Confronting Attitudinal Barriers in the Workplace: A New Major Motion Picture Traces the Impact of a National Program from its Birthplace in Oregon

While attending college in Portland almost four decades ago, two young men from Oregon struck up a friendship. Richard Pimentel and Art Honeyman were an unlikely pair, but their friendship was an integral factor in a series of events that would ultimately lead to Richard to write a compelling training program that would change many workplaces in America. Richard is the author of the Windmills Attitudinal Training Program that became the standard for disability-related training in corporate America.

This engaging story caught Hollywood’s attention and is the subject of a new major motion picture - "Music Within". A premiere showing of the movie took place in Portland only last month. Beginning on October 26, Music Within is scheduled for release in major cities throughout the United States. On November 9, it will open at the Regal Fox Tower Stadium 10 in Portland.

Larry King hails Music Within as "The Sleeper of the year... great movie, terrific cast, one of those films that comes along once in a blue moon."

In the film, Richard Pimentel (played by Ron Livingston) and Art Honeyman (played by Michael Sheen) both had to contend with disabilities in their lives. Portraying their experiences in confronting the subtle and not-so-subtle attitudinal barriers that face people with disabilities, the film personalizes the emerging disability rights movement and the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In our recent interview with him, Richard Pimentel gave us rich insight into his life and the importance of this movie experience. 

OBLN: Richard, a large part of Music Within is focused on your crusade with Windmills - the attitudinal training program that you developed for employers. Windmills has been one of the most important influences in the opening North American workplaces to workers with disabilities. Companies like Portland General Electric, here in Oregon still use it regularly. You must be very proud of the impact that you have had through it.

Richard Pimentel: A good friend of mine once said “Greatness can only be seen through the rearview mirror. You never see it through the front windshield.” Ultimately what we do on a day-to-day basis is just try to stay on the road. I feel that way about Windmills. Years ago, I was a job developer in Portland. I was trying to find jobs for people with disabilities. I would talk to employers and find that they had these attitude problems. I would take my time to educate each of them. Eventually, I just got tired. I couldn’t continue to give the same message to dozens of individuals every day. I decided to put it into a training program that I could use to educate several people at the same time. I would give these talks to groups of employers and then I would follow up with each of them – trying to get them to hire my job-seekers.

Some employer in Portland had heard my presentation and reported to his national headquarters that it was a really neat training program. This somehow got to the California Governor’s Committee for the Employment of People with Disabilities who wanted me to develop it into a full-blown training program. I took a year off and wrote Windmills. It came out with perfect timing. The disability movement was just picking up steam but there was no strong employer component to it. It was like a missing piece of the puzzle and it exploded! I saw this little thing that I had designed, just to help me place a caseload of about thirty people with disabilities into jobs, suddenly become the corporate training tool for companies like ARCO and IBM. Clarence Thomas invited to me train all the investigators for the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As part of the momentum of the entire disability movement, it was a huge roller-coaster ride.

OBLN: In Music Within your mentor, Ben Padrow, tells you not to focus on getting people to change their minds about people with disabilities, but to change their minds about themselves. How is that reflected in the Windmills program?

Richard Pimentel: In the earliest days of disability training we had “imitative training.” Trainers would come in and tell employers they were going to make all their people sensitive to disability. They would put non-disabled employees in wheelchairs. They would blindfold them. They would put earmuffs on them. They would tell them “You are now paraplegic, blind or deaf.” And they would have to go through their day that way. At the end of the day, those employees would shed those devices and say “Boy, poor people with disabilities. Let me write you a check.” What we didn’t see was that they weren’t hiring anyone. Those trainings elicited sympathy – not empathy. They focused on getting employers to do something for people with disabilities – rather than encouraging them to do things with people with disabilities.

When we entered the picture, we first asked “Why are employers reluctant to hire people with disabilities?” Overwhelmingly, we received the answer: “Employers lack confidence in the ability of people with disability to do the job”. In response, the disability community passed around things like the DuPont study which showed that, on the job, people with disabilities performed as well or better than their non-disabled counterparts. They passed around testimonials about how great this blind guy, or this deaf girl were on the job. But still employers weren’t hiring people.

I talked about this with a lot of people. Then one day I had this epiphany: Employers are not reluctant to hire people with disabilities because they have a lack of confidence in the ability of people with disabilities. In fact, it is because they have a lack of confidence in their own ability to work effectively with people with disabilities. Once I realized that, we diverted Windmills away from teaching employers everything they ever wanted to know about being blind, deaf, etc. and we made it an exploration of how people make decisions, why people react in certain ways, why the good skills you already have in working with people are the same skills that will allow you to work effectively with people with disabilities – and why you are afraid to do it. As soon as we shifted away from “We want you to feel better about these people” to “We want you to feel better about yourself” we began building the confidence of employers in themselves. That resulted in interviews, that resulted in hires, and that resulted in retention.

You are right, that one line from Ben Padrow is really the key to Windmills, its Rosetta Stone. I think it was the most important line in the whole movie. If we had not come to that realization, Windmills would have just been another stupid program that, at the end of the day, left employers saying “Boy, this was a wonderful experience, but I really don’t want to hire one of these people because it is too hard”.

OBLN: So, Windmills really doesn’t educate employers about people with disabilities – as much as it educates them about themselves.

Richard Pimentel: Yes, that is our philosophy exactly: There is nothing wrong with people with disabilities. There is something wrong with the way that we react to them. The focus can’t be that you go to employers and say “Let me tell you why you are wrong about people with disabilities having something wrong with them.” No, you say; “Let’s talk about why we react the way we do... and if you look at it in a different way, if you react in a different way, what more can you accomplish?” That is the key to the whole program.

OBLN: Your old friend Art Honeyman is a central figure in the story and his portrayal by Michael Sheen was amazing to watch. Michael was brilliant as Tony Blair in The Queen, but how was he chosen for this role?

Richard Pimentel: The most physically-impaired person in the movie, of course, is Art. Yet, if you look at it carefully, he is the only “normal” person in the film. Everyone, including myself, is fundamentally flawed. He is the only one that has his act together.

The key to casting Michael was that we weren’t looking for someone to play an individual with cerebral palsy. That would have been easy. We had to find the right actor to play Art Honeyman – a real person. When this thing first came about, I was insistent that people with cerebral palsy be auditioned for the role and, in the case of a dead heat with an non-disabled actor, that the person with cerebral palsy would get the role. Michael, however, nailed the portrayal of Art. People who know Art Honeyman, who have seen this movie, think that they have been put in a time machine and sent back to the 60’s. Throughout the making of the movie, Michael and Art became quick friends. Art taught Mike how to move and even how to drive his foot-guided electric wheelchair. In his portrayal, Michael was Art.

We bent over backwards to hire someone with cerebral palsy to play Art, but in the end, we had to go back to what I have been preaching all my life: “People with disabilities, like everyone else, have the right to be considered for every job but, ultimately, everyone has to be hired based on their own ability to do the job. A disability is not inherently a qualification.” In hiring Michael, we just hired the best-qualified person to do the job.

OBLN: In Music Within, we learn a little about your experience as a disabled veteran of the Vietnam War – and your early work in developing jobs for other disabled vets. Do you think that theme will resonate with today’s audiences?

Richard Pimentel: The movie did portray some of my experience as a Vietnam vet. I wouldn’t abandon my fallen comrades on the battlefield and I wouldn’t abandon them at home either. The parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is very real. We have soldiers fighting an unpopular and controversial war. We have very strong feelings on both sides. I personally don’t care how anyone feels about the war, but I do care what we feel about the warriors. We are going to get about 100,000 soldiers back this year. We have record numbers of soldiers with traumatic stress disorders. We have unbelievable numbers of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and we have huge numbers of soldiers with amputations. I don’t want the veterans of this war to come back and face the same lack of opportunity that Vietnam vets faced. I want employers who see this movie to be aware that injured veterans have valuable skills too.

OBLN: One last question about Music Within… what are your hopes for it? You designed the Windmills program that is featured in it. It is your life story, but it is communicating a strong message. What are you hoping that it will be able to accomplish?

Richard Pimentel: At first, as I started writing down my life story for the movie, I was really concerned about selling myself as the hero – because that seemed so wrong. As I actually began to write, however, I stopped worrying about being the hero and became worried about being the villain in my own life. After a while, however, I realized that I was neither the hero nor the villain, but barely even the protagonist. It became not the life story of Richard Pimentel, but the life story of the disability movement as seen through the eyes of Richard Pimentel. The story is about the movement – using Art and myself as the mirror.

I am truly hoping that seeing the movie will be a little like attending a Windmills training – that people will see it and come away saying “I understand.” - that people will come away with their perspectives on people with disabilities changed. I want employers to see it. I want teachers to see it. I want parents of kids with disabilities to see it. What I really want is for young people with disabilities to see it. I want young people with disabilities to know their history. I want them to know that there were people like Art Honeyman who were willing to go to jail. I want them to know where they came from - because they have so many more places to go. They need to know that they are a step in a longer journey. They need to know that something happened before them, that something is going to happen after them, and that they are playing a part in it all.

To me personally, Music Within is a blessing beyond belief. This movie captures my journey and everything I have stood for. As I get older and unable to teach as many people as I do now, like an ancient prehistoric bee frozen in rosin, people can pick it out and look at me! I hope that viewers will realize, as I have come to, that, ultimately, the only real accomplishments in life are the differences that you make in the lives of the individuals who you meet and touch.

Visit the Music Within website and watch the trailer!

Learn more about Richard Pimentel

Read about how Portland General Electric puts the Windmills program to work.

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