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(This is one of an ongoing series of articles on actors and performers with disabilities.)

Organizer Brings Determination
- and Change - to Acting Industry

By Kathi Wolfe

Growing up in Los Angeles, Tari Hartman Squire was always interested in acting. While in high school, she filmed a commercial for Clairol and eventually became a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).

In 1979, while in graduate school, the arc of her life changed when one of the abused children with whom she was working kicked her and sprained the cervical part of her spine, Squire wrote in an e-mail. “Wearing a neck brace, (I) went out on an audition at Fox, and the casting director looked at me, shook her head and walked away.” (Her disability turned out to be temporary.)

It was the first time she’d ever experienced discrimination, Squire said in a telephone interview. “I was angry,” she said. “But if you can channel your anger into organizing, you can work for change.

“Furious from this maiden voyage into the world of discrimination,” Squire said, she met with then-SAG president William Schallert, famous for playing the father on TV’s “The Patty Duke Show,” to find out if the union had any actors with disabilities. They searched “Station 12” (SAG’s “skills and talent” survey), a clearinghouse for casting directors looking for performers with unique skills.

Pictured left to right: Karen Tamely, Commissioner, Chicago Mayor’s Office on Disability; Tari Hartman Squire, EINSOFcommunications.com; Linda Mastandrea, ATT Advisory Panel; Zena Naiditch, President & CEO Equip for Equality

“No one knew why, but ‘handicapped’ (the word used then) was one of the listings,” Squire said. “We ran a search, and we discovered that the guild did have members with disabilities. There were actors who were blind (and) deaf, and (there were) little people.”

Encouraged by these findings, Squire and Schallert reached out to two other key unions: the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA/Actors’ Equity) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). (According to Squire, SAG represents actors working in films; AEA represents stage actors; and AFTRA represents performers, broadcasters and recording artists in television and radio.)

Actors with disabilities from all three unions had a meeting, Squire said. “We felt these actors would have issues in common. Were blind actors at auditions receiving their scripts in alternative formats (then audio tape and Braille)? Were there qualified sign language interpreters at auditions? Were auditions wheelchair accessible?”

That meeting took place in 1980 after a period of union strikes. After the SAG contract was signed, “disability was (for the first time) mentioned in the non-discrimination and affirmative action clauses (along with other marginalized groups: women, seniors and ‘minorities’ – the term used then) to more accurately portray the American scene,” Squire said. That was a huge breakthrough, as it was a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act, she added.

What does it mean to “more accurately portray the American scene”? It means to show a more “realistic” depiction of people with disabilities in the entertainment media, to have characters with disabilities working, getting dressed, hanging out with friends, dating – things that all those with disabilities do in everyday life, Squire said.

“Children of a Lesser God,” starring deaf performer Phyllis Frelich, opened on Broadway in 1980, and Frelich won the Tony Award for best actress. After that, “people could no longer say they couldn’t find actors who were deaf,” said Squire, now CEO of Ein Sof Communications Inc., a marketing and public relations firm specializing in diversity, disability and public policy.

Deaf all her life, Frelich dreamed of becoming an actress. In 1980, she won a Tony Award winner for the Most Outstanding Performance by an Actress for her role in the play "Children of a Lesser God," Phyllis Frelich is an exceptional woman.

During that time, the casting clearinghouse received a call for an actor with one leg, Squire said. “We found one! It was fabulous! We set a precedent. They (producers, directors and others) couldn’t use the excuse ‘we can’t find any actors with disabilities.’”

Spurred on, Squire continued her organizing. She helped to form the SAG, AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Committee of Performers with Disabilities, after which, in 1981, she went on to become the founding executive director of the Media Access Office. Under her direction, the office began not only to distribute Media Access Awards honoring the media and entertainment industry, but to serve “as a true liaison between the disability community and the entertainment industry,” Squire said.

In the early 1980s, there were signs of progress, Squire said. Actress and comedienne Geri Jewell, whose book “I’m Walking as Straight as I Can” is out this spring, landed a recurring guest-star gig on the hit sitcom “The Facts of Life.” (Jewell was the first person with a visible disability to appear on prime-time TV.)

At that time, “there was a television remake of the movie ‘Johnny Belinda.’ They cast it with a hearing actress,” Squire said. “We did some advocacy work. They couldn’t recast it, but they promised to do things differently in the future – to start looking for actors with disabilities.”

If this had been a Hollywood movie, everything would have ended happily ever after. But in real life, that’s not what happened. Despite the breakthroughs of the early 1980s, many actors and performers with disabilities, because of discrimination, have been unemployed or underemployed over the past 30 years, Squire and others in the industry said.

Jewell, for example, though highly talented, had few acting gigs between “The Facts of Life” and her work on the HBO western “Deadwood” (2004-2006). Though there are 54 million Americans with disabilities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, “realistic” characters with disabilities have remained, by and large, invisible from American TV, stage and screen.

A 2005 Screen Actors Guild survey of performers with disabilities in the entertainment industry documented how dismal employment prospects have been for those actors. The research -- conducted by Olivia Raynor, Ph.D., and Katharine Hayward, Ph.D., M.P.H. from the National Arts and Disability Center at the University of California, Los Angeles – demonstrated the following findings:

-- Only one-half of one percent of words spoken on TV are said by a person with a disability.

-- 56 percent of background performers with disabilities earn less than $1,000 a year.

-- More than one-third of those surveyed said they’d experienced some type of workplace discrimination, such as not being cast for a role or being refused an audition because of their disability.

In recent years, actors and performers with disabilities, along with their allies, became determined to change this situation. In 2008, the Performers with Disabilities Tri-Union Committee (of SAG, AFTRA and AEA) launched the I AM PWD (Inclusion in the Arts and Media of Performers with Disabilities) campaign. The campaign works to increase employment opportunities for actors, broadcasters and sound recording artists in the entertainment and news media.

“The normal struggles any performer faces … are complicated tenfold by our industry’s reluctance to include people with disabilities in the full landscape of entertainment,” said “CSI” star and I AM PWD chair Robert David Hall. “Society’s values and priorities are ... reflected in film, television, theater, news and music.

“If you aren’t seen and heard, you’re invisible,” added Hall, a double amputee who walks with prosthetic legs. “People with disabilities are largely invisible within the arts and media landscape.”

It’s still difficult for performers with disabilities to get traction, Squire said, “but there’s been some significant progress.”

One encouraging example of this progress, she said, was an event held last July called Lights! Camera! Access! The gathering was hosted by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Disability Employment Policy. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis issued a “call to action” to the entertainment industry. Assistant Secretary for Disability Employment Policy Kathleen Martinez, who is blind, issued a “soft challenge” calling for increased employment opportunities “in front of the camera and behind the scenes,” Squire said.

“It is my hope that the Labor Department, Congress and our partners in the private sector will help open doors for people with disabilities to join growing careers like those in the entertainment industry,” Solis said at the gathering.

As a result of Lights! Camera! Access!, NBC Universal (now Comcast) brought in 45 recent graduates and veterans with disabilities for resume review and “speed interviewing,” Squire said. “It was a first. It was phenomenal.”

Yet, even with this increased visibility, the majority of performers with disabilities still encounter discrimination. “Much more work needs to be done,” Squire said.

Kathi Wolfe is a Washington, D.C.-area based writer and poet who writes frequently on disability issues.

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