Hollywood Inclusion

Star ASL interpreters dazzle again in the second season of Amazon Music Live (AML), a weekly concert series hosted by award-winning rapper 2 Chainz and broadcast live from Los Angeles on Prime Video after Thursday Night Football (9:00 p.m. PT | 12:00 a.m. ET). Artists like Kane Brown, Ed Sheeran, and Asap Rocky have graced the AML stage alongside specially selected Amber G Productions interpreters and performers including Justina Miles, Martise Colston, and Matthew Maxey.

While these performances are typically on Thursdays from Los Angeles, this week, due to Thanksgiving, AML will air on Nov. 24 at 7:00 p.m. ET / 4:00 p.m. PT this week, on Prime Video and Twitch, following the Miami Dolphins – New York Jets game. Garth Brooks is slated to headline, livestreamed from the grand opening of his new downtown Nashville Bar, Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk. Brooks will be performing new music live for the first time. [continue reading…]

Read the report

After numerous disability organizations including RespectAbility and FWD-Doc lobbied for disability inclusion, the 2023 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report is tracking the disability status of actors for the first time.

“Recently, a few of the data sources used for this report have begun to collect information about disability,” the report states. “As more than one source on actor disability status became available as recently as December 2022, we were able to move forward with collecting and reporting on these data for the first time in this year’s report.”

The report’s end notes mention that one of these sources is Nielsen-owned Gracenote, which began tracking on-screen disability representation as part of its inclusion data in late 2022, with the assistance of RespectAbility. “We were honored to provide input to Nielsen’s Gracenote leading to new metrics indicating progress on representation of disabled talent on screen,” RespectAbility’s SVP Lauren Appelbaum was quoted in Variety in December 2022. “Being able to measure the gap in representation of disability is a powerful capability that equips the media industry to act and invest in representative content and disabled talent. We hope tracking representation will lead to an increase over time.” [continue reading…]

In a Western society that often shies away from death, Project CC’s creative and bright exploration of grief and impermanence is refreshing. Directed by RespectAbility Entertainment Lab alumna Cashmere Jasmine, this Disney Launchpad short film tells the story of a 12-year-old science genius, Paris, who attempts to clone her best friend CC. Paris does so in fear of rejection from the other kids for her brains and her bigger body.

In the short film, after CC dies of an illness, Paris wastes no time in activating her bedroom closet laboratory to transform CC’s remains into a clone. The experiment goes awry when Paris accidentally clones her dog, Jerome, setting loose dozens of corgis. When Paris and her sister Portia finally wrangle in the corgi clones, they realize that Jerome is missing. In the heartfelt emotional climax of the short, Portia points out to Paris that just like Paris knew that none of the corgi clones were Jerome, a clone of CC wouldn’t be the real CC. [continue reading…]

Don’t question yourself when you feel the need to fully realize your ninja skills and join a secret neighborhood fight club. It’s the thing to do now-a-days, especially after watching Disney’s Launchpad BLACK BELTS, a short about a Compton teenager quietly pursuing his father’s footsteps by learning how to use a secret and powerful form of street fighting.

“What I want people to take away from the film, is a sense of family rebuilding, fun, and enjoying watching film again,” said BLACK BELTS writer Xavier Stiles, who also served as a faculty advisor for the RespectAbility Entertainment Lab. Stiles is a Compton, California native, and a person with diabetes. [continue reading…]

TV content fosters a unique connection between audiences and characters, so it’s clear that people want to see themselves and their stories represented on screen. However, for TV to reflect audiences’ realities, the identities of TV writers need to reflect those of the population. While the disabled membership of the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) has doubled from 0.6% in 2021 to 1.3% in 2022, Canadian disabled writers are underrepresented in every TV format in proportion to their population size. [continue reading…]

On November 1, Disney will release the second season of their animated children’s show, Firebuds, which follows a group of friends and their first responder vehicles as they help others in their community, and even themselves. Notably, the Season 2 episode Wrong Way Rescue highlights a learning disability not commonly known called dyscalculia.

Dyscalculia is a learning disability that affects an individual’s ability to process numbers and math-based thinking, with an estimated 2-8% of the population having it. Wrong Way Rescue focuses on the character Axl, an anthropomorphic ambulance, who appears to have difficulty remembering the right address when an emergency call comes in. Axl initially struggles with counting in order, and then reverses the address number, taking her first responder friends up and down the street. Throughout the episode, Axl navigates feelings of embarrassment and confusion until she encounters another character who explains her disability with a catchy song. [continue reading…]

Trigger Warning: Suicide

A documentary produced by Bode Miller and Brett Rapkin, The Paradise Paradox is a very emotional and serious piece. The film explores the overwhelming number of cases of suicide due to the mental health crisis affecting the snowy mountain towns of the United States, in particular Eagle Valley, Colorado, Mammoth Mountain, California, and Winter Pack, Colorado. [continue reading…]

In celebration of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), Delta Air Lines is featuring seven disability-inclusive films in a Top Picks collection on their seatback, in-flight entertainment. Six of these films were written and/or directed by Disabled filmmakers, and all include Disabled individuals in front of the camera. In addition, these films are available with captions and audio description, creating accessibility for viewers who are deaf and/or blind.

Learn more at the Delta Studio website.

“As both an executive producer of Being Michelle and Vice Chair of RespectAbility, which has worked on some of the projects included in the Delta Studio NDEAM Top Picks collection, I am excited for the world to experience entertainment with powerful disability perspectives told through a lens in which disabled persons had a direct hand in creating both behind and in front of the camera,” said RespectAbility Vice Chair Delbert Whetter, who is a deaf filmmaker based in Los Angeles. [continue reading…]

“Wherever you go there you are,” a phrase popularized by Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction founder John Kabat Zin to describe how leaving a traumatic situation doesn’t mean the trauma has left you. For war refugees, despite leaving the physical site of destruction, the aftershocks seem to reverberate inside of them for years to come.

Netflix’s latest short documentary film Camp Courage shines a light on war refugees’ resilient capacity for connection and care in the face of those trauma aftershocks. Directed and produced by Max Lowe, Camp Courage tells the story of a pair of Ukrainian refugees at an outdoors-healing summer camp in the Austrian Alps. The film follows ten-year-old Milana, and her grandmother Olga on their individual and intertwining journeys through the challenges the camp presents to each of them. Milana is faced with scaling tall mountains, and Olga is confronted with parenting a preteen who lost her mom. Each of them must lean on the support of community and ultimately each other to reach their respective goals. [continue reading…]