population who live with a disability (1.2 billion people).
For more information about the FilmDis study, contact
Dominick Evans at info@filmdis.com.
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