Do you like to see handicapped people depicted as people?
Excuse me?
I think that there were a lot of stories in the film that
fell on the cutting room floor
because we made the decision to tell the film
as, kind of, the story of a band of friends.
One of the things I remember was, we talked
about my, getting my first car.
It was really kind of, where did my liberation
start happening? Where I didn't feel like a burden
or a problem, where I didn't feel penned in.
I got my driver's license when I was 17
for my senior year in high school.
And my first car was a used
1967 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser Station Wagon
When I got my driver's license, everything changed.
There's a part of driving that was like a great equalizer
for me, it was like I could do it as well as anybody else.
And behind the wheel, no one knows that I have a disability.
I can be out in the world and not be stared at
or know that I'm sticking out.
One of the best things about having a car was
that I could go see Nancy
without having a friggin' chaperone.
We didn't sleep together until a trip I made to see her.
She was going school and living in the dorms.
It felt kinda natural when we really kinda knew each other.
We knew that we didn't have to explain
that our bodies were different, we knew that.
Some characters' back stories had to stand in for others.
Some characters' journeys had to stand in for others,
and one of the things that I felt sad
to lose was the back story of our character Denise Jacobson
because she grew up in the Bronx
in an apartment building that was on the second floor,
and she couldn't get up and down the stairs.
There was no elevator, so she was literally stuck
in an apartment completely isolated,
and she had a very vivid, powerful way of describing
that experience of isolation and then the joy she felt
in landing in the camp and finding friends and being able
to roll wherever she wanted and having freedom.
We edited for about a year and a half on this project.
Yeah, our first assembly of the film was
about two and a half hours long.
A bit longer than I think that we expected at first,
but like every documentary,
it kinda reveals itself to you in a lot of ways.
One of the exercises that we were really encouraged
to do was to try to make a 90 minute cut,
and it became clearer and clearer
how important the camp was,
and how the evolution of these people's lives were,
and kind of make it not seem like two different films.
Camp and after camp.
In the long run, at least, you know,
we found the right length of the film.
Well I think we believed from the beginning
that it had to be a feature film to start with.
The narrative structure was the power of the camp
through to the passage of the ADA,
and seeing how the spark of the camp and the power
of these individuals coming together was gonna make
things change throughout the entire world.
The challenge that was exciting was,
how do we take all of this complexity
and all of this history across time,
and how do we blend this really immersive footage
that we had from the camp with the scraps
of archival that we were digging up
from all over the place to follow people
across time and how do we make that one story arc?
Because of that, a lot of things did have
to fall on the cutting room floor.
We definitely had in our minds-eye tracing things
up to the ADA, and we thought that the kind of end
of the second act would be the incredible victory
at the end of this 26 day takeover
of a federal building, and the enforcement
of the first disability rights legislation.
We worked our way towards I think knowing
that where we had to end the film was back
at camp, back where everything started,
and kind of the resolution of the life journeys
of the characters that we had followed.
One of the things that got us there was playing around
with combining the camp footage,
the old camp footage with the return to the campsite,
and this incredible song "Sugar Mountain" by Neil Young,
and there's something of kind of like a longing
to go back to that place in your youth
in that song that had the emotion
that we wanted to end the film with.