Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
E.T. The Extraterrestrial gets counted among the top films of the 1980s and among the greatest that science fiction has produced, and the writer bringing this story forward calls it her own favorite. Even so, she learned only now who physically gave the title character its life in front of the camera. That gap is the point. A performance can be loved for decades while the People with Disabilities whose work made it possible go unnamed, admired in what they produced and invisible as people.
That character was never the product of machinery alone. Animatronic technology that broke new ground was combined with three performers who could physically occupy the costume and move it from within. Tamara De Treaux and Pat Bilon were Little People. The third performer was Matthew De Meritt, who was 12 and had been born with no legs. The alien that people still talk about came from performers with disabilities doing skilled physical work, and that work belongs in the permanent record of how the film was made rather than in a footnote.
Getting from one place to another, Matthew De Meritt has moved on his hands for his whole life. That fact is usually presented as a disadvantage he carries, yet the barrier has never been his way of moving; it is the built environment and the assumptions attached to it that decide which bodies get counted as capable. On this production those assumptions collapsed. His way of moving was not merely workable, it was the exact answer the filmmakers required in order to put the alien on camera for real.
Matthew De Meritt is 56 years old today, and this account of what he did on that set is only now reaching a wide audience. Community Builders should take that timing as an instruction. Inclusion and accessibility for People with Disabilities are not products to be purchased or outsourced to others; they are shared responsibilities, owned personally by each of us and carried out both personally and collectively through decisions made in consultation with People with Disabilities. Naming the People with Disabilities whose work we already admire, and crediting them from the beginning rather than decades afterward, is part of the collective obligation each of us carries.
Read the Full Article: I Just Learned That E.T. Came To Life On Set Thanks To A Young Disabled Actor.
By: Sarah El-Mahmoud
