The Scarsdale Inquirer: Foundation keeps disabled screenwriters in the picture

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Twenty percent of our country’s population identifies as disabled. Yet only 2% of all characters on screen have a disability and, 95% of the time, nondisabled actors play those roles. Behind the screen, the statistics are even more abysmal: less than 1% of the writers penning scripts are disabled.

Richie Siegel, of Quaker Ridge, knows these numbers by heart — and he is determined to change them. Together with a partner, Marisa Torelli-Pedevska, in January he established The Inevitable Foundation (www.inevitable.foundation), a nonprofit devoted to funding and mentoring the next generation of disabled screenwriters.

Though the twosome only just started fundraising in the spring, they’ve already put significant dollars in the hands of disabled creatives. Earlier this month, the foundation announced its first two fellows: Shani Am Moore, a screenwriter with multiple sclerosis, and Kalen Feeney, a deaf writer and actor. Each will receive a $25,000 grant, as well as assistance in building helpful relationships within the industry.

It’s a splashy start for a foundation that was brainstormed less than a year ago. “We just began talking in the fall,” Siegel recalled. “We said, ‘Look, if there are not authentic writers writing these stories, we’re never going to fix this problem, and it’s really a problem we need to write ourselves out of. It’s not one we can just cast ourselves out of.’”

If Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska seem passionate about disabled people’s representation on screen, it’s because they both have connections to disability. Siegel has a sister with epilepsy and other developmental disabilities, while Torelli-Pedevska suffers from a connective tissue disorder. (In fact, Siegel met Torelli-Pedevska because she worked at a camp for teens and adults with developmental disabilities that his sister attended.)

“I never saw anyone like my sister on television or in film growing up — there was no kind of narrative understanding of that experience,” Siegel said. “We would go out to restaurants, walk across the street, and there were a lot of looks, a lot of stares, and so forth. You just kind of got that feeling of, ‘Oh, people are afraid of what they don’t know.’ But that familiarity is really the only thing keeping them from acceptance.”

Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska also have extensive experience with the film industry. After attending Scarsdale High’s Alternative School in 10th grade, Siegel finished out his high school years at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a boarding school in Michigan, where he studied filmmaking.

He continued on to New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he focused on business, law and fashion. From there, he worked at various jobs, from running a podcast to overseeing a book tour, before yearning to do something “a bit more meaningful,” he shared.

Torelli-Pedevska attended the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in cinematic arts and screenwriting from the University of Southern California. “A lot of her work is focused on putting disabled characters in her stories, because they’re in our communities,” noted Siegel. “I think her experience at [the camp for disabled people] was really informative for that, where she would leave every year and not see any disabled people in real life or on screen.”

In devising the foundation’s mission, he and Torelli-Pedevska decided to take a unique approach. “We’re not the first organization to tackle this problem, [but] we are the first to tackle it the way we’re doing it,” Siegel said.

“A lot of other organizations tend to focus on casting, trying to get more disabled actors in roles, or they focus on advocacy,” he explained. “And those are really important. But if you apply a first-principles understanding, that all has to start with the writers, and without that, the other problems are just way harder to solve.”

The two also understood it would take significant grants to truly change the lives of the fellows selected by the foundation (a board of disabled writers, all of whom are paid, made the final selection). “We knew that in order for the money to make a really big impact, we wouldn’t be giving, like, $5,000 checks to writers,” said Torelli-Pedevska, a native New Yorker who has been living with Siegel and his family in Scarsdale during the pandemic. “We needed to be giving something like $25,000.”

Added Siegel, “There is a lot of research behind our focus on the money. To live a disabled life costs, on average, about 30% more than a nondisabled life, and unemployment for disabled people is about twice the rate of nondisabled people. The median income in the U.S. is 37% lower for a disabled person than a nondisabled person … it was really important for us to come out of the gate with a really big-size check for each fellowship.”

Fortunately, industry backing has been readily forthcoming. “We’re really lucky to have Warner Media and AT&T as the first studio and corporation to really support us,” Siegel said. “And then we have a number of big foundations coming down the pipeline, which I unfortunately can’t talk about just yet, but they’re coming very soon.”

The future certainly looks bright for the foundation, which advertised the fellowships via social media  — “We didn’t spend a single dollar on advertising,” Siegel proudly noted — and attracted hundreds of applications. Indeed, Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska hope to award several more fellowships before year’s end.

Yet they also hope for the foundation to grow obsolete at some point in the future, because disabled screenwriters will be, at last, fairly represented. “It’s going to take a long time to really get there,” Siegel said. “But I think in the more medium term, we want to build this army of the most talented screenwriters that just happen to be disabled, and prove that there’s incredible talent within the disability community.”

This article was updated June 30 to incorporate terminology preferred by the disability community.