Wait Until Dark, 1967 (Movie Still)
“As people with disabilities, we already live a isolated life and so to have pictures on the big screen that doesn’t tell the truth and paints this picture that you would rather be killed or cured then to live your life as a person with a disability. I think it’s literally a death sentence every time you show a movie like that” - Candace Coleman
“We don’t have a lot of clean resolutions, a lot of things are sloppy endings and untied frayed edges, so it’s hard when you try to squeeze our stories into clean resolutions, they just end up ringing rather hollow a lot of times.”
- Mike Ervin
“I want to see the American that I see on the street, I want to see that on the screen. I want the American stage to look like America. I don’t see that.” - Tsehaye Hébert
“I think that’s a great thing for any community, any disability group, I mean we finally have, we have the ability to tell our own stories, without the filter of those outside the community.” - Crom Saunders
“We need to get Hollywood to help us be real, because they spend far too much time pretending that we're not real and convincing other people of that.” - Mat Fraser
“I had to work out accepting who I was, and it was because of Heidi that I had that goofy notion in my head, that “Oh yeah, one day I’ll be normal!” kind of thing. It was terrible.”
- Tekki Lomnicki
The Soloist, 2009 (Movie Still)
“Movies have always been painful because everything I saw growing up, everything -whether it’s television or movies, the occasional play - every single thing’s a refutation of who I was. That I never saw anybody who really looked like me.” - Riva Lehrer
The Theory of Everything, 2014 (Movie Still)
“There are a lot of bad actors out there, and people are acting in bad faith that are putting...patently false messages and information out to the world about things that they know nothing about and they choose to remain ignorant of...because it'll give them a buck. It'll guarantee an audience. It'll be titillating. It'll be...it'll be come one, come all, freak show!” - Tommy Heffron
“What the code of the freaks reminds us is that there is strength in solidarity. Disability – “freakdom” – used to be just a diagnosis. But now, it means so much more. It means identity. It means community. It means history. No one’s afraid to be the outsider anymore.”
- Lawrence Carter-Long
“The way that these narratives work out, they almost get played out in real life. They end up limiting our choices; they end up coercing us into certain decisions in our lives that may be more harmful than good.” -Carrie Sandahl
“There are a lot of stereotypes of disability in the movies. In fact, there’s nothing but, and that’s an epiphany when you realize suddenly that it’s all the same movie. It doesn’t matter what happens in the movie.” - Susan Nussbaum
“As a disabled viewer you have to watch these films in some ways with an edge, it’s a kind of survival strategy, I guess, where you pick out these things that the films do that are so absurd.” - Aly Patsavas
“Instead of following our lives, it's all about either overcoming disability, or using a disability to explain something else, like using a disability to empower non-disabled people, or using disability to explain what's going on in the world in general.” - TJ Gordon
Code of the Freaks, a feature-length documentary, is a radical reframing of the use of disabled characters in film. From The Fake Beggar (1895), Of Mice and Men (1939) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) to more contemporary films like Million Dollar Baby, Forrest Gump, Avatar, Fences and Me Before You, Hollywood continues to crank out all the old disability clichés and hollow inspirational narratives – what disability activists call “inspiration porn” – that have served so well for more than a century. Code of the Freaks (the title is a line from Tod Browning’s 1932 classic Freaks) counters these formulaic entertainments with a powerful corrective: it dares to imagine a cinematic landscape that takes disabled people seriously.
Code of the Freaks is well timed to intervene in an emerging international conversation about inclusion and representation. Social media has elevated the disability community’s critique of Hollywood’s casting decisions and the exclusion of disabled people from the film industry. John Krasinski’s insistence on casting a Deaf actor in A Quiet Place (2018) shows that some in the industry have begun to take heed. Code of the Freaks offers audiences a visual and narrative example of what it means to center the voices of disabled people, and shifts the conversation from the largely superficial issue of casting to the stories themselves.
The 13 unprecedented voices and perspectives featured in Code of the Freaks include actor, writer, performance artist and musician Mat Fraser, best known for his role in American Horror Story; Lawrence Carter-Long, host of Turner Classics Presents - The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film; painter Riva Lehrer, whose memoir, Golem Girl, will be released in October 2020; Susan Nussbaum, author of the award-winning novel Good Kings/Bad Kings; and writer Mike Ervin, whose blog Smart Ass Cripple was once dubbed by the late film critic Roger Ebert “some of the fiercest and most useful satire on the web.”
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