How the Inevitable Foundation is changing disability representation in Hollywood
How the Inevitable Foundation is changing disability representation in Hollywood
Richie Siegel and Marisa Torelli-Pedevska created the Inevitable Foundation to support the next generation of disabled screenwriters to close the representation gap in film and television. Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska both have experience in media themselves, as Siegel ran a consulting firm that worked with media companies, and Torelli-Pedevska is a screenwriter.
The Inevitable Foundation offers screenwriting fellowship grants of $25,000 in unrestricted funding, along with personalized mentorship and networking opportunities. Siegel, the Inevitable Foundation’s co-founder, talked with me about the nonprofit’s mission, their diverse team, and the next steps needed towards improving disability representation in entertainment.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you and Marisa decide to start the Inevitable Foundation?
Marisa comes at this work from two different places. About eight years ago she started working at Ramapo for Children, a summer camp in upstate New York for teens and adults with developmental disabilities. It was the first time she was in a majority disabled space, and it quickly became a second home for her. She would leave every summer and go back to the “real world” and wouldn’t see anyone in life like she would see at camp, and specifically wouldn’t see them in film or television. It pushed her to become very interested in storytelling and screenwriting with a focus of putting disabled characters in her stories because they're in our communities.
Marisa also lives with chronic illnesses that manifest as physical disabilities that have progressed a lot the last few years. She has a whole new kind of physical disability and accessibility perspective. I'm sure you know how unaccessible so much of the entertainment industry is, and that really informs a lot of her work.
For me, I have a younger sister with epilepsy and a lot of other developmental disabilities, the biggest impact of that being it was just normal to grow up with someone like that in our lives. When we would go out to restaurants or walk across the street, [we’d] get the looks and the stares often because of her behaviors, which were normal to us, but not for most people. That dichotomy of normalcy really kind of stuck with us. I studied filmmaking and spent the last seven years working in the consumer goods space, most of that running a consulting firm, working with a lot of consumer brands and media companies.
I know Marisa because my sister is a camper at Ramapo. We got connected because of the camp. We started talking last fall about the disability representation gap [and] as you might know, the stats are quite staggering. [Over] 20% of the population identifies as disabled, but only 2% of characters on screen have disabilities. Of the 2%, 95% are inauthentically cast. And less than 1% of writers in the writers’ rooms have disabilities. When we looked at that set of statistics, we got really stuck on the writers’ room part because it starts with the story, and to affect change at that level seemed like the most impactful way to do it.
We looked around and found other organizations in the space, but they were mostly focused on casting or advocacy. Those are important, but they’re way later in the process. We saw the opportunity to start this foundation to fund and mentor the next generation of disabled screenwriters.
How did you come up with the name “Inevitable Foundation”?
We wanted to find something that was part aggressive, and part like “this will happen with or without a studio, a production company, a gatekeeper or whoever.” We wanted to find something that said, “the change is coming, you can either get onto the train now or miss the train or let it run you over depending on how soon or later you get on.” We felt that “inevitable” had that connotation. It also has “able” in it very quietly. Most people don't realize that until we actually mention it, which is great because we didn't want to go super heavy on that. The end goal of this organization is for it to self-destruct, and we don't want it to exist forever, because that would mean this problem has not really been solved.
How did you select your current screenwriting fellows, Kalen Feeney and Shani Am. Moore?
So one of the core theories of the work we're doing is that if you look at a lot of talent programs, generally they tend to focus on an emerging level. With this community specifically, given all of the ableism in the industry, given the barriers there, there is so much talent already working professionally in the industry that cannot progress at the level that their non-disabled peers are.
We look at that and we also looked objectively [at] how do we impact something really quickly and easily. The best thing was going to be to take the people that already have the talent and ambition but have been held back because of barriers fully beyond their control, and help them break those barriers down and, in a sense, push them over the hill, so to speak, versus trying to push someone up it from the bottom.
There are a lot of people that have probably similar skills and ambitions to a Shani or Kalen that have not had the opportunities that their non-disabled peers have. So we really have focused the program on professional writers. I think of the goal [as] we need to have the one breakthrough creator that is at the level of a Shonda Rhimes, who is disabled. Once that happens, you will have made the path and then other people can kind of walk through that. In a sense, you're trying to find that single or second or third kind of breakout person to climb up the mountain. It led us to focus on fewer people to spend more time with them, give them more resources, somewhat by design. This is meant to be pretty targeted.
Your advisory board is made up of a diverse group of professionals. How did the Inevitable Foundation go about recruiting these people to join in your mission?
When we started working on this, the advisory board is really the first thing we started with. Marisa identifies as somebody in the disability community [and] I am not disabled myself but obviously have the relationship [with] my sister. Even so, those are only two perspectives. It was really important that we have a lot more at the table. We wanted to talk and work with people that are further along in their disability journeys [and] are integral members of the disability community.
We took probably two to three months to just build that out. It was important to have storytellers on there, we [also] have social workers. There is a really interesting, amazing cross section of people, technologists, filmmakers, writers. They've been very involved in terms of our overall strategy and being a sounding board for us as different things come up, as they do when you build a program like this from scratch.
What you don't see on the website, though, is we also have a Selection Advisory Committee we build for every fellowship cycle. It's a committee of all disabled screenwriters and storytellers that are tasked with taking the top seven to eight applications and really narrowing them down and picking our winners. There is an overlap of the people on that and those on the advisory board, [but] it’s not exactly the same.
[It’s] about putting the power into the hands of the disability community and letting them drive where [the money] should go, who it should go to, and so forth. For Marisa and myself, when we met that first time and will in the future, it was an amazing conversation. [There’s] just a level of nuance and detail we’re going to work through. [It’s] very promising for the level of thought going into this and also speaks volumes about Shani and Kalen, and specifically, all they have to offer and bring.
We've taken a lot of time and energy and money, which was really important that we paid everyone for their time. What often happens in this community [is that] people go unpaid for their labor. We really want to make sure we kind of set the foundation of the foundation there. And we're really proud of what we’ve done.
What do the mentorship and networking opportunities look like for your fellows?
This is evolving every day as we continue to learn more and build more, but where it's really going right now is focusing the program on content development and helping our fellows develop original material, build the creative team that it takes to take that material out to market and at the end of the day, sell that material. In terms of the actual program elements, [we meet] every two weeks for the writers’ room internally. We're meeting and talking through material and reading pages or talking about pitches. We’re probably doing one to two different workshops a month. That could be anything from learning how to brand yourself as a writer and build your own brand all the way to pitching. We’re really focused on building up pitching skills because it's such an integral part of the work.
We also have a lot of other relationships we bring to the table. As stuff progresses through the different content development stages, we're able to make introductions to creative executives, development executives and show runners to help assemble the team and hopefully find a path to market for it. But nothing is necessarily required. There’s still a level customization. Both of our fellows right now have agents and managers, not all of them always will in the future. Getting someone representation is a different kind of path. We're adding more structure slowly, but it's still bespoke within that.
What do you think is one of the most important things that film and television viewers should know about the challenges that disabled members of the entertainment industry face?
I think the biggest thing is just having the awareness of the authenticity or lack thereof on screen. As a viewer, you're not really paying much attention to the process of getting that piece of material on screen. Once you see a non-disabled actor playing a disabled role, there's something icky about that, and you will never really unsee it. I think that’s the biggest thing, because that leads to people talking about it on social media and in the press and will lead to more pressure and so forth.
I think [the disability] community is generally quite invisible and always the last one on the list when it comes to diverse communities, even though it is the largest minority group in the country. The pressure works, and in a lot of ways you wish that didn't always have to necessarily come to it. But I would promise you people have exhausted literally every other option. A lot of this stuff people don't necessarily intend to do it. It's “Oh, I don't know if a disabled person can be on set,” or “I don't know if they can do long hours.” It's not malicious, but it's just ignorance and laziness. And that’s not an excuse for it. I think the more people see it, it will always stick in their brain. There are people we work with who did not pay attention to these issues whatsoever before. Once we talk about our work, I hear often, “I watched this thing, yeah, that was wrong. That didn't feel right. That's dishonest.” I think that [awareness] is a good thing.
On your website you have a great section on the disability representation gap. Though they’re few and far between, are there any recent on-screen representations of disabled characters that you think signal progress for film or television?
I think a show like “Ramy” is wonderful [with] what [Ramy Youssef] and Steve Way have done together. If you talk to Steve Way, he will tell you that's literally him and Ramy in real life. There's stuff in that show that you would never expect on television. And I think that's a great example.
Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte) in “Breaking Bad” was the most prevalent B or C character in television ever. I think the question becomes, “How do you get more of those as main characters?” But a really important part of our work too, and also why we focus on screenwriters is, this is not about making disability the plot. It can be components of a character, but our fellows and the writers in this community, they can write about literally anything they want.
It's really important that we do not pigeonhole them into only writing about disability. Of course, people write about their identity, but you can point to a character like Steve in “Ramy” or Walt Jr in “Breaking Bad” and in both those examples, I think their disability is not really the plot, it maybe bubbles up at some moments and then dies down again. They should just be characters in a world.
Lastly, how would you recommend people interested in your cause get involved with the Inevitable Foundation?
I think for [those in] the industry, we have lots of different volunteer opportunities for people to interact with our fellows. So whether it's meeting with them, giving notes on work, or just wanting to work with them, there's a lot there. We encourage people to reach out to us.
Outside the industry, I go back to what we talked about before: be an aware viewer and just pay attention to this. So much of it is tied to visibility and awareness. That's how the change will happen. There are examples of projects released this year that people were very not happy with, and the industry will learn from those experiences.
You can follow us on social media, where we talk about statistics and quotes. We do events about once a month as well, and we have a mailing list of those. We did a great event with Nickelodeon last month, talking about disability representation in kids and family [entertainment]. We are kind of an industry-facing organization, but one that is doing so because it will have more global effects in the form of the content that people see. We straddle both of those lines.
Be an aware viewer and also pay attention to the disability community and listen to the disability community, which is incredible.