BOISE, Idaho - 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."
