“Crip Camp” co-director talks accessibility in the film industry

Film festivals play a major role in the industry, but are they accessible?

Marketplace’s “Econ Extra Credit” team kicked off the summer with the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution.” The movie tells the story of Camp Jened, located in upstate New York back in the ’70s, which catered to teenagers with disabilities. The environment created a haven for campers who were often marginalized by society.

Campers formed incredible bonds with each other and eventually helped spur the disability rights revolution, which led to the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. One huge gain from the ADA: workplace accommodations.

For more on the film and the impact of the disability rights movement, “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio spoke with James LeBrecht, former Camp Jened camper and a co-director and co-producer of “Crip Camp.”

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: So jumping into the film, I think it’s an important vignette, you get out of college and you get what sounds like a dream job. It’s at a famous theater in Berkeley, California. It seems like you’re excited by the work, but what about the surroundings?

James LeBrecht: When I joined the Berkeley Rep, they were still in this storefront theater, and there were stairs I had to climb up to the sound booth, and they were also outdoor stairs. Although I can’t walk, I’ve never walked, when I was growing up, I didn’t have a wheelchair in the house. I was used to climbing up and down stairs. Bless my parents, but when I parked my wheelchair in the garage, I had to climb one, two, three flights of stairs to my bedroom. So physically, I could really handle this, you know, it was a challenge, but this was a job I really, really wanted.

Brancaccio: But you shouldn’t have had to be in that position. The way that that theater was set up, you know, did not allow for dignified access, shall we say?

LeBrecht: Well, this was 1978 so this is before the ADA [American’s with Disabilities Act]. You know, here’s the deal, I took over this position as resident sound designer for my friend Paul Dixon. And before I was given the job, people knew that I couldn’t walk. And the managing director of the theater said to Paul, ‘But Paul, I mean, he can’t walk.’ And Paul said, Mitzi, ‘He’s the best damn sound designer I know.’ Well, Paul told me this story later, and he said, ‘Jim, you were the only sound designer I knew.’ I think there was so many of us, David, we have people that help us along the way, and it wasn’t charity, but it was seeing me for who I was. And I can point to dozens of people that along my career path, you know, to say they took a risk on me, perhaps that’s an accurate statement, not because I didn’t know what I was doing with audio, but because they hadn’t seen anybody else who used a wheelchair as a sound editor for film or as a mixer for film or in theater.

“A very, very nice elevator shaft”

Brancaccio: And the energy that’s generated from that camp all those years ago, which leads to this profound policy change in America, the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. I mean, it actually plays out at that theater as well. How’s access these days, as far as you know?

LeBrecht: Oh well. I mean, it’s really good. We were up on College Avenue and then moved to downtown Berkeley, which was part of the downtown revitalization of the time in the very early 1980s and oh, the access was great. Initially, they hadn’t raised the money for the elevator. The elevator shaft was there [laughs] a very, very nice elevator shaft [LeBrecht says sarcastically]. There was a board member who knew me, and when she found out that the elevator wasn’t there, the story goes that she said, ‘Look, I’m putting up half the money, and the rest of the board needs to pony up right now.’ And so, yeah, and they built another theater, and the access is fantastic. And look, when we talk about access for people, especially with disabilities, you know, it’s not just like, can you sit in the audience, but are you in the green room? Are you in the dressing rooms with the other actors? You know, how can you get around backstage, or even maybe up in the lighting grid? Accessibility, for me, is something that I’ve been really focused on advocating for in film festivals and other venues, because places like film festivals are how you network with people. It’s how you meet people if you are trying to have a career in the film industry. What I realized also is that it wasn’t just about people with disabilities being able to get into a room or to hear a panel at a festival, but it’s like, you want me in the room. I’ve worked in in film for 30 years. So it’s a two way street. It isn’t just like, you know, quote, unquote, “we’re going to help people with disabilities.” It’s like you’re getting access to people like myself and so many other people with disabilities who are really at the top of their craft.

Brancaccio: A film festival is, among other things, a location for networking, which can help people with their career, and if it’s inaccessible, it can hurt people’s career.

LeBrecht: Yeah, first off, if you’re not there, they don’t know about you, right? I mean, it’s pretty basic. But also, if it’s a struggle, or it seems like it’s really difficult, you know, sends a message that, ‘Gee, well, I don’t think this person could do the job, because look how tough it’s been for them to, like, get around.’ I mean, this may not be the best example, but I will say that for years, I had been asking Sundance Film Festival to make their filmmakers lounge accessible. It was up three flights of stairs, and they were fairly steep. And I just wasn’t getting anybody to really take this seriously. And then when Nicole [Newnham, co-director and co-producer of “Crip Camp”] and I were working on “Crip Camp” and we were at the festival in 2018 Nicole contacted Keri Putnam, who is the head of the institute at the time, and said, ‘There’s things that I can do that Jim can’t do.’ And so what wound up happening that year is that she had a number of the panels moved out of the filmmakers lodge into accessible locations. And then when Nicole and I had the honor of being the opening night film at Sundance in 2020 there had been an elevator installed up to the filmmakers lodge. I mean, that was, you know, really wonderful. And of course, as these things go Nicole and I are in the elevator and we’re going up and the door won’t open on the top floor [laughs]. It eventually opened up up there. But that kind of irony just seems to kind of happen all the time.

Brancaccio: Unfortunately. Tell me about some of your work here in 2024. Lot of creative work, but also work with some nonprofits that you’ve helped found. 1IN4 coalition, that’s 25% of people have either visible or hidden disabilities.

LeBrecht: Yeah, that’s right. Although the representation in the entertainment industry is so much lower, especially when you’re looking at, you know, the characters that you see in front of the camera. I mean, we typically make up, you know, less than 2% if we’re lucky. And then the employment of actors with disabilities and then them getting roles is, you know, much, much lower than our representation in society in general. So the “one in four” coalition was pulled together by a wonderful talent manager, Eryn Brown. She had been dealing with so many issues herself, as somebody with a mobility issue, and gathered these really wonderful professionals. And so 1IN4 Coalition really focuses their work on things like festival accessibility, but also working with agencies and working with casting directors and also with studios and doing things like developing a rubric that kind of is a guide about how good is your representation of people with disabilities. We were at the “Barbie” premiere, and 1IN4 Coalition helped, kind of at the last minute. Margot Robbie wanted a bunch of influencers from the disability community to be at that opening — that was so meaningful. And that’s the kind of work that they do.

Brancaccio: And you also do work with other documentary filmmakers with disabilities…

LeBrecht: Yeah, I’m one of the co-founders of Forward Doc, which we spell out as FWD, dash, DOC.org, and we are a group of documentary filmmakers with disabilities and our allies, and we’ve been around for about four years, we have really focused on trying to support people in again, this networking at film events or film festivals. We have over 1,000 members now internationally, and it’s a really wonderful community of people that get to collaborate. And in our earliest beginnings, we were at the International Documentary Association’s Getting Real conference, and I was able to get a panel with documentary filmmakers with disabilities. And then we went into an adjacent room afterwards, and in that room were about 40 people, and many of these people with disabilities had never met anybody else who was making film that had a disability. And out of that, kind of a core of us got together and built this organization.

Brancaccio: One of the issues that nonprofit tries to confront is just what are the narratives about people with disabilities that you’re seeing in some of these creative productions, some of these films, some of these TV shows. Trying to point out things like objectifying people with disabilities or worse.

LeBrecht: That’s absolutely right. You know, people working in documentaries to work on narrative and vice versa. So there’s really a wonderful synergy between these two organizations. But the fact of the matter, I believe that the success of “Crip Camp,” first off, the quality of the work that the whole team put together, but it’s the authenticity of this story. And so this is, you know, a film in which the disability story is being told by people with disabilities. And the authenticity, I think, was really the driver that made this such a vibrant and entertaining documentary. But so here’s the deal, it’s really hard to get any project on the air or into a movie theater, especially at the current kind of economic situation where, you know, streamers are not spending the kind of money that they were a couple of years ago. No one seems to want to take a risk, and they call it a risk, I call it an opportunity. We know where the stories are, and it’s not like, you know, oh, disability, this is going to be so sad. Well, as anybody who ever saw “Crip Camp” knows, there’s a lot of joy and humor in that film, and so our community is really creating projects that really look at disability in a heightened level. I think that the biggest barriers that we face as a community is incredibly low expectations, or people would rather ignore us or dismiss us, and we, as for my life, have moved from looking at disability as purely a medical situation and really what we call the social model. It’s about civil rights. It’s about human rights.