Autism Awareness Month on SundanceNow Doc Club Channel
Posted on April 16, 2016 at 8:00 am
The SundanceNOw Doc Club observes Autism Awareness Month by showing three inspiring films that follow the triumphs and hurdles of individuals on the Autism spectrum. These stories show that through art and self expression, untraditional methods, and efforts of entire communities’ individuals with special needs can flourish.
SPECTRUM OF HOPE
Follow the journey of 10 musical theater students, their families, and their teachers as they travel from their NYC special needs school to compete in the Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. A powerful celebration of what can be accomplished through arts education, musical theater, and allowing individuals to grow on their own terms.
BEST KEPT SECRET
Janet Mino has taught her class of young men with autism for four years. When they all graduate in the spring of 2012, they will leave the security of the public school system forever. Take a closer look at the compounded difficulty of special needs individuals within the working-class and impoverished circumstances.
THE HORSE BOY
When two-year-old Rowan was diagnosed with autism, Rupert Isaacson, a writer and former horse trainer, and his wife Kristin Neff, a psychology professor, sought the best possible medical care, but traditional therapies had little effect. Then they discovered that Rowan has a profound affinity for animals—particularly horses—and the family set off on a quest that would change their lives forever.
“Everything is Copy,” the documentary about Nora Ephron by her son, premieres tonight at 9:00 on HBO. Ephron was the daughter of Hollywood screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron (“Desk Set”), who named her after Ibsen’s famous heroine of “A Doll’s House” and based their hit Broadway comedy “Take Her, She’s Mine” on the challenges of raising Nora and her sisters. Nora Ephron began as a journalist, and her collected essays about women and media are witty, self-deprecating, and fiercely funny. She often quoted what her brilliant but difficult mother told her as she was dying:”Take notes.” Her parents taught her that everything was material for her writing, and her first novel, Heartburn is the bittersweet, but fiercely funny of her marriage and humiliating break-up with Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, the second of three writers she married. She wrote the screenplay for the film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
I’m a big fan of her film with Rick Moranis and Steve Martin, My Blue Heaven, a comedy about a long-time crook in the witness protection program, and I think it is very funny that it came out around the same time as “Goodfellas,” a brilliant drama about a crook in the witness protection program, based on a book by Ephron’s third husband, Nicholas Pileggi. Everything is copy, indeed.
In the film, Joe Cross travels across America to talk to a dozen nutrition experts who are making headway in conquering childhood obesity, including Food Network star Rachael Ray, former White House Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition Sam Kass, and Grammy-nominated hip hop star DJ Cavem. Joe found that the best offensive against this national scourge is to target children directly. Children can be better motivators than their parents, and the movie shows kids becoming the agent of change for their families, communities, and schools.
Interview: Dayton Duncan on “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”
Posted on March 11, 2016 at 3:36 pm
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the National Parks Service, PBS and all affiliate stations will rebroadcast The National Parks: America’s Best Idea April 25-30. 2016. The six-episode series was produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan and written by Dayton Duncan. It was filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature’s most spectacular places, from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska. Mr. Duncan is the author of twelve books, including Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark’s America and Grass Roots: One Year in the Life of the New Hampshire Presidential Primary. SSeed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea is being released with the Yosemite Conservancy to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the park’s initial creation as a federal grant to the state of California. Mr. Duncan generously took time for an interview.
He told me about his unforgettable first trip to a national park.
I was not quite nine and it was the only real vacation my family ever took, back in the late 50s. I grew up in a little town in Iowa. Both of my parents worked so we didn’t really take vacations except that one summer. So it’s such a vivid memory. I can almost give you a day by day rundown of the places we went but they included the Badlands in South Dakota, Devils Tower, which is a national monument in Wyoming, the Little Bighorn Battlefield which is a national historic site in Montana and then we went to Yellowstone to the Grand Teton National Park, both of them in Wyoming, to Dinosaur National Monument. It was a great experience. My mom sort of lead me to believe that I was going to be instrumental in the planning of the trip and had me get out maps and write away write to different states for brochures and stuff and help to map out where we were going to go.
Basically we borrowed my grandmother’s car and some camping equipment from some family friends. We stayed in national parks because they were beautiful, because my mom thought they were important and also because they were affordable. I didn’t come back from that trip saying, “My life has been changed forever,” but as I look back on my life now as someone who has spent much of his adult life traveling the United States in pursuit of getting to know more about it, and someone who has written a lot about the history of United States but particularly the western part of United States, I can say it has. You know I can look back and think that that actually did change my life because at the time I didn’t say, I will end up being a writer, a filmmaker and one of those things that I’m fascinated in now is the land that we call the United States and our history and its interplay with that land. So I can’t help but think that that probably had something to do with it.
My mom wanted to broaden my sisters and my horizons and there is no question that I saw places that I hadn’t conceived of. It was 1959 and our car had broken down in the Black Hills, South Dakota which delayed us for two days otherwise we would have been in Yellowstone in the disastrous earthquake of 1959. In fact we would have been in the campsite outside of the park with the big flood when the dam broke. But while we were in Yellowstone there were still a number of aftershocks and not only did I see these geysers going off but felt the earthquake aftershocks two or three times. I saw my first moose, my first buffalo, all those kind of things. And 40 years later as a parent I took my children to those places and got to watch them see their first bison, their first moose.
The idea of national parks is original to the United States. Duncan says that the tension between those who want to preserve the parks and those who want to sell them over to private interests is not a new one.
The subtitle of our film says it is the best idea we ever had. We are quouting Wallace Stegner, the great writer and historian. At the core of that are two things that come from us as a people as a democracy. We are the first nation to have set aside the most extraordinary magnificent, some would say sacred parts of our landscape not for the exclusive use of kings and royalty or the rich and the well-connected but for everyone and forever.
The Declaration of Independence created our country as a nation. The creation of the national parks which no nation prior to us had ever done is in my belief a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence to the land, that is to say those things, every person is equal, that is what national parks does, too. That we all are owners and have equal access to these extraordinary places for our pursuit of happiness, however you want to define what pursuit of happiness might be. So that’s the thing that should be saved for everyone in the second part is in for all time. And in doing that that obviously like the idea of liberty itself, it’s always being contested, it’s always evolving and so far in our history has broadened. The Declaration of Independence said that all men are created equal, but if you ask the people who wrote that in 1776 they would’ve said, “Well, we mean all white men who owned property and had no debts are created equal.” Fortunately they didn’t write it in this way and our nation’s journey has been to redefine and broaden what that meant so that not just on men white men with property and no debts but then all white men were created equal, then we included African-American men and we included women and we still on that journey of expanding that and bringing true meaning to those inspiring words.
And in the national parks at first we were setting aside these sorts of logical oddities, the tallest waterfalls in North America the biggest trees on earth and the greatest collection of geysers on earth, those sort of things and we continue to broaden that to include important places in our history, both those places that we traced because they speak to the best of us and places now in our history that reminds us of mistakes that we have made. We’ve expanded the state parks not just for the scenery but that there to preserve nature itself. When Yellowstone was created in the 1872 as the world’s first national park, they had no concern about buffalo at the time, well as it turned out it became a refuge for the bison when they were nearly exterminated in our continent, the most magnificent animal that we have ever had I believe was down to about 24 in the national park and even there it took legislation and action by people to fully protect them and it saved them from going to extinction and now there are 7 million bison in the United States.
Slowly we came understand that these places served lots of different roles. The first director of the National Park Service 100 years ago. Stephen Mandel, called them “vast schoolrooms of Americanism,” by which he meant that when people go there they become prouder of their country and therefore better citizens. But what we have also learned in the last hundred years is they are best schoolrooms, period. They are great teaching places. They teach us about nature, they teach us about our interaction as human beings with nature, they teach us about our history and remind us of things that we need to be reminded of at different times. Alexis de Tocqueville said that Americans prefer the useful to the beautiful and we will always demand that the beautiful be made useful. And as John Muir said, “Nothing dollarable is safe.”
Americans are commercial and believe in individualism and all those things to sometimes an excessive degree. But at the same time what the parks remind us is that we are capable of something else, that we were capable in the 19th century which when as a nation we were in a mad dash across the continent trying to privatize everything that we could. In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress’s main duty for 100 years had been to give away or sell away the public domain but in Yosemite in 1864 they said, “No, we’re not going to do that here,” and they entrusted it to the state of California to protect it forever. And then in 1872 when the reports came about Yellowstone they said we’re going to do the same thing that we did in the Yosemite but wait a minute there is no state to give it to as Wyoming was still territory, so they created the world’s first national park and then discovered that that was a better model than the state and then eventually Yosemite became a national park like Yellowstone.
So the Grand Canyon was first proposed as a national park in 1880-something. Had Congress agreed to the proposal it would have been the world’s second national Park. But local interests in Arizona territory didn’t want it to be. They wanted it for commercial use, so they fought and stopped it and so it was proposed again and again turned down again and again. Theodore Roosevelt visited there as a president 1903 and on his very first visit there he said, “My advice of the people of Arizona is leave it as it is. The ages had been at work on it and man can only mar it.” They paid no attention to him.
Then with the tools of the thing called the Antiquities Act in 1908 he was able to set it aside as a national monument against the howls of protest of commercial and private, political interest in Arizona. It wasn’t until 1919 that the Grand Canyon was finally after very long and political fight was finally made into a national park. It’s about the most self-evident place that should be preserved as a national park as you could ever imagine but it took 30 plus years to make it so. So that’s part of the tension that is within us and within society. It has always been that way and it sometimes rises to a higher pitch and sometimes recedes a little bit. Right now we are in one of those higher moments when there seem to be a greater interest and political push to privatize what’s left of the public domain versus both protecting places like parks but also protecting places that might become national parks in the future. That’s just the political situation that we find ourselves in. Luckily and what I feel very profoundly is that that kind of impulse will kind of always be with us. There is always going to be somebody who is going to look down at Grand Canyon and see a river down there and say, “Boy, what a great place for a dam.” There’s going to always be somebody who is going to be looking at a beautiful valley like Yosemite and say, “Boy, what a great place for trophy homes,” and there’s always going to be somebody who will look at the mountainside and wonder if there are minerals inside of there, and see a grove of trees and try to figure out how many board feet of lumber could be gotten out there. That will always be with us.
The challenge for us as Americans is to recognize that we have to inspire each generation to be responsible for taking care of this legacy. Once it’s been ruined, it’s been ruined. So just because you created a national park doesn’t mean that you don’t have to always be vigilant and always be trying to bring forth the next generation who understand that and will treasure it and will have the political will to fight those other impulses that are part of the American character that might just spoil it. The imperative is to reach both young people and diverse populations and say,”This place belongs to you too. You are an equal co-owner of the most jaw-dropping Canyon on earth, you are a co-owner of these ancient and magnificent trees, you are co-owners of these geysers and custodians of these bison. Nothing converts you more to being a park advocate than actually visiting one.
Interview: Dawn Porter on the Abortion Documentary “Trapped”
Posted on March 8, 2016 at 3:20 pm
Dawn Porter is the lawyer-turned-documentarian who directed and co-produced Trapped, a film about the new laws limiting access to abortion. Known as TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, they are described by legislators as protecting the health and safety of women by imposing requirements that normally apply to hospital settings, waiting periods, and distribution of misleading or inaccurate information. The release of the film is very timely, in theaters the same week that the challenge to these laws was argued in the Supreme Court. As the movie shows, and as the arguments before the Court made clear, medical authorities do not support these requirements, which are not imposed on similarly risky or risky medical procedure providers (liposuction, colonoscopies). They have no medical benefit to women and are intended to and have the effect of limiting women’s ability to make their own choice to have a Constitutionally protected medical decision.
In an interview, Porter spoke about the impact of these laws, her compassion for the women’s reproductive health care providers in the film, and her decision about the portrayal of anti-abortion voices in the film.
How does the death of Justice Scalia affect the prospects for the Court’s decision on the challenge to the Texas TRAP laws?
This film has taken so many twists and turns. A lot of court watchers believed he might have actually pushed to re-examine Roe v. Wade and its legal underpinnings. With him gone, most people think there isn’t anyone who would push the Court that far. It’s probably doesn’t impact the ultimate decision except that if the Court splits 4 to 4, the Texas decision upholding the law will stand with no precedential value which in itself would be a huge issue because the court likes to take cases that will have some precedents. They look for cases that can actually help govern the law. And if the decision in this case doesn’t provide any precedent it means states across the country will still be in this legal limbo; we will still be fighting about TRAP laws. If Justice Kennedy votes with the more liberal members of the court, then it will be a 5/3 to strike down the laws and then that would be the law of the land. So Justice Scalia’s death is quite significant and the final chapter in this is certainly not written.Copyright 2016 Abramorama
How can legislatures enact laws directing doctors and patients to do things that are not medically recommended?
That’s one of the things that makes me the angriest. I read a report this morning that examined the materials that doctors are compelled to distribute to abortion patients and it estimated to 40 percent of the information in some of these pamphlets is inaccurate. I spent times in six different clinics over two and a half years and saw a lot of the patient populations. 60 percent of people in a number of clinics were under the poverty level. A lot of people were not getting any medical information. I saw Dr. Parker just listening to people’s hearts, checking blood pressure, routine medical care. There is a healthcare crisis in this country and the idea that the health department that bears the imprimatur of the state would knowingly distribute false and misleading information to people who do not have resources to help them understand what is happening is so manipulative and such a waste. Most of the equipment in that room is never turned on. And as you see in the film, they are required to buy $1100 of medication every month that is never used but it expires and so has to be thrown away and replaced. We are in a situation where the conservatives are requiring waste and wasteful medicine; that’s not good medicine. While we have people who can’t access healthcare we have this facility that is unused.
What did you learn about the opponents to abortion? Why don’t we hear more from them in this film?
When I first started filming I wanted to talk to the protesters and just see if there was anyone who would present kind of a non-hysterical point of view. There was either just outright misinformation or people who would not present very well, put it that way. And so I kind of had to make this editorial decision about how to give any kind of voice to people who are anti-choice. So what I tried to do was, I included the voices of the anti-choice people. We see protesters and we see the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court appear at an anti-abortion event. But I tried to make the film from the perspective of the providers as they tried to comply with the laws and their day-to-day experiences. And I wanted to show their compassion and commitment to the women who come to to their facilities. When we filmed in that center the thing that kept coming to me was how beautiful it is.
I thought it was incredibly important to put Justice Moore in because he is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Alabama. He is charged with enforcing the laws. A really important law that the Alabama courts have to enforce are the consents for minors. So in Alabama the only way that you can get an abortion is if your parents’ consent in writing, both parents or if you have a judicial bypass. The minor has to appear and states her reasons for having an abortion and have an Alabama judge decide whether or not that that is ok. So it’s quite relevant and that the the chief judge of the Supreme Court in Alabama is the person who decides what the administrative rules are. So if you have somebody who is violently anti-choice who is part of the funding operation for anti-choice activist, I felt like that was relevant. I also think it speaks to the political climate. A number of people have remarked to me that the legislators are not hiding their true intent. And as a lawyer as a person who is a poli-sci person I find that horrifyingly fascinating that people are open about this tactic.
Why don’t the opponents to abortion pursue initiatives that actually are proven to decrease abortion, like providing birth control and support for pregnant women and babies?
I think is a great question and but I don’t think that there is a good answer. What the anti-choice people would say is that they support adoption, that children are a gift from God and that sex is for procreation. I mean that’s really what it comes down to. There is the protester in the film who says that men are here to adore women and take care of them. And the way that he shows that is by screaming at them and shaming them. And we did not include the names that he calls women. He screams in front of his own children. Women were supposed to be adored but not the woman who were there for an abortion.So I think if you think the same states that are passing laws that are shutting clinics also do not take federal funding for the Affordable Care Act, do not support sex education, and do not support birth control. So the logical conclusion is they are more anti-sex, they are anti-non-procreative sex than they are anti-abortion. So that’s really what this conversation is about.
The irony there is that a number of the women I saw were married, I saw a number of women who wanted to have the pregnancy continue but were literally saying they cannot afford to bring this child into the world. One of the most heartbreaking things I saw was this woman who cried through her procedures and she cried in the waiting room. She wanted to speak with me but she didn’t want to be on camera. I never pushed anybody once somebody who said no but she did say she wanted to talk about it and she said she had a two-year-old, she had just gotten out of welfare she had gotten into school and a part-time job and she was so excited about her life. She was on birth control that failed and she had an unplanned pregnancy and this woman said, “I love my husband, I love my child, we would love to have a second child but if I have that everything we’ve worked for over the last two years would go away. I’d go back on welfare and I don’t know if I’d ever get off.” And so it was not that she still thought it was the right thing to do but it was horrific time for her to terminate a healthy wanted baby with her partner that she loved. And so not only did I watch her go through it but I watched her being screamed at about how she was a slut and a baby killer as she was already so torn up about this and her husband was in the waiting room. It was just such a range of emotions but the biggest thing that I took away from that was as much as I wanted to hear her story, I didn’t want to be the position of judging anyone’s abortion.
I have two kids and I know what kind of a mother I try to be. Why would I want anything less for somebody else? We were able to wait till we could to have kids. And why wouldn’t I give that same dignity to someone else to make that decision for herself?
There is a disproportionate impact on poor women and their families, too.
There is a deep contempt for poor people in these laws. Watching people count off money that was the equivalent of a month’s rent and know that they were literally taking food off the table and making this choice between having another child or being able to pay their bills that month was also infuriating. Because of these extra requirements you have to make these separate visits and take off from work, which is hard because a lot of people are on hourly jobs or if you’re lucky to have a job, then you have to get child care because more than half of the women already have a child. And also because of shrinking number of clinics so many people are traveling so far so then you have to have overnight costs so you have like the people were sleeping in their cars in the parking lot. And so there’s all these obstacles but there’s also the question of dignity and it was really distressing to see people who were already in some level of crisis have these added burdens. I don’t have to go through any of those things, I have good health insurance and I call and make a doctor’s appointment for a time that’s convenient for me. So if I had to have an abortion I would go to a state where I could be seen within a couple of days I wouldn’t be racing the clock. And half the people who are racing the clock need procedures that are more complicated and it becomes more expensive and it completely gets out of reach for people. So none of it is good health care policy which is why it makes me just also crazy when people say this is for the health and safety of women because there is just nothing to support that.
What led you to make the film and who do you think the audience for the film is?
I was working on another film, Gideon’s Army, and I was shooting interviews in Jackson, Mississippi and I read in the local paper that there was one clinic in the entire state of Mississippi. To give you a comparison in New York metropolitan area there are about 80 clinics. I was so floored by that. So I did what all documentary filmmakers do. I called them up and I said, “Can I come over?”
I met Dr. Parker that day. He just started talking about abortion access in a way that it just hit me like a lightning bolt that this was such a politicized, such a brilliant way of stopping clinic access is to attack the providers and attack the doctors in the name of women’s health which makes it very difficult for the general public to understand. I thought if there’s a way to show that political story through this individual person that that would be a film that would be accessible to the widest possible audience. And it’s also the kind of film that I like to make. I like films about people. He introduced me to the clinic owners and so the film really kind of unfolded really naturally.
It was complicated and it was challenging logistically because so much was happening and they were actively involved in litigation and the lawyers didn’t always want them to talk or comment so I had to kind of work around those restrictions. I hope and I do think that it will add a different perspective to the abortion conversation. I think most people understand about crazy people who kill doctors, they understand about people who bomb with clinics what they don’t understand is the greatest threat to abortion clinics is the state political process and I think in this presidential year focusing on the mechanics of government is really important. The state and local elections are really important. I really wanted to kind of introduce that this is not an accident that half the abortion clinics in America has closed in the last five years.
I hope this is a wake-up call. Most people support some form of right to abortion, more than 80 percent of Americans. So if that’s the case then my sincere hope is that people will pay attention to the process by which these rights are being eliminated and stop feeling like it’s some private screaming match issue they think they don’t want to get involved in. We can’t sit by the sidelines and allow that to happen. And so I am I’m enough of an optimist and not like so much a cynic that I feel like if people like Dr. Parker can get up and go to work every day, the least I can do is to talk about it.
is the bittersweet, but fiercely funny of her marriage and humiliating break-up with Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, the second of three writers she married. She wrote the screenplay for the film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
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, a comedy about a long-time crook in the witness protection program, and I think it is very funny that it came out around the same time as “
is being released with the Yosemite Conservancy to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the park’s initial creation as a federal grant to the state of California. Mr. Duncan generously took time for an interview. 
, and I was shooting interviews in Jackson, Mississippi and I read in the local paper that there was one clinic in the entire state of Mississippi. To give you a comparison in New York metropolitan area there are about 80 clinics. I was so floored by that. So I did what all documentary filmmakers do. I called them up and I said, “Can I come over?”