THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602080032
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ALEXANDRIA BERGER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
WHEN I was growing up, every motion picture had to be passed by a censor board before it was shown in theaters. Anything viewed as unfit for public consumption wound up on the cutting-room floor.
Abject violence, blood, gore, mutilations, breasts, bottoms and sex got cut - sometimes leaving bizarre gaps in films. Showing real deformities, unless taken from classic literature, like ``The Hunchback of Notre Dame,'' was not permitted.
Real people were not deformed, disabled or handicapped, except maybe blind (Jennifer Jones in ``Johnny Belinda''); or famous, blind and deaf (Patty Duke in ``The Helen Keller Story''); or wealthy, romantically inclined and accident prone (Deborah Kerr in ``An Affair to Remember''). Who could forget?
I viewed myself as privileged back then, because my dad was chairman of the Motion Picture Censor Board. On Saturday afternoons, we'd ``screen'' movies in his office screening room, before they were released. I was a teen-age movie freak with access.
Having been a judge, my father strictly interpreted the law. He believed motion picture censorship was unconstitutional and illegal. Then along came a film entitled ``The Moon Is Blue,'' about a teen-age ingenue who falls madly in love with an older man. The Maryland Supreme Court temporarily banned the film. Other states followed suit. A public battle ensued. When the film was released, it had been cut to shreds.
In the months afterward, frustrated, Dad wrote a legal opinion on the unconstitutionality of motion picture censorship, paving the way for today's rating system. This also paved the way for blood, gore, sadistic violence, overexposed breasts and bottoms - a down side to freedom and an affront to good taste.
However, motion picture freedom has also given us real stories, visually capturing real triumphs. Handicapped, disabled and disfigured actors have depicted issues the government once thought were too painful for us to see. They have even become Academy Award winners.
Tom Cruise, a war-injured paraplegic in the Oscar-winning ``Born on the Fourth of July,'' painted a realistic picture of adapting to physical and emotional trauma. Jon Voight and Jane Fonda showed us how unexpected disability can unravel relationships in ``Coming Home.''
``My Left Foot'' became highly acclaimed, and its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, won an Academy Award portraying the Irish author Christy Brown, who was severely handicapped all his life. ``The Elephant Man,'' a film about von Recklinghausen's disease (bodily deformities caused by multiple tumors called neurofibromas) vividly recounted human inequities that the disfigured suffer.
``Mask'' gave us a similar view from the teenage perspective. In ``Man Without a Face,'' a cosmetically disfigured Mel Gibson shows us how children see past all handicaps when fear is taken away and replaced with propinquity. The list goes on ``like a box of chocolates'' - all the way to ``Forrest Gump,'' in which the title character overcame a childhood handicap and a double-amputee veteran recovered his self-respect.
So what's wrong with this picture?
It's that Hollywood hasn't, won't or doesn't think it needs to hire real handicapped, disabled or disfigured actors and actresses - talented men and women who don't need to imitate life situations because they already know them intimately and can act the mechanics of disability impeccably.
Although deaf actress Marlee Matlin broke through the Hollywood sound barrier, we're still a long way from hiring a wheelchair-bound actor to play a starring role as a wheelchair-bound actor. I'll bet Christopher Reeve, Annette Funicello and Richard Pryor, now navigating through life sitting down, would stand up if they could, shouting for Hollywood to get real.
By not hiring handicapped performers, Hollywood teaches us that being handicapped is something to be artificially played out on film, a temporary acting circumstance, terminated by shouting, ``Cut!'' Now, as in the past, the industry is still battling censorship. Only this time, it's about a category of people, not legal opinions. MEMO: Write to Alexandria Berger in care of Real Life, The Virginian-Pilot,
150 W. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk, Va. 23510. by CNB