3:28am July 2, 2014

When Billy Broke His Head

Is available to stream on Amazon.com for a low price:

http://www.amazon.com/Billy-Broke-Other-Tales-Wonder/dp/B00HBMPV22/

It’s a very good introduction to the mainstream (physical disability) disability rights movement, as told by a guy who got into it after he got brain damaged in a motorcycle accident. Despite his cognitive disabilities, this is a very physical-disability-centered film and it shows at times. But it’s also an amazing introduction to the disability rights movement.

I want to make a similar movie only with the developmental disability community. I brought up the idea with a leading guy at Syracuse University, a famous one lots of people look up to. He had just helped Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher get their movie going, Wretchers And Jabberers.

His response to me?

“Don’t make it about all developmental disabilities. Nobody’s interested in that. People are interested in autism. Make it about autism and it will sell.”

Which made me vow that if I ever manage to get my feet off the ground and get such a movie going, it will feature as many nonautistic DD people as possible: People with cerebral palsy, people with brain injury, people with intellectual disabilities, and of course people with autism but sure as hell not as the centerpiece of the whole thing. I want to make a movie that will make people aware that the DD movement is out there, that we make our own decisions, that IQ does not limit our moral and ethical capacities, and that we have made amazing changes on our own, including at least once singlehandedly closing down an institution by going inside, talking to the residents, finding out what they wanted, and getting it done. These are things that deserve to be chronicled as history and nobody is doing the chronicling.

If anybody has the resources to help me make such a movie, please let me know. I’m dead serious about wanting to do this, I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time, I want to basically interview a huge range of self-advocates locally, showing their lives as they want to live them, showing what they have accomplished politically, showing what they think politically, showcasing their voices. Even if it ends up being a no-budget sort of thing that doesn’t get fully off the ground but at least gets finished. I want to make this, it’s a very long-term dream of mine, to give something back to the DD community that has given me so much more than I could ever have expected in life. I want to give them the visibility for their movement that they deserve but rarely get. This is very personal, it’s something I want to do, with help of course, but I desperately want this to be a movie that I do the interviews and I have a lot of creative control over the end product.

But seriously if you haven’t seen the original, it’s worth watching on Amazon. Despite its faults (overwhelmingly phys-dis, overwhelmingly white even though plenty of PoC are shown in crowd scenes where it’s obvious they could’ve been interviewed if the author had cared), it’s one of the best if not the best disability rights movies out there.

I have no idea if captions work on the streaming version. I have a home video version that purports to be closed captioned but isn’t. It would be really nice for a disability rights movie to be fully captioned, but you never know what to expect.

And I’m serious if anyone could help me make a similar movie about DD people, and could help me find the time and energy and money, then this is something I’ve been badly wanting to do for years. And fuck the Syracuse University guys I used to look up to, if they can’t handle that DD doesn’t just mean autistic or that non-autistic DD people are just as interesting as autistic ones. And that if they/we weren’t as interesting, then it wouldn’t sell, and there wouldn’t be a point. This was Doug Biklen who told me this, a man I had always looked up to, and he didn’t even notice how badly his comment wounded me.

Anyway, back to When Billy Broke His Head. Maybe someone could watch it who doesn’t strictly need captions or subtitles. And then they could report back to the rest of us on whether there were captions and/or subtitles that actually worked. That way, we won’t have Deaf people paying money to see this and then not being able to. It would suck if there’s no captions, because this really is one of the classic movies of the American disability movement, despite it being so phys-dis and so white. (I’m still puzzled by how phys-dis it is given that the main character has brain damage with cognitive disabilities. But it is, it’s very phys-dis and there are occasional remarks that make that extremely clear. Similarly, there was no reason for most of the people interviewed to be white or white-passing: They showed plenty of people of color at the ADAPT actions, they just didn’t bother interviewing any of them.)

Anyway, if you can see it, it’s totally worth it.