CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion

Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948), Jon Voight in Coming Home (1978) and Jamie Foxx in Ray (2004) all won Oscars for playing characters with disabilities they did not have. Disabled veteran Harold Russell won an Oscar for playing a man who had lost his hands in World War II in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) but didn't act again until Inside Moves (1980), 34 years later. It would take more time than that for the Academy to honor another actor with a disability, when Marlee Matlin won Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God (1986). Even as actors with disabilities have begun winning roles in film and on television, there are still relatively few people with disabilities working behind the camera. Jenni Gold's 2018 documentary, CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion,
CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion looks at the broad range of Hollywood's treatment of the "other," placing depictions of disability within the context of the big and small screen's treatments of race, gender and sexual orientation. It moves from the silent films, in which Lon Chaney portrayed a variety of characters with disabilities, through Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), which used actors with disabilities, to more recent inroads by actors with disabilities like Matlin, Daryl Mitchell and Geri Jewell, an actress with cerebral palsy who starred on The Facts of Life. In addition, the documentary considers the stereotypes that have developed about people with disabilities on screen: the noble innocent, the bitter recluse, the sympathetic suicide. Opinions expressed range from those of Jewell, who appreciates the challenge facing actors who assume disabilities in front of the camera, to those of writer-producer Janis Hirsch, a polio survivor who says, "An able-bodied person in a wheelchair is the same as having a white person in blackface."

When an article about Gold appeared in the Los Angeles Times' Valley edition, some producers she knew contacted her about doing a documentary on her work. She felt that would be too limited, instead proposing the idea for CinemAbility. The producers passed, protesting that it would be too much work, but Gold persisted. Before long she had assembled an impressive list of interview subjects, including filmmakers with disabilities and A-list, Oscar-winning actors who were eager to share their own experiences playing characters with disabilities and dealing with disability issues in their own lives. In some cases, her subjects even came to a new understanding of the importance of inclusion in both casting people with disabilities and employing them in front of and behind the camera. As she worked, Gold began to see links between the way people with disabilities were portrayed and public attitudes toward disability issues, as when a series of positive portrayals in the 1980s was followed by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion was in development for more than a decade, premiering in an earlier form at the Burbank International Film Festival, where it won an award for diversity in 2012. It also won Best Documentary at the Valley Film Festival in 2013. Since then, Gold has worked to tighten the picture's focus and include more recent developments, eventually getting her four-hour first cut down to just over 90 minutes. Reviewing the current version for RogerEbert.com, Scott Jordan Harris wrote, "CinemAbility is the most entertaining comprehensive history of disability in American film and television ever made."

Along the way, Gold learned some surprising things about disability representation. She hadn't expected the series Ironside, starring Raymond Burr as a detective in a wheelchair, to be a positive depiction because it was made in the 1960s, but when she saw it, she was surprised at how much it focused on his tenaciousness and ability to solve crimes. She also unearthed a 1951 daytime drama called Miss Susan created for Susan Peters, a young actress who was paralyzed from the waist down after a hunting accident.

Gold was drawn to film from an early age, when she realized she had a passion for telling stories. She started out making her own movies with a Hi8 camcorder before attending the University of Central Florida. She founded Gold Pictures to produce and develop properties, directing and co-writing the action thriller Ready, Willing & Able (1999) and co-producing the comedy Can I Get a Witness Protection? (2016) and the boxing drama Tiger (2018), starring Mickey Rourke. Gold serves on the advisory board of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Gold's next film, currently in post-production, is the horror comedy Aaah! Roach! , starring Casper Van Dien, Barry Bostwick and Jason Mewes.

Director: Jenni Gold
Producer: Jenni Gold & Jeff Maynard
Screenplay: Jenni Gold & Samuel W. Reed
Cinematography: D. Scott Dobbie
Score: Erik Lundmark
Cast: Jane Seymour (Narrator), Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Geena Davis, Jamie Foxx, Vince Gilligan, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy, Kyle MacLachlan, Daryl Mitchell, Gary Sinise, Garry Marshall, Marlee Matlin, Peter Farrelly, Camryn Manheim, Peter Bodanovich, Ken Howard, Richard Donner, Taylor Hackford, Gale Anne Hurd, Michael Apted, Randal Kleiser, Paris Barclay, Phil Keoghan, Adam Arkin, Beau Bridges, Laura Innes (Themselves)

By Frank Miller