SXSW Film Picks

How's Your News?*

One day Arthur Bradford got a phone call from Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The creators of South Park wanted to tell him they were big fans of a video he had made, a video that fell into their hands by accident, really. A friend of a friend of Arthur's had told them that they should see this tape of mentally handicapped people who go up to strangers, stick a microphone in their face, and say, "How's your news?" Bradford directed that video because, as a counselor at Camp Jabberwocky in Massachusetts, a camp for adults with disabilities, he taught a video-making class. Bradford told Parker and Stone that it had been his dream to make a documentary in which the following things would happen: A group of disabled adults, led by Bradford and a crew that had experience taking care of them, would travel in an RV across the entire United States. The adults would become reporters who would ask strangers how their news was. So, funded by Parker and Stone (and indie guru John Pierson of Split Screen), Bradford got to do just that.

Now all that Arthur had to do was convince the parents of the five reporters he wanted for How's Your News? that he wasn't crazy. "Larry's parents, for example, he's 56, and his parents are in their 70s, and they were just really confused about this whole idea," Arthur says. "They were thrilled that someone wanted to spend time with their son, but they just thought it was so strange that we wanted to make a news show and have Larry be a news reporter." How's Your News? begins in New Hampshire and ends in Venice Beach, Calif. Along the way, a street-corner evangelist asks Robert Bird, a reporter with Down syndrome, if he knows Jesus Christ; Susan Harrington is rebuffed by an angry homeless man who doesn't want to talk about his news; and Ronnie Simonsen kisses Chad Everett's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame because he is Everett's "spiritual brother." Simonsen, who is fixated on Hollywood, is a gregarious interviewer, and during a stop in Arkansas, he asks a laborer the following questions:

Ronnie Simonsen: What's your biggest dream?

Subject: I don't know.

RS: You must have something. You can't have anything if you don't have anything, right?

S: Yeah. I ain't never thought too much about it.

RS: Okay. Listen, it was good to talk to you. Thank you for your time. I didn't mean to disturb your lunch.

S: That's all right.

RS: I wasn't trying to be nosy like Barbara Walters or the Hollywood press.

The line between exploiting people with disabilities and depicting them honestly is often mercurial and hard to navigate, and the filmmakers wanted to be certain that How's Your News? would not become a platform for audiences to laugh at the reporters. "I love to discuss those issues with people," Bradford, a 1998 Michener Center for Writers graduate, says, "because I think that it's really important for people to know that the people with disabilities in this movie are aware of what they're doing, and they're really proud of it, as are the families. I think sometimes people feel like these people shouldn't be so flamboyant and shouldn't be so in-your-face. I understand why there's that worry that it's exploitation, but I really was very careful in the editing to make sure that we weren't doing something that was against our ethics. How's Your News? for me is a reaction against what I think is the typical disability documentary, which is usually just way too sentimental and sappy for my tastes." (Bradford and three of the reporters will perform original songs from the documentary and screen the 25-min. pilot at the Hideout, 617 Congress, Monday, March 12, 9pm. Bradford also promises "special mystery guests." Screening times: Alamo, 3/11, 9:30pm; Bad Dog, 3/14, 4pm; Bad Dog, 3/16, 1:30pm) -- Clay Smith