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| West September 29, 2003 | |
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Small in Stature, Big on Talent
By Cassie Carpenter
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| Tony Cox, Meredith Eaton, Danny Woodburn, and Debbie Lee Carrington |
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The old saying goes, "There are no small parts, just small actors." But little people have a legacy of entertaining the masses, and unfortunately most of their parts have been limited to playing sight gags, mystical creatures, or stand-ins for child stars. However, meatier roles have begun to be penned for them, and they are finally stepping into the spotlight to play fully human characters.
Little people--not to be confused with the derogatory term "midgets"--have been fighting the odds for centuries. They have endured typecasting, laughable misconceptions, and exploitation that would have any other group speed-dialing the ACLU. "It's all kind of racist," said director Matthew Bright, who centered his film Tiptoes on little people but has since condemned the film "over conflicts with the producers." "They're looked at as a different race and they're not," said Bright. "I would be pissed off if I was an actor." Indeed a lot of little people are angry about the way they are portrayed in the media, which ultimately furthers the lack of roles available. But the actors who spoke with BSW have decided to put that bitterness aside and transform the negative energy into memorable performances and, ultimately a little more public awareness.
Star-Making Turns
"Carnivale is an absolute breakout from the traditional industry handling of little people," Michael J. Anderson said of his role as a dwarf who runs the carnival, a con man with integrity. "Samson is a full-depth character. This is the most real acting I've ever had a chance to do." Anderson stars in the new HBO series set in the 1930s Dust Bowl, but he is probably best-known for his role as the dancing Man From Another Place in the cult series Twin Peaks. Indeed, Anderson sees Carnivale as "Twin Peaks with logic."
"Being a little person is kind of like being a beautiful woman," said Anderson. "If they think the scene needs little people, they open the little-people drawer, grab a handful, and kind of sprinkle a few in. And that's kind of the way they treat beautiful women. They can't really tell one from another. The audience certainly can, but the industry cannot. But that's changing with me, at least, and I think with a few others. There are a few little people out there who are gaining an identity with the industry."
Zelda Rubinstein, most famous for her role as a professional exorcist in the Poltergeist series, also sees the parallel between little people and the beautiful people of the world. "One misconception is that we're all cute and adorable and don't really have a full compliment of human feelings," said Rubinstein, who will debut her cabaret show, An Evening With Zelda on Oct. 24 at L.A.'s The Gardenia. "But some of the most profound spirits I've ever run into have been those people who are not average in their appearance in any way, and that includes very beautiful people who also have a societal handicap--they're always expected to be superhuman examples."
When Debbie Lee Carrington--who appeared in Return of the Jedi, Total Recall, and Men in Black--was working on a feature in full costume and headgear, she became overheated. The director made a strange comment.
"He said, 'I know you guys have different body temperatures than us tall people.' And I was like, 'What?'" Carrington said. "'You think we have green blood?' It's like we're aliens or something. And the director was a really nice guy. I was pretty shocked that he had this misconception."
"It goes back for hundreds of years. It's not a stigma of modern society," explained Peter Dinklage. "Dwarves used to be the jesters and played the fools as sort of a sight gag, and it's really kind of strange that it still happens in movies today. I don't [act] for any political reasons. I just love acting, and I'm not out to change stereotypes or anything." Coincidentaly, Dinklage's portrayal of Fin, a reclusive train enthusiast in The Station Agent, is a landmark role that is already getting lots of notice. Set for release Oct. 10, this moving film is about three lonely people (Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, and Bobby Cannavale) who form an unlikely friendship in rural New Jersey. The film won three awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, including the Audience Award for Best Drama.
"Initially, I don't think [the film's writer/director Tom McCarthy] wrote it for me as a dwarf," said Dinklage. "But he was curious about how [Fin] deals with society, and he got thinking that this character is sort of a loner. So he incorporated dwarfism. It's not a personal story of mine; I'm not that character."
Dinklage also appears in Elf, the comedy starring Will Ferrell, which opens in November.
Playing Human Beings
Danny Woodburn, famous for playing Kramer's irascible buddy Mickey on Seinfeld, got a chance to play actor Kathy Baker's love interest and regular guy-next-door in director Rodrigo Garcia's captivatingly beautiful Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her. "For me, it was an amazing experience," said Woodburn. "Like what Peter's doing in The Station Agent, it means something because they show us in such a human way that we're so not used to. It's always in some sort of a costume or a mask, which is OK to a point. But we want to have some acknowledgement that we exist in society and that we are human beings." Woodburn teaches a standup comedy class and recently taped an episode of Funny Money, a game show for standup comedians.
Probably one of the most recognized little people in the industry is English actor Warwick Davis, although he's often disguised in heavy makeup. He played the first Ewok we see in Return of the Jedi, he's on the sixth installment of his title role in Leprechaun, and he plays Professor Flitwick in the Harry Potter series. But it was his leading role in Ron Howard's little-people-friendly (nearly 300 were used, more than any other film) 1988 epic fantasy film, Willow, for which he is most recognized, because, well, we can see his face.
"It's fairly rare I'm offered a role where it's basically me, though that happens more now," Davis told The Houston Chronicle. "Even so, to create a strange character that doesn't exist is quite challenging, and it's more fun than being a regular guy on the street. I'm grateful for anything, really." In 1995, Davis launched his own casting agency, Willow Personal Management Ltd., which represents 70 people between 3 and 5 feet tall--the largest such agency in the world.
Meredith Eaton beat out 3,000 other women to star opposite Kathy Bates and Rupert Everett in the film Unconditional Love, to be released on video Oct. 15. Paul Haggis, the creator of CBS's Family Law, saw Eaton in the film and created the role of Emily Resnick, a feisty attorney specifically, for her.
"I was thrilled. It was the first time a little woman had ever sustained a regular role on a primetime drama," said Eaton, who added that the role had nothing to do with her height. "[Haggis] said to me, 'I will bring it up in the first episode, and where it is relevant we will talk about it. But you are going to be a lawyer who happens to be 4-foot-3. You're not going to be a dwarf lawyer.' So that was monumental, and I feel really fortunate that I haven't ever played the elf roles--not that I have anything against it. It's not my cup of tea. I've turned things down because they didn't feel like they were good roles or I felt like my integrity was being compromised.
So why have perceptions not changed over the years? It's a combination of factors: the limited number of little people acting, the specific roles written for them, and plain old-fashioned fear of the unknown.
"We're individuals," Eaton continued. "People don't realize that. There are misconceptions that we're all drunk, we're all horny, we're all mischievous, and some of that might stem from negative roles through the media that have perpetuated year after year."
A Bad Reputation
This partying reputation began during the filming of arguably one of the best sequences ever shot in motion picture history---The Wizard of Oz's Munchkin Land. The fact that 124 little people were gathered for this one sequence in 1938 was historic, but the exaggerated rumors surrounding their seven-week stay at The Culver Hotel while filming has branded them as somehow menacing or uncontrollable. "They had sex orgies in the hotel, and we had to have police on just about every floor," producer Mervyn LeRoy was quoted saying. In fact, this kind of gossip inspired a really bad movie in 1981 called Under The Rainbow starring Chevy Chase. Even movie critic Leornard Maltin asked, "Is this film the Wicked Witch's revenge?"
In 1967, Judy Garland appeared on a TV special hosted by Jack Paar called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Hollywood. She called the Munchkin actors "little drunks" and said "they got smashed every night and they picked them up in butterfly nets," although the ironic thing is Garland was actually battling alcohol and drug dependency herself at the time. Not that the Munchkins' stay went without incident, but the handful of events has been grossly embellished.
Jerry Maren, who appeared in both Under The Rainbow and The Wizard of Oz as one of the Lollipop Guild, told Stephen Cox author of Munchkins of Oz his take on the rumors. "Are you kidding?" Maren said. "It was a lot of hard work, six days a week, going into the studio at six in the morning and not getting home until around seven or eight. There wasn't a lot of time for wild parties and that sort of crap."
According to Cox's book, the little people working on The Wizard of Oz were treated much like children and actually made less than Toto, the Cairn terrier that earned $125 a week. MGM allotted $100 a week for the Munchkins, but their agent Leo Singer took a whopping 50 percent commission. Singer gathered the bulk of the little people for Oz, and had them all sign a contract promising to work exclusively for him---not the studio. Few complained because even that little amount was substantial at the close of the Depression.
"He was in charge of all the midgets in the movie, because [Louis] B. Mayer figured he'd make it easier for himself," Jerry Maren told Back Stage West. "He had most of them in his show, you know, The Famous Singer Midgets. They were a famous act. Well from what I read about it, he was a son of a bitch. He was a cheap bastard. He stole all their money. I don't know what he took out of me, I was just promised $50 a week and that's what I got."
"I only got five dollars a day," recalled Munchkin Hazel Derthick Resmondo in Cox's book. "There wasn't any union or guild or anything for us then. When I complained, Singer said, 'if you don't like your job, you can go home.' I stayed, but I didn't know how to stand up for myself like I can now."
In 1970, former Munchkin Billy Curtis led a drive to provide little people with full membership and voting privileges in SAG, which previously only allowed them to work under waivers. "We've enjoyed many years of not paying dues, but my pride was hurt," Curtis told the Associated Press at the time. "It's like saying because you're not five feet five you can't vote for the president of the United States."
"I was handicapped because of my size," Munchkin George Ministeri told Boston Seniority in 1980. "In my day, show business was one of the only places small people could turn. It's hell going through life being a small person. It's amazing how cruel some people can be without knowing what they're doing."
Politically Incorrect TV
Even in 2003, little people are still being used as visual punch lines. Television is surely the culprit here. On The Man Show, producers were forced to pull one segment featuring "Midget Fly Paper," which was designed "to rid your home of those pesky midgets," Adam Carolla described to The State News.
Earlier this year, little people were in uproar over a skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live that featured dwarf actors and closed with the line, "Aren't midgets fun? Everyone should own a midget." Danny Woodburn was absolutely outraged by this skit. "There's not that many of us so we're a lot less known, and the more we are put in the media, the more backlash there is against us," said Woodburn. "Not a day goes by where I don't hear something incredibly offensive on the television about little people. Right now, Jimmy Kimmel is at the top of my list. He'd be the first person to burn a whole bunch of tiny crosses on my lawn. He's just that kind of a bigot."
Airing next month is Knee High P.I., a new Comedy Central show about "a pint-sized P.I. with a short fuse" and he's always willing to hide in a watermelon to get his man." It will likely continue this trend and lure the same macho audience fed up with the PC mentality. When they were casting Knee High P.I., Woodburn was sent a script of the show. "I read up to page 20 before I threw the script across the room because I was so infuriated by the de-humanizing imagery that was put in it. All of a sudden, political correctness is a bad thing. When was it ever really in play? Now there's a backlash against it," said Woodburn.
Not every little person is outraged by this kind of politically incorrectness. After all, there must be some little people who are willing and compensated to perform in these controversial shows and sketches. To some little people, work is work no matter how un-PC or unglamorous the job, and they don't want anyone telling them what job to take or not take. Peter Dinklage understands this plus side to being un-PC.
"Sometimes, for me personally, that can get in the way a little bit," Dinklage said. "I mean, I'm all for political correctness, but when you're walking on eggshells, that's when people separate you from the rest of the group. Like, when a kid points at me, and the parent puts the kid's hands down and tells them to look away---that's wrong. That kid is going to grow up to be somebody who's walking on eggshells around somebody like me, and it's just got to be all sort of opened up with a line of communication. That's why I try to lighten the whole seriousness of it."
Meredith Eaton agreed with Dinklage on the attitude of walking on eggshells as being the real enemy. "You're not doing any good to us, to them, or to anybody by doing that," she explained. "We're putting ourselves out there. We're not hiding, and we want to be seen and heard and noticed. In doing that, we're trying to change perceptions and open doors. If I wasn't me and I saw me walking down the street, I would stare also! Staring is okay and even pointing, because it's different. We're not people that you see every day." Perhaps the average person just doesn't have enough exposure to little people to see them as people.
Large Role Models
There are two actors that are still widely looked up to by the community of little people in the entertainment industry: the late Michael Dunn of The Wild, Wild West fame who scored Oscar and Tony nominations for his work, and the late Billy Barty who not only spent his entire life performing, but he acted as the champion and spokesman for all little people. In 1957, Barty founded Little People of America, Inc. (www.lpaonline.org), an organization designed to address medical and social issues, and help them accept the unique challenge of being a little person. With an iconic charisma, Barty was a relentless entertainer and advocate, and he bestowed a unique kind of dignity to practically everything he touched. Along with LPA, organizations like Little People's Research Fund as well as The Billy Barty Foundation continue to raise money that is channeled into medical research, educational scholarships, and the breaking down of barriers that affect little people.
83-year-old Jerry Maren, whose long list of credits include At The Circus with the Marx Brothers, The Gong Show, and decades of McDonald's and Buster Brown commercials, told Back Stage West that he helped his old pal Barty co-found and organize the LPA. Although, he didn't want to act as president himself because there were more little people with Barty's condition than Maren's. Of the estimated 200 types of dwarfism, achondroplasia is by far the most common, accounting for approximately half of all cases of profound short stature (other genetic conditions that result in short stature include spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, diastrophic dysplasia, pseudoachondroplasia, hypochondroplasia, and osteogenesis imperfecta).
"There are 99 percent more of them, so you should run for president if we get together because you're one of them and it'll be easier for them to recognize you than me," the former Munchkin told Barty at the time. "And so he said, 'well, if that's the way you like it Jerry,' and I said that's the way I like it. I didn't want to be the president anyway. There was no money attached to it and some people like the glory. Billy loved that shit, you know, pardon my language, but that's where he was. So we made him founder of the Little People of America. Billy did a lot of good, that's for sure."
"Some love it. Some hate it," Matt Roloff, the current LPA national president, said of the organization. "Here we were founded by an actor, and that's our legacy. And a large percentage of our population makes their living, or tries to make their living by acting. Yet are these roles so derogatory that they affect the rest of us that are just trying to be professionals? There's a large segment of our professional population that's very anti-entertainment. They think all of those folks that are taking those roles ought to quit, because they feel like it affects the perception that people have of little people. Being in these derogatory type roles. I've got to admit that I see a different angle than some of my doctor and lawyer friends that are in LPA who are the more anti-entertainment segment of our population."
This is because even though Roloff has made his living in the computer field and as owner of the company Accessibility Solutions, he did in fact play some extra parts in Under the Rainbow and Return of the Jedi for fun. These anti-entertainment members criticize roles that don't reflect some kind of awareness or just "minstrel-ize" the actor involved. For example, Austin Power's Mini-Me catapulted Verne Troyer to international fame but raised questions like where does comedy end and exploitation begin? "I think Verne [Troyer] doing the Austin Powers thing created a lot of opportunities in spoofing alone, because I've played quite a few mini-whatevers in reference to that. Everybody loved the character and the idea," defended Carrington, who played Mini-Mimi on Drew Carey.
'Most of the time when you're a dwarf in a scene, it's a gag. It's a joke. Eventually, you think that that would erode your self-worth a little bit. Would it not?" asked Roloff. "I'm glad to hear that there are some new roles out there that are starting to emerge, but I think that they're still few and far between."
Michael J. Anderson has seen this erosion first-hand, but admits that he took a different perspective on his way to stardom. "19 years ago, I played a lot of Santa's helpers and leprechauns and little creatures in the forest. But in my case, those characters have always sort of captured my imagination," Anderson admitted. "I've worked with some people that would look at the costume and it would in some way defeat them. When you've got a pointed hat on and a pair of pointy ears, it's not the time to do the John Wayne thing, you know what I mean? If you're going to cling to your masculine dignity while you're wearing shoes that are curled up in a little...(laughing) you're really in for a battle. I would just surrender that and become that character. But when I would see what the effect on other people, I could see that playing those roles was a genuine ordeal for those guys."
Computer-Generated Thievery?
"Whoopi Goldberg made a comment about how there were no African-American people in The Lord of the Rings," said Woodburn. "And I just thought to myself, Well, every one of the main characters is pretty much under 4 feet tall, but none of them were actually little people. So, there may have been no African-American people in Middle Earth, but they didn't cast any little people in Middle Earth, either."
Ever since Hollywood has had the technology, it has freely cast average-sized actors in roles that would have gone to little people--and used a big, blue screen. Think of Kenneth Branagh in Wild, Wild West, Julia Roberts in Hook, and John Leguizamo in Moulin Rouge. The Mighty, Dungeons and Dragons, The Lord of the Rings series, and the upcoming Tiptoes have used CGI to shrink their leading men and women-- a slap in the face to some little people.
According to Woodburn, the Rings breakdown asked for actors under 5-foot-9, specifically so CGI could size them down. He said casting director Victoria Burrows saw only three little people in L.A.: himself, the late Billy Barty, and the late Josh Ryan Evans. "Some were really nice and did other roles," defended Burrows. "They even went to India and got some little people. They did around-the-world casting for the roles. But for the most part the ones who really could sustain the leads at that time were the people who got the jobs." Woodburn also wrote to director Peter Jackson about the casting. "[Jackson] basically said that they were going to be using little people but felt that Tolkien's view of the Hobbit is more closely related to his image of what he thinks the Hobbit looks like, which is these CGI'd average people," said Woodburn.
Anderson, however, believes that technology will allow "little people to play giants," citing his role in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. "The technology edge can go both ways," said Anderson. "In that movie, I play a 6-foot-tall man.
"I kind of have mixed feelings about [technology], because I've been in the business like 20 years," said Carrington, who recently did some stunt work for Van Helsing, out next year, and a cameo on Scary Movie Three, out next month. "In the olden days, there was a lot more opportunity for sci-fi work and aliens and monsters and trolls and things like that. A lot of that kind of work has been taken over by the computer. But instead of taking it so personally, I looked across the board at other films, and there are a lot of times where a person who has sight will play a blind person. Or somebody who's not in a wheelchair will play a person in a wheelchair. That's just the way the industry is, and you can bag on it or you can accept it."
Carrington also appears in the upcoming Robert Zemeckis Christmas tale, The Polar Express, out next year. "It's all going to be motion capture. No film has ever, in its entirety, been done with motion capture, and this is one situation where they could have picked a tall actor and made them an elf," she said. "But they auditioned little people, and it wasn't your corny typical Santa's helpers. We're like rough, New York-accent guys. Everybody in the entire film, including Tom Hanks, is going to be animated."
The Linda Hunt Factor
Are roles truly getting better? "I think that started out pretty much with Linda Hunt doing The Year of Living Dangerously. She is a very vocally endowed woman," said Rubinstein, whose first acting work was also in voiceover for The Flinstones. Hunt played Mel Gibson's half-Chinese dwarf photographer and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1984.
When Tony Cox, who has appeared in Return of the Jedi, Friday, and Me, Myself, & Irene, first came to Hollywood to get into acting classes, the head of the school turned him away without a screen test. "He said, 'You know, you're black. You got a strike against you already,' I mean this guy really just belittled me, and it hurt. But then I thought about it, and I said, 'This guy doesn't even know me. He doesn't know how big a heart I have.'" Cox went to other schools and got fantastic feedback. Five years later he told that same guy off. "Actually I ended up speaking at that school about what it's like to make it in acting, and I got a standing ovation," said Cox.
Cox is second lead behind Billy Bob Thorton and Bernie Mac in Bad Santa, due out Nov. 26. He'll also be seen in Back By Midnight with Rodney Dangerfield. "The roles are getting a little bit better," said Cox. "In my case, I just wait for the roles that appeal to me or what I consider good roles. I don't just take anything because I need the work, but in most little people's cases, they can't be like that, and I think they take whatever comes." Evidently plenty has come for Cox. He'll also be appearing in a Jewish superhero film called The Hebrew Hammer, due out in November, and Uncle P, with producer/rapper Master P, due out next year.
When Carrington first came to Hollywood, she estimated, she would get one straight, real-person audition per year, and now more are coming her way. "So I'd say it's just really slow-moving but it's happening," she said. "It's difficult for the casting people because unless it's written as such, if they bring a little person in for something that [producers or directors] didn't ask for, they could get some negative reactions like, 'Why are you wasting our time? We didn't ask for a little person.' So I think casting people are still a little wary of bringing little people in when it's not specified." Carrington said she has been in situations where someone has written a leading part for her and pitched it, but, "Production and people in power don't feel that a little person can carry a film," she said. "A lot of people are like, 'Why does it have to be a little person? We want somebody with a name.'"
Woodburn wants to present himself as a character actor in the same vein as Paul Giamatti, and not just a little person actor. "I've been lucky enough that, with Seinfeld behind me, I've been able to get roles that don't necessarily call for a little person. They just call for a character. I keep a running tab on my non-specific role ratio to specific role ratio. I've always managed to keep [non-specific] above 50 percent, which is good."
Woodburn uses his connections to people in power to help make changes in some of the more stereotypical roles. "The more people you connect to, the more people have an understanding of who you are and what you do. A classic example is [producer/director] Andy Ackerman, whom I worked with on Seinfeld. He wanted me to come in and do this episode of Becker. I read the script, and there were some things in there that I just couldn't swallow, so I talked to him. He was totally open to making all the changes with me," he said.
Why can't Hollywood see a little person as a quirky schoolteacher or lawyer or dentist? The demand for better roles is one that Hollywood writers have yet to meet. Woodburn isn't waiting. He has a comedic script in the works, and Eaton also has been pounding away at the keyboard. "I'm not going to sit around and complain about it," said Eaton. "I'm an opportunist, and when the opportunities are there, I take them. When they're not, I create them. So I wrote a half-hour sitcom, and I also wrote a full-length screenplay. I think people just don't know how to write for little people, and if they only just sat down with someone...What happened with Peter and The Station Agent is fantastic. It had very little to do with his height. It was the backstory, but it wasn't everything. That's what we need more of."
Perhaps every demographic of actor-aside from Caucasian males--is demanding bigger, better roles, and there have been great strides made for African-American and female actors in the past decade. So, here's hoping that little people, who are anything but diminutive, especially where talent is concerned, make a successful and rewarding leap into the mainstream--and Hollywood acknowledges them at long last. BSW
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