Why were so many deaf people angry with Columbia Pictures in 1992? What was the movie they were angry about?

Answer:
In 1992, executive producers Penny Marshall and Elliott Abbott cast Kurt Fuller, a hearing actor with no previous experience in sign language or familiarity with Deaf culture, as an ASL-using Deaf character in Calendar Girl. Although there was no scarcity of qualified Deaf actors with native-ASL skills who could have taken the role, they were not properly notified. They were, in effect, bypassed. Despite nationwide protests, the producers stuck to their decision and refused to reopen auditions. The movie, released on September 3, 1993, proved a commercial flop and was quickly yanked from distribution, ending what promised to become a nationwide boycott of the movie with coordinated protests at each cinema where it was being shown. Calendar Girl later emerged on the home-video market.

The team of Penny Marshall and Elliott Abbott had already been involved with two critically-acclaimed and successful movies. They were two of the three co-executive producers of Awakenings (1990). Abbott was producer of A League of Their Own (1992). Marshall directed Awakenings and A League of Their Own.

Calendar Girl, directed by John Whitesell, was a nostalgic coming-of-age movie, told in flashbacks. Jason Priestley, Gabriel Olds, and Jerry O’Connell co-starred as three childhood buddies who, in 1962, pool their resources and take a road trip to Hollywood to fulfill their fantasy of meeting Marilyn Monroe. Clips from Monroe’s films are included, as are “Golden Oldies” tunes. Viewers’ reviews (in the Internet Movie Database) were decidedly mixed. One calls it “a routine but pleasant comedy.” Another calls it “uninspired pretty boy nonsense.” Others commented on the attention to 1950s-1960s period detail. Older viewers enjoyed the nostalgia.

The “quirky” role of Arturo Gallo, a Deaf Mafioso-type loan shark, was originally to have gone to an ASL-fluent actor. Instead, the “ASL-ness” of the Gallo character was dumbed down. After Kurt Fuller was cast, he was given a two-week crash course in ASL signing and mannerisms. As any seasoned ASL signer knows, this isn’t sufficient to produce convincing results. A fluent signer who saw a cinematic preview reported that Fuller’s signing was badly done, and full of errors.

What odd (indirect) connection did the producers have with the Deaf community?

Answer:
Awakenings was based on the book of the same title by the renowned neurologist-author Oliver Sacks, who also wrote Seeing Voices: a Journey into the World of the Deaf (1990), exploring his fascination with the Deaf community, its history, prelingually deaf people, the intricate workings of ASL, and the amazing things scientists have been learning about the way Deaf people think and process language. He even includes a chapter on the “Deaf President Now!” uprising of March 1988.

Awakenings was originally published in 1973. Harold Pinter’s 1982 play, A Kind of Alaska, was inspired by it. A revised edition of Awakenings was published in 1990, including essays about the book’s screen and play adaptations.

Awakenings details Sacks’ work with patients afflicted with encephalitis lethargica. They were victims of a devastating epidemic that swept the world from 1917 to 1928. Just as mysteriously as it had appeared, the epidemic vanished, but the survivors were left with debilitating illness, much like sleeping sickness or catatonia. Their bodies frozen in a trance-like state, most could not communicate at all, even though they still had some consciousness. They were given up as hopeless cases and warehoused in a psychiatric-hospital ward. After decades of immobility, they experienced dramatic, but short-lived, improvements after receiving the new Parkinson’s Disease drug L-dopa in 1969.

The 1990 movie version, a fictionalized adaptation, was co-produced by Walter Parkes and Larry Laske. Penny Marshall, Elliott Abbott, and Ann Schmidt were executive producers. Robin Williams starred as Dr. Malcolm Sayer, whose character was based closely on Sacks. Robert De Niro co-starred as Leonard Lowe, one of Sayer’s somewhat fictionalized patients. The real Dr. Sacks served as technical consultant to the production. Williams socialized with Sacks, observing him closely, then created his own character.

No one—so far—has attempted to do a movie version of Seeing Voices.