Voyage of Discovery

Film lets disabled adults pose their own questions.

By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff, 1/27/2002

It takes a while to get there, but the final extended scene in "How's Your News?" - an 80-minute documentary about disability and self-discovery that's been a surprise hit at film festivals recently - is a knockout.

The setting: Venice Beach, Calif., a sunny Mecca for the thong-bong-and-collagen-treatment crowd.

The cast: five adults from Camp Jabberwocky, an innovative summer camp on Martha's Vineyard for people with physical and mental disabilities, in some cases severe ones.

The setup: the five cast members, plus a supporting team of camp counselors and film personnel, have voyaged across the US in a "news" van, posing as reporters and randomly interviewing Americans on a variety of topics.

The results are sweetly touching and often hilarious as the cast descends upon well-trod tourist stops such as Manhattan, Nashville, Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon. They sing, they gawk, they dance, they twitch, they approach everyone from homeless men to Vegas showgirls with microphone in hand. In the spirit of Charles Kuralt, but with a dose of Lewis Carroll thrown in for good measure, they also seek out more offbeat venues such as a Texas livestock auction, where everyone speaks fluent jabberwocky, and an Arkansas alligator farm, where one "How's Your News?" reporter tries earnestly to interview a sheep.

Then, in Venice Beach, with 40 hours of tape and a whole continent behind them, the cast marshals all its skills to film a segment that plays like "Good Morning America" meets Monty Python, a carnival-mirror look at pop culture, how we communicate, and the news business itself.

Ronnie Simonsen, who is 43 and suffers from cerebral palsy, goes one-on-one with Hollywood actor Vince Van Patten, the paradigmatic Southern California beach-boy celeb. The mildly retarded Simonsen has an odd gift for mimicry and a serious fixation with B-list television stars; his nightly prayers include Chad Everett and David Hasselhoff. Van Patten cannot stop yakking about his various film projects, which don't seem to interest even Simonsen past a certain point. Imagine the comic pages' Zippy hosting "Access Hollywood" and you have some idea of the meeting of the minds at work here.

Down the boardwalk, meanwhile, sits Larry Perry, 58, an expressive man who has severe spastic cerebral palsy and cannot walk or talk. In front of Perry's wheelchair is a sign that reads "Talk to Me!" Perry soon gets a hot-looking beach chick to dance with him, as if that sort of thing happens all the time. (In Venice Beach, maybe it does.) Eat your heart out, John Hockenberry.

There's more. Susan Harrington, 35, who's legally blind and mildly retarded, interviews a sidewalk guitarist who appears to have landed in California from a distant solar system. Sean Costello, 34 - he has Down syndrome - gets up close and personal with a stoner beach dude. And Bobby Byrd, 46, whose Down syndrome renders him unable to speak intelligibly, but who seemingly understands everything said to him, has his palm read by a peroxide-haired fortuneteller with nine-inch fingernails and a bad facelift. The woman blithely assures Byrd, "Your career looks very good." Byrd seems pleased by the news, if mildly surprised.

And who's to say she's wrong, come to think of it?

Funny? Audiences from Austin to Amsterdam have thought so, as "How's Your News?" has made its way from underground video circles to big time film festivals. Unconventional? Uh-huh. Uncomfortable to watch? For some viewers, no doubt.

Wider exposure is now on the way. The film debuted locally at the Brattle Theatre 10 days ago, with director Arthur Bradford and cast on hand to discuss it. On Tuesday it airs nationally on HBO's "Cinemax Reel Life," at 7 p.m. Riding a wave of hype, the film raises questions wherever it goes because of scenes like the one described above. There is a fine line, after all, "between mockery and sincerity," as one reviewer has noted, or between "exploiting people with disabilities and depicting them honestly," as another has written.

And "How's Your News?", whatever its other flaws and virtues, provides few easy answers as to where that line ought to be drawn.

"No one at the screenings has come up to us and said it was offensive," says Bradford, whose backers include "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and indie producer John Pierson. At the Toronto Film Festival in September, one viewer did ask Harrington if she felt "respected" when she heard the audience laughing hysterically at the scene in which she sings "Respect" (the old Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin tune) in a Vegas karaoke booth.

Says Bradford: "Sue stood up and said no, that watching herself perform again onscreen made her feel like she'd really nailed that song. I couldn't have said it better myself."

To Bradford, the notion of exploiting their disabilities for cheap yucks implies that Harrington, Simonsen, et al. don't understand what they're doing on camera. "And that's plain wrong," he maintains.

On the contrary, says Bradford, a volunteer counselor at Jabberwocky since 1993, it's their distinctive personalities and often wide-eyed innocence - not their social dysfunction or cognitive limitations - that dictate what happens, funny or not.

"The fault of most movies about people with disabilities is they come off as sappy," he says. "We wanted a film viewers weren't sure of at first. That might start out with questions about what our motivations really were."

At the Cambridge screening, before an audience that included the parents of most cast members, Bradford and crew ambled onstage to a standing ovation after the film had ended. Bradford opened the floor for questions. One viewer asked Harrington to name her favorite interview in the film. She didn't really have one, Harrington replied quickly. Instead, she said, to, a gale of sympathetic laughter, "All the people were, like, `Oh my God, get me away from this woman!'"

Bradford told another questioner that he had deliberately edited the film to minimize the difficulties of traveling cross-country with five disabled adults. Pierson, also on hand for the screening, later said he agreed with Bradford's decision.

"He wanted to make it harder for audiences to figure out what's going on," noted Pierson, who hopes to develop the film into a semi-regular cable TV series. "You're not spoon-feeding them a message here, or patting yourselves on the back. They have to get it on their own terms."

His biggest disappointment, continued Pierson, was being turned down by the Sundance Film Festival because festival organizers apparently had "problems" with the film's concept.

"I can't go nuts about that," said Pierson, rolling his eyes. "But do I think it was worthy? Yes."

For Bradford, the film's standing ovation reception is the second act in a big year creatively. Last summer he brought out his first collection of short stories, "Dogwalker" (Knopf). Winner of a prestigious O. Henry Award, Bradford has published in Esquire, McSweeney's, Bomb, and other cutting-edge periodicals. As a writer, he's drawn comparisons to Denis Johnson and David Eggers, among others. Many of the stories in "Dogwalker," moreover, feature characters and situations that can reasonably be described as eccentric.

A Yale graduate, Bradford, who recently moved from Texas to northern Vermont, says he got interested in video while producing a public-access TV show in New Haven. After arriving at Jabberwocky in '93 and agreeing to teach a video class there, Bradford recalls, "I looked around and saw one guy who couldn't talk, one who couldn't hold a camera, and one who couldn't stop talking. It was pretty interesting."

Bradford responded by sending campers like Costello into the Vineyard community to do "news" interviews. Costello was a revelation, says Bradford, because people could suddenly understand what he was saying when a microphone was put in his hand. It was also Costello who ventured into a local sports class and guilelessly asked, "How's your sports?" Thus were both a star and a concept swiftly born.

What made the camp videos so funny, says Bradford, was the struggle for common ground between interviewer and interviewee, the progression from total miscommunication to wary, if incomplete, understanding. Costello's childlike wonder in posing everyday questions was a prime example of this phenomenon.

"Sean has this wiseguy sense of humor that really started to come through on camera," says Bradford. "Also, he thought everybody he met was really weird. But he was totally sweet and polite about it."

Copies of a 1994 camp video found their way to Stone and Parker, who became big fans. Bradford continued to produce an annual camp tape until 1998, when he shot a "How's Your News?" pilot that took a group of campers on an abbreviated road trip. The half-hour film became a smash at underground film festivals. Still, Bradford wasn't sure there was a wider audience for his film. Enter Pierson, of "Split Screen" fame, who agreed to back a feature-length production - and even loaned the crew an RV for the trip. The total budget for the film was still modest, or "less than six figures," according to Bradford.

Picking cast members was easy because Bradford knew them from his video class. Convincing their parents was harder, he admits. Travel was one consideration, the finished film itself quite another. Bradford offered to prescreen the film for family members and edit scenes they found uncomfortable. None objected, says Bradford, adding: "I had to know in my heart that it showed them [the cast] in their best, most honest light."

In addition to the Cambridge screening, the film has been shown at film festivals in Austin, Toronto, New York, and Amsterdam - where Simonsen performed a song with David Byrne, no less.

"It's been a really fun ride for everyone," says Bradford, who plans to write a novel as soon as the film tour winds down. Pierson predicts an even wilder ride ahead if Chad Everett - whose star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame Ronnie Simonsen kneels down and kisses in "How's Your News?" - takes notice and agrees to sign on.

"We tried him before," says Pierson. "But we're hoping maybe to get Chad for the sequel."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached by e-mail at jkahn@globe.com.

This story ran on page L1 of the Boston Globe on 1/27/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

Source: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/027/living/Voyage_of_discovery+.shtml

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