|
 Music
Within -
Disability and Employment on
the Big Screen
For over two decades, like Johnny Appleseed,
he has wandered the fields of corporate America (and Canada)
- sowing seeds of new perspectives and fresh insights on the
productive and rightful participation of people with
disabilities in the workplace. In the assault against
attitudinal barriers in the workplace, he is a one-man
S.W.A.T. team. Beyond his personal impact, he developed a
revolutionary tool, the Windmills Attitudinal Training
Program, which has enabled thousands of corporate
trainers, job developers and disability advocates to
effectively make their own inroads against discriminatory
workplace practices. His name is Richard Pimentel.
I remember being at a conference twenty years
ago and hearing loud waves of laughter coming from the room
next door. When the session ended, I saw a colleague coming
out and asked him; “Well, that guy is obviously funny, but
does he have anything to say?” My friend gave me a grave
look and replied; “He sure does. That was the most amazing
presentation I have ever heard.” And so began my own
campaign to get Richard in front of as many employers as
possible. Over my years in this field, I have never seen
anyone who could so quickly connect with a crowd of
employers, so readily engage them, so thoroughly entertain
them, and so successfully have them leave the room with eyes
newly-opened to the possibilities of people with
disabilities as prospective employees.
When, a couple of years ago, Richard told me
that there was interest in making a movie about his life I
was pretty skeptical. After all, how many people, who aren’t
the Queen of England, have a movie made about them while
they are still alive? Fortunately, my skepticism was
ill-founded and “Music Within”, a movie based on
Richard’s life, will open in selected theaters next month.
Certain that almost everyone who regularly reads this
newsletter will want to see it (and make sure that it is
seen by their friends, families and colleagues), I invited
Richard to share some of his thoughts with us.
~ Rob McInnes
RM:
Richard, a large part of Music Within is focused on
your crusade with Windmills - the attitudinal
training program that you developed for employers. From my
own work, I believe that Windmills has been one of
the most important influences in the opening North American
workplaces to workers with disabilities. You must be very
proud of the impact that you have had through it.
 Richard
Pimentel:
A good
friend of mine once said “Greatness can only be seen through
the rearview mirror. You never see it through the front
windshield.” Ultimately what we do on a day-to-day basis is
just try to stay on the road. I feel that way about
Windmills. Years ago, I was a job developer in Portland.
I was trying to find jobs for people with disabilities. I
would talk to employers and find that they had these
attitude problems. I would take my time to educate each of
them. Eventually, I just got tired. I couldn’t continue to
give the same message to dozens of individuals every day. I
decided to put it into a training program that I could use
to educate several people at the same time. I would give
these talks to groups of employers and then I would follow
up with each of them – trying to get them to hire my
job-seekers.
Some
employer in Portland had heard my presentation and reported
to his national headquarters that it was a really neat
training program. This somehow got to the California
Governor’s Committee for the Employment of People with
Disabilities who wanted me to develop it into a full-blown
training program. I took a year off and wrote Windmills.
It came out with perfect timing. The disability movement was
just picking up steam but there was no strong employer
component to it. It was like a missing piece of the puzzle
and it exploded! I saw this little thing that I had
designed, just to help me place a caseload of about thirty
people with disabilities into jobs, suddenly become the
corporate training tool for companies like ARCO and IBM.
Clarence Thomas invited to me train all the investigators
for the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As
part of the momentum of the entire disability movement, it
was a huge roller-coaster ride.
RM: In
Music Within your mentor, Ben Padrow, tells you not
to focus on getting people to change their minds about
people with disabilities, but to change their minds about
themselves. How is that reflected in the Windmills
program?
Richard Pimentel:
In the earliest days of disability training we had
“imitative training.” Trainers would come in and tell
employers they were going to make all their people sensitive
to disability. They would put non-disabled employees in
wheelchairs. They would blindfold them. They would put
earmuffs on them. They would tell them “You are now
paraplegic, blind or deaf.” And they would have to go
through their day that way. At the end of the day, those
employees would shed those devices and say “Boy, poor people
with disabilities. Let me write you a check.” What we didn’t
see was that they weren’t hiring anyone. Those trainings
elicited sympathy – not empathy. They focused on getting
employers to do something for people with
disabilities – rather than encouraging them to do things
with people with disabilities.
When
we entered the picture, we first asked “Why are employers
reluctant to hire people with disabilities?” Overwhelmingly,
we received the answer: “Employers lack confidence in the
ability of people with disability to do the job”. In
response, the disability community passed around things like
the DuPont study which showed that, on the job, people with
disabilities performed as well or better than their
non-disabled counterparts. They passed around testimonials
about how great this blind guy, or this deaf girl were on
the job. But still employers weren’t hiring people.
 I
talked about this with a lot of people. Then one day I had
this epiphany: Employers are not reluctant to hire people
with disabilities because they have a lack of confidence in
the ability of people with disabilities. In fact, it is
because they have a lack of confidence in their own ability
to work effectively with people with disabilities. Once I
realized that, we diverted Windmills away from
teaching employers everything they ever wanted to know about
being blind, deaf, etc. and we made it an exploration of how
people make decisions, why people react in certain ways, why
the good skills you already have in working with people are
the same skills that will allow you to work effectively with
people with disabilities – and why you are afraid to do it.
As soon as we shifted away from “We want you to feel better
about these people” to “We want you to feel better about
yourself” we began building the confidence of employers in
themselves. That resulted in interviews, that
resulted in hires, and that resulted in retention.
You
are right, that one line from Ben Padrow is really the key
to Windmills, its Rosetta Stone. I think it was the
most important line in the whole movie. If we had not come
to that realization, Windmills would have just been
another stupid program that, at the end of the day, left
employers saying “Boy, this was a wonderful experience, but
I really don’t want to hire one of these people because it
is too hard”.
RM:
So, Windmills really doesn’t educate employers about
people with disabilities – as much as it educates them about
themselves.
Richard Pimentel:
Yes,
that is our philosophy exactly: There is nothing wrong with
people with disabilities. There is something wrong with the
way that we react to them. The focus can’t be that you go to
employers and say “Let me tell you why you are wrong about
people with disabilities having something wrong with them.”
No, you say; “Let’s talk about why we react the way we do...
and if you look at it in a different way, if you react in a
different way, what more can you accomplish?” That is the
key to the whole program.
RM:
Your old friend Art Honeyman is a central figure in the
story and his portrayal by Michael Sheen was amazing to
watch. Michael was brilliant as Tony Blair in The Queen,
but how was he chosen for this role?
 Richard
Pimentel:
The
most physically-impaired person in the movie, of course, is
Art. Yet, if you look at it carefully, he is the only
“normal” person in the film. Everyone, including myself, is
fundamentally flawed. He is the only one that has his act
together.
The
key to casting Michael was that we weren’t looking for
someone to play an individual with cerebral palsy. That
would have been easy. We had to find the right actor to play
Art Honeyman – a real person. When this thing first came
about, I was insistent that people with cerebral palsy be
auditioned for the role and, in the case of a dead heat with
an non-disabled actor, that the person with cerebral palsy
would get the role. Michael, however, nailed the portrayal
of Art. People who know Art Honeyman, who have seen this
movie, think that they have been put in a time machine and
sent back to the 60’s. Throughout the making of the movie,
Michael and Art became quick friends. Art taught Mike how to
move and even how to drive his foot-guided electric
wheelchair. In his portrayal, Michael was Art.
We
bent over backwards to hire someone with cerebral palsy to
play Art, but in the end, we had to go back to what I have
been preaching all my life: “People with disabilities, like
everyone else, have the right to be considered for every job
but, ultimately, everyone has to be hired based on their own
ability to do the job. A disability is not inherently a
qualification.” In hiring Michael, we just hired the
best-qualified person to do the job.
RM: In
Music Within, we learn a little about your experience
as a disabled veteran of the Vietnam War – and your early
work in developing jobs for other disabled vets. Do you
think that theme will resonate with today’s audiences?
Richard Pimentel:
The
movie did portray some of my experience as a Vietnam vet. I
wouldn’t abandon my fallen comrades on the battlefield and I
wouldn’t abandon them at home either. The parallel between
Vietnam and Iraq is very real. We have soldiers fighting an
unpopular and controversial war. We have very strong
feelings on both sides. I personally don’t care how anyone
feels about the war, but I do care what we feel about the
warriors. We are going to get about 100,000 soldiers back
this year. We have record numbers of soldiers with traumatic
stress disorders. We have unbelievable numbers of soldiers
with traumatic brain injuries and we have huge numbers of
soldiers with amputations. I don’t want the veterans of this
war to come back and face the same lack of opportunity that
Vietnam vets faced. I want employers who see this movie to
be aware that injured veterans have valuable skills too.
RM:
One last question about Music Within… what are your
hopes for it? You designed the Windmills program that
is featured in it. It is your life story, but it is
communicating a strong message. What are you hoping that it
will be able to accomplish?
Richard Pimentel:
At
first, as I started writing down my life story for the
movie, I was really concerned about selling myself as the
hero – because that seemed so wrong. As I actually began to
write, however, I stopped worrying about being the hero and
became worried about being the villain in my own life. After
a while, however, I realized that I was neither the hero nor
the villain, but barely even the protagonist. It became not
the life story of Richard Pimentel, but the life story of
the disability movement as seen through the eyes of Richard
Pimentel. The story is about the movement – using Art and
myself as the mirror.
 I
am truly hoping that seeing the movie will be a little like
attending a Windmills training – that people will see
it and come away saying “I understand.” - that people will
come away with their perspectives on people with
disabilities changed. I want employers to see it. I want
teachers to see it. I want parents of kids with disabilities
to see it. What I really want is for young people with
disabilities to see it. I want young people with
disabilities to know their history. I want them to know that
there were people like Art Honeyman who were willing to go
to jail. I want them to know where they came from - because
they have so many more places to go. They need to know that
they are a step in a longer journey. They need to know that
something happened before them, that something is going to
happen after them, and that they are playing a part in it
all.
To me
personally, Music Within is a blessing beyond belief.
This movie captures my journey and everything I have stood
for. As I get older and unable to teach as many people as I
do now, like an ancient prehistoric bee frozen in rosin,
people can pick it out and look at me! I hope that viewers
will realize, as I have come to, that, ultimately, the only
real accomplishments in life are the differences that you
make in the lives of the individuals who you meet and touch.
© Rob
McInnes, Diversity World, September, 2007 (If not used for
commercial purposes, this article may be reproduced, all or
in part, providing it is credited to "Rob McInnes, Diversity
World - www.diversityworld.com". If included in a newsletter
or other publication, we would appreciate receiving a copy.)
Visit the Music Within website and watch the trailer:
http://www.musicwithinmovie.com
Learn more about Richard Pimentel:
http://www.miltwright.com/_richard_pimentel/index.htm
Opening cities and dates (For information on group tickets,
promotional e-cards and
postcards, please email
mwright@miltwright.com.)
|
Opening Date: October 26, 2007 |
Opening Date: November 9, 2007 |
-
New York City:
AMC Empire, AMC Village 7
-
Los Angeles:
Mann's Chinese,
AMC Century City
-
Chicago:
AMC River East
-
San Francisco:
AMC Metreon
-
Dallas:
AMC North Park
-
Washington DC:
Regal Gallery Place,
AMC Sherlington 7
-
Minneapolis:
AMC Eden Prairie
-
Boston:
AMC Boston Commons
-
Boise:
Regal Boise Stadium
|
-
Philadelphia:
Ritz, AMC Neschaminy
-
Houston:
AMC Gulfport 30
-
Seattle:
Regal Meridian
-
Miami:
AMC Aventura
-
St Louis:
AMC West Olive
-
San Diego:
AMC Mission Valley
-
Portland:
Regal Fox Tower,
AMC Bridgeport Village-CCS
-
Rochester:
Regal Henrietta 18
-
Phoenix:
AMC Esplanade
|
|
AWARDS:
Promoting Access and Inclusion
RECRUITING:
Online Job Matching for Students with Disabilities
RECRUITING:
New Online Job Matching site in Canada
SELF
EMPLOYMENT: 
LEGAL:
Americans with Disabilities Act Restoration
AFFILIATION:
Deaf Professional Network
EVENT: Vermont’s
Conversion Institute 
EVENT: 2007
Canadian Supported Employment Conference
EVENT:
National ADA Symposium & Expo