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DISABLED WAR VETERAN'S ACTIVISM FORGES ONTO FILM --

The film, which won honors at several film festivals

this summer, opened in nine markets on October 26

and expands to 12 more on Friday.

Ron Livingston plays Richard Pimentel, who lost most of his hearing while serving in Vietnam. (photo: Piotr Redlinski, MGM)

For a previous article about this film...click here...
http://www.vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfOCT07/nf103007-7.htm

Story here... http://www.usatoday.
com/news/health/2007-11-05-pimentel_N.htm

Story below:

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-------------------------

Disabled war veteran's activism forges onto film

By Steve Friess
Special for USA TODAY

BOISE — His story was about to be told up on the big screen, but as Richard Pimentel stood to thank his friends and fellow activists for coming to this preview screening in his hometown, he realized his legacy was all around him.

There were people in wheelchairs who, a scant 15 years ago, wouldn't have had ramps to enter the theater. There were also people with hearing disabilities who wouldn't have had devices providing special amplification, and blind people wouldn't have been able to listen to an audio description of the Pimentel biopic Music Within.

"None of that would have existed were it not for the Americans With Disability Act (ADA)," says Pimentel, 59, who lost most of his hearing in an explosion during his service in the Army during the Vietnam War. "What we've accomplished is amazing."

So amazing, in fact, that Hollywood came calling. Director Steven Sawalich was drawn to the story of Pimentel's activism on behalf of disabled Americans after he returned from the war.

"It's the first movie about the ADA movement, our civil rights movement," says former U.S. representative Tony Coelho, D-Calif., who authored the civil rights law that passed in 1990 and became effective in 1992 to ban discrimination based on disability.

"Rich was one of those people who was active and engaged, and his story is like a lot of others," says Coelho. "The movie isn't a story about Rich so much as Rich symbolizes hundreds of others like him who helped get the ADA adopted."

Pimentel says the film is a "pretty accurate" representation of his life, beginning with his rough childhood in Portland, Ore., as the son of a mentally ill single mom (played by Rebecca De Mornay). He was a natural public speaker but couldn't afford college, so he joined the Army and returned virtually deaf, except for some lower frequencies and a constant ringing in his ears.

Pimentel, played in Music Within by Ron Livingston (Office Space, Sex and the City), enrolled at Portland State University, where he met his best friend, Art Honneyman (played by Michael Sheen of The Queen), who has severe cerebral palsy. The pair bonded over their dissatisfaction with the social and physical limits that face disabled people and were moved to action.

After college, Pimentel — who taught himself to lip-read and could conceal his disability — worked for an accounting firm before quitting to start a service to help disabled Vietnam vets get jobs. Eventually that work drew attention in the disabled community, and the California governor's office asked Pimentel to create a program to teach employers how to treat employees with such challenges.

The program that emerged, Windmills, remains a widely used diversity training guide, and Pimentel spent the 1980s giving the workshop to human-resource managers and officers of Fortune 500 companies and such government agencies as the CIA and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

"It just exploded, and I became sort of the metaphysician of the disability movement, the philosopher," he says over coffee in downtown Boise. "I helped create the concepts of reasonable accommodations by not being hostile to employers, by realizing that employers were not hateful, but they were just unsure of themselves."

The film, which won honors at several film festivals this summer, opened in nine markets on Oct. 26 and expands to 12 more on Friday.

Pimentel, who is busy adapting Windmills to address how employers can put disabled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to work, is nervous that some may feel the movie assigns too much credit to him for his role in the movement. He agreed to the film, he says, because he believes that the next generation of people with disabilities must know the tale of their movement.

"But I became satisfied with it when I realized that it was the entire disability movement shown through the eyes of one of the activists and one of the principals. I would not take credit for the ADA, but I was a principal."

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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