All About Change - Season 4, Episode 2: Holiday Special Featuring Acclaimed Filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly Part 1

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Check out the two-part holiday special of All Inclusive with Jay Ruderman featuring award-winning film directors and producers, Peter and Bobby Farrelly! Join Jay, Peter, and Bobby as they discuss inclusion in the entertainment industry and why authentic representation of people with disabilities is so important! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Authentic representation in the entertainment industry of people with disabilities is something that the Ruderman Family Foundation has been involved with for some time now. While there have been some improvements lately, such as at the Sundance Film Festival making Crip Camp, a movie about summer camp for people with disabilities in the 1970s, and the disability rights movement, a major piece of their festival this year, and Zach Godeskin presenting an award at the Oscars in February, Hollywood is still lagging behind when it comes to the inclusion of people with disabilities. All Inclusive, a podcast on inclusion, innovation, and social justice with Jay Ruderman.

I'm Jay Ruderman, host of All Inclusive, and we have with us today two people who have always made inclusion for people with disabilities an important aspect in their movies. Acclaimed filmmakers and Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion honorees Peter and Bobby Farrelly. I'm also excited to announce that we're running a giveaway right now to spread some joy during this season. From December 14th to January 15th,

we're giving away one iPad per week for five weeks. That's five iPads. To enter, you simply go to my Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, at Jay Rudiman, follow me, and comment on the weekly contest post with the hashtag, All Inclusive iPad Contest.

To enter to win. We'll draw a random winner each Friday. So enter now. You must be 18 or over and in the United States to participate. Okay, so welcome welcome Peter and Bobby. And you guys grew up in Rhode Island and became acclaimed filmmakers. Tell me how it happened, how you guys started out and how you got into the business. The general way we tell the story is we had the ability to fail a lot early on in life.

And so when we decided, you know, in our 20s to go out to L.A. and start writing, nobody tried to stop us. You know, normally, like I remember I talked to a buddy of mine who went to Yale. He was like, you know, one of the top guys in our school class in high school. And he said once he went to Yale, he was on a path. He had to go, you know, he was either going to business school or law school certain track it's hard to hop off that track and then say hey I want to you know take a wild risk and go make movies we we weren't on any tracks so when we did it when we said hey with mom dad we're gonna go to you know start writing movies see what happens they were like awesome good. You know, there was nothing else going on. So that was kind of our advantage. Honestly, like I always tell

kids when I speak at high schools and colleges that, you know, success can, I mean, failure can be your friend a lot. You know, it pivots you, it changes your direction in ways that may ultimately turn out well for you. But also as, you know, when we were in high school and college, Pete, I remember that you were studying accounting, and I was studying geology in college. We had no idea that 10 years later we'd be filmmakers. We literally didn't, it never even crossed our minds. So that's what he's talking about,

is that the path that we were going down just didn't work out for us, so we tried something new. It wasn't until our mid to late 20s that all of this started to happen for us. There was a lot of flailing for a little bit. I remember at that time of life, we didn't know what was going on with ourselves, really, but we were having fun.

And, you know, it brought us to L.A. and we, what we were doing was kind of exciting when we started writing screenplays. Yeah, even, it took us nine years to get a movie made, but in that nine years, those nine years, we were selling scripts and meeting people and getting better as writers, and it was fun. We had a great time. It wasn't a hard time. People say, boy, this must have been tough years. No, they were the best years. It was fun. We had a great time. It wasn't a hard time. People say, boy, this must have been tough years. No, they were the best years. It was great. We were waiting tables and driving limos

and all that too, you know, certainly a little bit, but it was all a lot of fun. Yeah. It was. I remember, if I could say one thing,

I remember the first time it ever occurred to me that, hey, maybe we could do that and I think it's when Airplane came out and I think that's 1980 or 79 80 something like that and I remember thinking I saw the guys the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrams on

Letterman or one of those shows and they just seemed like normal guys like I had always had an image of what a writer would be like is sort of different than me and I thought well those are guys like us and we tell jokes jokes. And what if we... Where were they from? Wisconsin? We're from Wisconsin. Milwaukee or something like that? I remember that was the seed where I started thinking, it's doable. And then a few years later, when I got the courage, went for it.

So were you involved in comedy before you started writing? No, not remotely. And just how did you get into writing? Were you always good writers? I mean, it takes a lot of discipline to write something and bring it to fruition. I got to hand it to Pete here in that when we were doing that thing where we were flailing at our jobs, he did just say, hey, you know what, I'm going to try something new in my life. And he quit his job and dedicated himself to writing a book. And that's what got the writing off and running. And our parents and everyone was like, what?

You're not a writer, are you? And everybody goes, well, I want to be. And so that was it. So you sat down and wrote. No, we weren't good writers. We got better as we went along but like in in high school or any school grammar school i never wrote a fictional paper nobody ever said hey make up a story which i could have done well i think it was always you know you had to do an essay or something that you know book report or that and that kind of writing to this day i'm not

good at uh so uh there was no indication that we could write, no. So what was the first thing that brought you out to the West Coast? I was in grad school in New York, and my buddy and I, Bennett Yellen, we wrote a screenplay. We decided, I was working on a book, he was working on a book of short stories, and we realized you can't make a living doing this. Like at that time, if you sold a book, you'd get $5,000 or $10,000. And it takes two, three years to write a book. So it wasn't a living.

But we knew that screenplays sold for more, so we kicked off a screenplay. It was called Dust to Dust. And it was about two dumb guys who work at a down-and-out funeral parlor. Like they had layaway sales and don't get buried with high prices. And basically it was Harry and Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber. It was those two characters.

And we wrote this thing about these guys working at a down-and-out funeral parlor who pick up a load of, it was supposed to be a body, but it's loaded with coke, and they don't go where they're supposed to go because they're, you know, idiots, and they go all over town. They've got bad guys chasing them. And it had some laughs in it, and the Zucker Brothers and Eddie Murphy Productions simultaneously wanted the script. chasing him and uh it had some laughs in it and the zucker brothers and um eddie murphy productions simultaneously wanted wanted the script so they um the zuckers flew us out and when we landed we

had two jobs we had job uh can you remind me how they got the script you know the zucker brothers yeah the zucker brothers yeah it was uh it was like just pure luck the The Zucker brothers, Jim Abrams, I mean, Jerry Zucker was in a Hebrew dance class with Bennett Yellen's sister. They were Orthodox Jewish, the Yellens. And they had a Hebrew dance class. And Bennett had told me, he said, hey, my sister is actually in this dance class with David Zucker. So if we write this script, we can get it to him. That was part of the inspiration. And sure enough write this script, we can get it to him. That was part of the inspiration.

And sure enough, we finished it, we gave it to her, and she gave it to him, and he took it, and he read it. It was miraculous. Simultaneously, I had a date with this girl in New York one night, only time I ever went out with her, and I told her I'd just finished a screenplay. She said, oh, give it to me, because her parents had just moved to Alpine, New Jersey.

And Eddie Murphy lived right next door to her family. And she said, this will give me an excuse to go over and meet Eddie. I want to go say hi. I'll give him your script. I said, excellent. So I gave it to her. Next day, she called me. She said, I gave it to him.

He took it. I said, are you kidding? She said, nope. I saw him up front, ran over, and gave it to him. But I figured he's going to the house, tossing it in the trash. The same week that the Zucker brothers called us and said, hey, we like this. Let's come on out. I was watching Eddie Murphy. I was watching Letterman and Eddie Murphy was on it. And Letterman says, what's this story about your neighbor gave you some kind of script or something?

What's this? And he said, yeah, my neighbor gave me a script and it's really good and we want to do it. And he said the name of it, which is Dust to Dust. And the next day, I called Eddie Murphy Productions in L.A. By the way, I hadn't even written my phone number on the script. And her family was on vacation, so they didn't know how to get in touch with her. And I called them, and they said, yeah, we've been trying to reach you. So it was kind of a mini miracle. We got two deals.

That's a major miracle. So it's a lot of hard work, but a little bit of luck also. Yes. So how did you guys, as brothers, begin to work together? Well, even from the beginning, when I was writing with Bennett, Bobby was in another business, but I'd give him the script, and he'd go through it, and he'd punch it up, and he'd say, cut this, I love this, do that.

He was basically doing a pass on the script for us with no credit. And then finally, after a couple of, once we got out to LA, I called him and I could see he wasn't like, you know, burning it up back home. So I said, why don't you come out and write with us? So then it became a three-way team, me, Bobby, and Bennett. So tell me about growing up with your parents and what influence that had on your life. You do a lot of comedy, but your values come through in your work. So tell me a little bit about growing up and the influence that they had on you.

My father was a, you know, we grew up in what we'd call a small town, rural town in Rhode Island, outside of Providence. And my father was a doctor in town. So he was well-respected and he had a lot of responsibility. And so he certainly made us behave ourselves just so that we didn't embarrass him. But at the same time, he and my mom had a wicked sense of humor. And so at home, we'd always laugh a lot and sit around the dinner table and tell stories about what happened that day.

And it was kind of like a little contest to see who could make each other laugh the most. You know, it was sort of a daily thing. And I don't know. So I think that's where our storytelling came from is just being at home and we were allowed to laugh, but you had to laugh within certain rules because my my father was very strict and you know he wasn't a reverend at all he

was but he was funny but you had to behave there were boundaries yeah but also he was a you know even though my father growing up by the way when we were growing up he was always a republican uh he was extremely liberal in other ways like Like we, every summer, we always had inner city kids staying with us for the summer. And, you know, he was involved in the Fresh Air program. And he, you know, he believed a lot in giving back. Not that all Republicans don't. It's just that he was more liberal than most Republicans, at least today, are in a lot of ways, in the current climate, I'll say. And so there was a lot of diversity, you know, around the house and in our lives and also, you know, in our neighborhood, too. We happen to have, and we've talked about this, a lot of friends with disabilities just coincidentally.

And so we were around it a lot. friends with disabilities just coincidentally. So we were around it a lot. It was a different day and age, as you know, Jay, when your parents would say on a Saturday morning, go on out and be home by dinnertime. So you'd go out and you could go miles away from home. I don't think as many people do that nowadays. You're out a lot, so you would see all the kids in the neighborhood, and some of them were what we would call mentally retarded at the time,

and we'd hang out with them. They'd just be part of the gang. If you were playing touch football, they'd be in it. They'd play with you, and I don't know. I remember growing up with those kids, and when we started writing our stories, we included them and those people in the stories. And I think it was a big part of our writing.

You're listening to All Inclusive with Jay Ruderman. You can learn more. View the show notes and transcripts at rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Please remember to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you are listening. So you were writing based on your background, like how you grew up.

There was no ideological agenda like saying, listen, I really want to push this element of including people with disabilities in our writing, in our movies, just sort of came naturally. Definitely not early on. I mean, we didn't think like that. And it was, when it was brought to our attention that we hadn't been using enough people with disabilities early on in our careers, we realized that was an oversight and then we started yes then we were aware just and not in a huge way it just in a way where just be you know fair you know 20% of the population has

disabilities and if you don't have something like that in your movie it's not a real world for one thing and we were trying to write reality you know we wanted people to recognize the world they were in so it just seemed natural to us um uh but uh and and then we were aware of it but not that aware we weren't you know making a huge statement i will say that now first trying to entertain right but you were receptive to those conversations you weren't just blowing them off because i think a lot of people would blow them off and say, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's not enough representation, but okay, not my issue.

I'm doing something else. No. And it didn't take much. It was one friend of ours who's quadriplegic, who I was with when he broke his neck, Danny Murphy, who said after Dumb and Dumber, hey, what's going on? I didn't see a lot of disability in there. And I was like, God, you're right. And that, you know, that changed it right then. We just, you know, we and also because we were very comfortable. We had two friends who broke their

necks in high school and Danny Murphy and Peter Bohack. And so we had wheelchairs all around us. Everybody was in vans, you know, going to parties and stuff like that. It seemed, of course, you'd have to do that. We just hadn't done it the first time. We weren't thinking about it. So Danny ended up being in a lot of your movies. Yeah. He wasn't a trained actor.

I mean, where did the decision come from to say, okay, you know, I think you should be in our movies? Well, I think it was that day when he said, hey, how come there's no one with disabilities in your movie? Then we said, all right, fine. You're in the next one. So we kind of called him out. We said, start acting.

Yeah. And he did. He took a lot of classes. He took acting classes. And he did what he could do to take it very seriously. Actually, he did take it very seriously. And he improved a lot, too. Yeah.

He ended up doing some stage acting. And he became an actor. He became a lot too. Yeah, he ended up doing some stage acting and he became an actor. He became a professional actor. But it was kind of like putting him on the spot because he was putting us on the spot. And so it worked out well. But also we learned a lot from him because he moved to L.A. to act. He really got the bug and wanted to do it. He moved to L.A. and then we started realizing how difficult it was because he was our friend he he would go first of all it's almost impossible rear when someone in a wheelchair would even get an audition you know and uh and if he did

most of the time he would or not most of the time but a lot of the time he would get to the audition and they'd have to come out and audition him out on the sidewalk because he couldn't get in the building it's like they literally didn't have the accessibility to get him in the in the building and up the stairs so they'd come out and he'd be doing he'd be you know auditioning in you know right on the side with people walking back and forth it was awful and uh so that that it was that opened our eyes and he's not the only person you've included many different actors with disabilities throughout your career in your films. At what point did you guys say,

okay, well, we're really leading in this business in terms of having more authenticity of disability in our film? We never thought that. Today was the first day. Yeah. Well, thanks. No, honestly honestly you guys are recognizing it i guess uh we never did we never said hey this is what we're doing and we're good at it and we don't deserve it because honestly we haven't done much we put some people with disabilities in the movies

but that is like i can tell you unfortunately like 30 stories of people with disabilities who we tried to help like get a project off the ground or get this going or get that and didn't succeed. You know, putting people in movies is the easy part of what we're trying to do. And it's been an uphill climb for all of these things. So we don't see ourselves. We're just trying to make them represented fairly. And that's it. Yeah.

You know, this business, Jay, anyway, I don't care if you're completely able-bodied or not, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to find work. It's very difficult to get work and to keep working. So these guys from the disability community, they don't even get a chance to audition to do that. But even if they do, it doesn't mean they're going to get a role or find a good part. It's just there's so many people trying for so few parts that it's just extremely difficult.

I think one of the things that we did do, though, was sort of open up the possibility that we'd consider people from the disabled community. And if they're good, we'll cast them. But they're not all good. They're not all great actors. And it's just difficult. But at least they have the opportunity. Yeah.

I'm proud of the fact that our casting agent, Rick Montgomery, if you say the girlfriend walks in the room and they sit down and they have a cup of coffee, he's not thinking one certain thing. He's thinking, okay, this could be a deaf woman. It could be a blind woman. It could be this woman. It could be that woman, black, white. He's very good because we trained him of like not, you know, pigeonholing thing.

Because if you don't say just because you don't say the person is hard of hearing doesn't mean they can't be. You know, you could be anything. And the casting agents have to start opening doors up because like, you know, a wheelchair doesn't really. There's not many roles that you can't be in a wheelchair for. There's a few, but there's most of them in a movie or a TV show. I mean, there could be somebody in a wheelchair, but it doesn't have to be written as such. So he has to read those people, and we'll pick the best one,

and hopefully they're getting their chance, people with disabilities. So do you think that the industry, I mean, it seems like the industry is very self-aware of the influence they have on society. I mean, just in the past, you know, few years, you've seen minority groups really shoot ahead in terms of representation, African American community, Asian community, Hispanic, LBGTQ. And I think in my point of view, I think it's had an impact on our society. So do you think that the entertainment industry is aware of the power they have to influence public attitude? Positively. But their first goal is to make money. They are aware. They can make changes. And

honestly, it was only when those changes that you're talking about, like hiring more women, diversity, color, this, that, when that started becoming demanded of them. And if they didn't have it, people wouldn't go to the movies. And so they were like, OK, yeah, let's do this. Like Black Panther, that worked out. Let's do another one. That kind of thing. And they are aware of this, but they're still behind on this one. They have not done anything. These are the forgotten ones. Absolutely. This is the one group that's

completely forgotten, that's totally underrepresented. Right. And we know, I mean, that, like, as you mentioned before, 20% of the population has a disability. We know that in the United States and around the world, they're the poorest and most segregated part of our population and yet you see a lot of disability on on film you know the in the last three decades half of the men that have won uh the best oscar best actor oscar have won for playing a disability and they themselves were not uh they were able-bodied. So where is that coming from? It's like the stories are there. The stories are selling. They're getting acclaim, but people with disabilities are not getting cast for those roles. Well, that's about to end. Jenny Gold wrote a

great op-ed piece. I think it was in Variety. It might have been Hollywood Reporter about that very thing, and she termed it crip face, like somebody wearing blackface. It's not acceptable anymore. And this won't be acceptable either. The idea of using people without disabilities in disabled roles,

especially since there's so many people out there who could do these roles perfectly fine. But nobody's pushed back yet. Now it's starting to's pushed back yet. Now it's starting to get pushed back and they're going to be embarrassed and they're going to stop doing it. You know, I had a horrible thing happen about a year ago. I was in Vancouver and we had a role for a college aged, a guy in a wheelchair. And I called the biggest casting agent in Vancouver and I said, hey, I want to see a bunch of guys, you know, college age and

wheelchairs actors. And she said, well, we don't have any. I said, what are you talking about? She said, we don't have any up there. I said, Canada? She goes, we have no actors that you're describing. College age men in wheelchairs. I was like, well, they're all over town. You know, they're everywhere and they want to act, you know, And they had no, they were behind us. So I hooked them up with media access people down here who represent people with disabilities, and I got her on the phone. She felt horrible, by the way.

She was embarrassed, the casting agent. And she said, I'm sorry, what do we do? And I said, you gotta you gotta wake up you gotta change and we had she called Alan Rucker who's a gem we had a conference call and basically she got the ball rolling up there because this had happened believe it or not like a couple weeks earlier when I said we need a little person for a role and she says well we have two I said no no no I want to read a bunch of little people and she said well we only have two

and so we actually had to uh fly somebody in from the states a little person and uh nick novicki who's unbelievable he's one of the best actors on the planet by the way and he killed it but uh it's this change is happening it's happening fast and it only happens when you uh you shame them a little and she she was embarrassed and she realized that know, this is an overlooked population. So do you think that, you know, I don't know, 10, 20 years down the road, whatever, we're going to look back and see inauthentic portrayal of disability the same way we would look at inauthentic portrayal of other minorities, right, as we do now? Certainly hope so. I certainly hope that we look back and say that this, you know, that it's not inauthentic anymore.

Because, you know, like we're pointing out, all these great roles, you know, it'd be great if people with real disabilities were playing people that had disabilities in the story. And right now, you know, that's not really the case. So, you know, we're hoping to go that direction. I think it's changing quickly. And also there's, you know, the movie that you're familiar with, Crip Camp, which is coming out this month. That movie is a game changer.

I think if people see it, and I highly recommend you see it, not because it's educational, though it is extremely educational. It's one of the funniest movies I've seen in the last five years. I laughed out loud 15 or 20 times and bawled my eyes out. It's a true story of this camp in the 1970s in upstate New York for people with kids with disabilities and adults with disabilities who had suddenly because the guy who ran it was a lunatic it gave them ultimate freedom and it's all the the beautiful things that happened at that camp and the friendships that were made and how those people came on to be the leaders of the disability movement in the late 70s and 80s and to this day. I'm hoping that movie will change people's thinking in a huge way. The one thing that I've known Judy Heumann for a long time, and she's one of the leaders in the history of our country on the disability rights movement. And there's so many things, you know, she's one of the people that was at the

camp and became a leader in the movement, and there are so many things I didn't know about her. I mean, there was a full-fledged disability rights movement in this country in the 70s and 80s, and I think so many people are not aware of it, yet it's a movement that existed. And I think so many people are not aware of it, yet it's a movement that existed. And I think that great thing about Crip Camp, and I hope a lot of people see it, is they have the actual footage. Not only of these kids, young kids who are teenagers or younger at camp, but then as they move through life into their 20s and 30s and become major activists. This is going to be a historical document I predict forever because of the footage. It's unbelievable, the footage. It was also, Jim Lebrecht directed it, and he's in it, and he's, it's just one of the most... The Obamas helped produce it, right? That's right. So yeah,

I mean, it's going to, people are going to want to check it out when it comes out on Netflix. It went right to my top three documentaries of all time. Wow. Yeah, it's up to, people are going to want to check it out when it comes out on Netflix. It went right to my top three documentaries of all time. Wow. Yeah. It's up there with American Movie. If you haven't seen it, see it. And I also loved Icarus a couple years ago, which is phenomenal. But this one's right there, right at the top. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation.

Our key mission is the full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. You can find All Inclusive on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher. To view the show notes, transcripts, or to learn more, go to rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Have an idea for a podcast? Be sure to tweet at Jay Ruderman. Thank you.