Our style of comedy is sort of pushing the envelope, and I guess in this instance, we're pushing the envelope about who's included in the story.

Hi, I'm Jay Rudeman, and welcome to all about change, a podcast showcasing individuals who leverage the hardships that have been thrown at them to better other people's lives.

I say put mental health first, because.

If you don't, this generation of America has already had enough. I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen. Bobby Farley is a director of movies like Dumb and Dumber, and there's something about Mary. He's, of course, known for his comedy, but his work has another through line as well.

And even if the script doesn't say, oh, this guy's a guy in a wheelchair or on crutches or a guy missing a leg or blind or whatever, someone like that can play that part. So we just opened up our mind, like, where can we fill it out so that you see a little bit of everyone?

I spoke to Bobby and his brother Pete Farley back in 2020 about their film careers and how they got into the movie business. You can go back into the all about change archives and listen to those interviews. But for this episode, I wanted to hear from Bobby about what's changed in Hollywood since then.

The days are gone when you'd get an able bodied actor to play a disabled part. Not going to do that anymore. That's not accepted, and that's a good thing.

Bobby has been a pioneer in disability inclusion from the onset of his film career, and that's still true today. That ethos is clear in his newest movie champions.

They were all great. They could act just. It was no harder for me as a director getting a performance out of them as it is with able bodied actors.

Bobby, thank you so much for joining me on all about change. I know you've been with me before, but it's been a few years, and I think it's a great time to catch up about what you've been doing. And you've had some great stuff since we spoke, so it's a good time to get into it. So let's start at the beginning. How did you get into entertainment, and what were your goals when you first started down the road? To say, I want to make movies.

Yeah. Well, my brother Pete and I, neither of us studied film or ever thought we'd have anything to do with know, growing up. Pete went to Providence college and studied accounting. I went to Renzelaire Polytechnic Institute and studied geology. And neither of us used our whatever it is we studied for even a day after. And Pete, who's a year older than me, thought to himself, you know what? I want to try something different. And he really, out of the blue, said, I want to be a writer. So he quit his job, and he started writing and went to grad school to study creative writing and all that. And he wanted to write a book. And he did write a book. It took about a year, and it got published, and it did great. As far as books go, it's hard to have a huge hit right out of the gate, but it got published, and it got good reviews and all that. So it was very encouraging. Pete said to himself, I'm going to move out to California. He had met a guy at writing school who lived out there, and he thought, I'm going to move out there and try my hand at screenwriting.

So he moved out, and meanwhile, I moved out to California because I didn't have much going on back home either, back in Providence, where I was working, and I moved out with a friend. So while I was out there, Pete and his writing partner, Bennett, were writing screenplays. And when they get a screenplay ready to turn in, they send it to me and say, hey, take a look at this and tell us what you think. And so I sort of became their first line of defense, the first eyeballs who saw it. And then I'd give them some notes, and they'd think, oh, that was good. Those are good notes. And so eventually they said, you want to come in and write with us? I was like, oh, my God, this sounds great. Because the other know, we were having fun doing it, but we weren't making a living. So I hopped on board with Pete and Bennett, and we wrote. We wrote screenplays, and we would get so close to getting them made into a movie, but it just wouldn't quite work. Okay, so we wrote maybe a half dozen screenplays. We'd sell them, sell them to the studio.

They'd option them or they'd pay us for them, or it wouldn't quite get made. And one of the ones we had written was the script of dumb and dumber. And the studios, they all saw it and they laughed, and people had, that's great. And we'd get hired to write other things because we had written this screenplay that was making everyone laugh. But, odly, they wouldn't make dumb a dumber. Just, okay, it's funny, but it's really dumb. Yeah, well, that's the idea. They're so dumb. It's funny, right? And so eventually we got frustrated that we didn't get anything made. And so we thought, why don't we try to take one of these screenplays that we've written, and we'll try to figure out how to make a very low budget movie ourselves. We'll make an independent movie. And that was going to be dumb and dumber. And as we started that process, things just kind of took off. This guy in it named Jim Carrey that everyone knows now, but he was on a tv show. He wasn't a big star, and nobody thought he was going to be a movie star. And we got him at the right time, and things were just taking off.

And finally we were in the right place at the right time, and it was number one at the box office when it came out. And so we went from a standing start to off and running, and we've been making movies ever since and just having a really good time doing it. We both enjoy it, and it's just been a tremendous experience.

It's unusual, and it's not unusual for brothers to work together. It sounds like you guys had a really good relationship that you lived near each other and you were able to work together for a long time.

Yeah, well, Pete and I are. We're only a year and a half apart, actually. A year and a half to the day apart, 18 months apart. A little bit of what call irish twins, I guess, or close to that. And so when we grew up, we were very close. We had the same group of friends, basically. We always did the same things.

So, Bobby, can you tell me the story of Danny Murphy? Danny, I guess, is someone that you and Pete grew up with, and just tell me his story and how he ended up impacting you guys.

Yeah. Danny Murphy was a childhood friend. He was from Boston, we were from Rhode island, but we'd both go to the cape during the summertime. We ended up meeting him, and he became a good friend. He was a young guy who just had the world by the tail. Tremendous athlete, came from a really nice family, big irish family, I think, eight or nine kids, and great hockey player and golfer and all that. And then one day during the summer, he was out. I wasn't there that day, but Pete was there on a boat, and Danny dove off the boat into the water, and it was way more shallow than he thought. And he hit his head and broke his neck and became a quadriplegic at age, I think it was 16 or 17. And he was just that guy. Like he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He was just such a great inspiration because he just never wallowed in pity at all. He just said, all right, I'm going to make the best of this. And he did. And he had a full life afterwards, doing all sorts of things. He became a great advocate in the community of people with those sort of disabilities.

He was in a wheelchair his whole life and was basically a quadriplegic where his arms nor legs worked properly, but he did have a little movement in his arms. But anyway, stayed our friend, just a great guy. And after he saw dumb and dumber, we showed the movie to all of our friends, and he said, that's really great. So proud of you guys. But I didn't see anyone with a disability in that movie. And we're like, oh, God. He just called us out on it, and we're like, oh, okay. It's just one of those things. We didn't think to do it. We didn't write a character that had a disability in it. And so we realized, okay, you got us. I remember Pete said, tell you what, you want to be in the next movie? We'll put you in. He's LIKE, what am I going to do? I don't know. We'll figure out a place for you. And so we actually put him in our next movie, Kingpin. And he kind of said to us at the time, he said, I'll do it. WasN't an actor or anything, but Kind of leapt at the opportunity.

But he said to us, he goes, I don't want to just be that guy that everyone loves, and he's the sweetest guy, and I'm an earth angel, and I never do any wrong. I want a real role. And so we basically turned him into one of the bad guys that Woody Harrelson comes up against. When Woody's in the movie, he's a bowling hustler. And so he comes across these other guys, and they catch him hustling them, and they end up roughing them up. And Danny was one of those guys. No, what are you doing? I'll pay you BACk, I swear to God. I swear. So he ended up being in all of our movies after that. But because we put him in and we thought he did such a good job, we just opened up the doors to thinking about people who'd have some form of disability and putting them in our movies. And actually, people from that world came to us because they saw that we had done that and they lobbied us for other roles. And so we've just always had basically an affinity for finding places for people with disabilities because they're often overlooked in other movies, just like we did in the first movie.

We just DIdn't THInk ABout it. But after we started thinking ABout it, we put them in. My feeling about actors is that a lot of what makes a memorable actor or a good actor is having a really good look or a distinct look. It's not the whole THIng, but it's a big part of it. If you stand out in some way, you're going a long way towards building a memorable character. And so, like DANNY in his WHEELCHAIR, it becomes a memorable character. And, odly, in movies, they were very seldom, they, being people like him with disabilities, were very seldom cast in movies. And it was usually, like he said, only to know the guy who's someone's brother and is a sympathetic character and all that, but never in really full bodied human roles where they can be a good guy or a bad guy or anything in between. It was always like a certain stereotype. And so he told us, don't do that to me. I don't want to do that. And that's what opened up our mind to think. It's like, okay, well, we have all these roles in the script, and even if the script doesn't say, oh, this guy's a guy in a wheelchair or on crutches or a guy missing a leg or blind or whatever, someone like that can play that part.

It doesn't just have to be, oh, then they come across, like I say, a guy with a certain disability. So we just opened up our mind, like, where can we fill it out so that you see a little bit of everyone?

And one of my favorite movies that you guys made is something about Mary. And there are several roles with people with disabilities in that movie. So it wasn't just Danny, you know, many people in there. And did that become something that was now a focus? You're like, okay, let's know several of these roles.

Well, there's something about Mary. Trying to write this Mary character. We always draw on our own experiences of what we had growing up or what we have in our life or people that we know and all that. And we had a kid who was in our neighborhood growing up who was intellectually disabled in those days. We'd say he was mentally retarded, but he had intellectual disabilities, and everyone loved him. He hung out with us. He had a couple of brothers that we hung out with, and he was just one of the guys. He was one of the gang. So we thought, he can be Mary's brother. In the movie. And so we wrote this character a lot like. And his name's Warren, and the one that I know, Warren Tajin. So we named the character Warren, and he's a little bit different, but there's a lot of similarities. And we just wrote this character in, and he just became part of this story. Now, it's a big, broad, goofy, go for it comedy. And so the studio that was looking at and said, hey, you can't put this character in here. It doesn't feel right.

Why doesn't it feel right? It feels like you're making fun of him. They're going to come after you. You're making fun of this guy. And our feeling was, we're not making fun of him at all. He's just one of the guys. And everyone in the whole story is a little flawed and does funny things and all that. He's just part of the troop. And they were like, I don't know. And so they kind of put the squeeze on us to take this character out, and we gave it a moment's thought. Could thinking, well, these guys are smart. They run a studio. They know what they're doing. But then we thought to ourselves, well, then we're just pretending that he doesn't exist. That's not what we want to do. There's something inherently wrong about it. We're pretending that our friend Warren exists because all the other characters loosely based on people that we know, so how come we can't base one on him? And that was the beauty of being a brother team, is that we talked to each other. Then we just stood our ground. We said, no, no, we're not taking him out. We're leaving him in and he stays.

Have you seen my bedball? Hey, buddy, come here.

I think I know where your ball is.

You seen my bedball? Yeah. Yeah, I've seen it.

And that must have been hard, going up against a studio who's footing all the bills and saying to them, no, I think he's the right person.

You know, Jay, making a movie, it's always hard because you're always up against the studio and all that. And God bless them, they give you the money. And like I say, they're experts. They know a lot. They know what they think the audience will want and all that sort of, you know, there's a certain wisdom to what they're saying, but they have a tendency to try to water everything down just to play it all safe. And that was one of the things that Pete and I didn't know when we made dumb and dumber. It kind of broke the mold. It wasn't like other comedies that were coming out then. We were putting in jokes and things that we thought were funny, and the studio would have told us to take all those things out, too. It's just that because we were making a smaller movie and it kind of took off on us. They didn't have time to tell us all that, and so we just made the movie that we wanted, and then we've pretty much done that ever since and just followed our own instincts. Otherwise, it just becomes sort of a very watered down vanilla story.

It's safer to tell those stories, but there's something missing. But I guess in this instance, we're pushing the envelope about who's included in the story.

So let me ask you, I'm curious, have you seen a shift in the industry recently, and do you see any changes for the better regarding authentic representation?

There's definitely been a shift. The eyes have been opened, and I think that there's a lot more representation now. I still think we have a long way to go, but, yeah, I don't think that the studios and all that would object as quickly as they did before. It was easier to just, I don't know, like I said, sort of pretend that everyone's healthy, everyone's normal. But no, nowadays, you see, of course, in almost all stories, you see much more representation of not just people with disabilities, but all sorts of ethnicities and religions and everything else. They're all way more represented than they used to be. Our thing is, it still is people with disabilities, because, as you know all too well, they're underrepresented. They're a lot more in real life than there are what you see in the movies and the tvs and all that. But I think we're coming. Look, last year we made the movie champions, and in the movie champions, there's ten people with varying degrees of intellectual disabilities. So I had to find actors who could play that. The days are gone when you'd get an able bodied actor to play a disabled part.

Not going to do that anymore. That's not accepted, and that's a good thing.

So talk about that shift. How did that happen? Because it used to be, at least from my advocacy, when I would sit down with the studios and talk about more authentic representation disability, the pushback that I would get is, hey, we need a big name, and I don't have a big name who has a disability. So therefore, that's what good acting is. How do you push back against that.

Look you CAn see, you can build a case for either side would rain man if they said, oh, Dustin HoFfman can't play that part. He's just acting. He doesn't have that degree of autism or whatever it is that that character had. Right. But it's like, well, that was a great movie, know? So I can see where someone would say, they're an actor, they can play that part. I can understand that. But here's the rub. The other way is that people with actual disabilities and different abilities, they don't get cast for regular, what they would call normal roles. They just don't. And so if there's a part like that in a movie nowadays, a part where somebody has something that makes them stand out in the world of disabilities, it's like, well, find an actor with disabilities that can do it. And THat's what I was getting at with champions is that when I cast the ten actors that were in that who were to have intellectual disabilities, the actors did have disabilities. They were all great. It was no harder for me as a director, getting a performance out of them as it is with able bodied actors.

So, I mean, that's the thing. Given the chance, you'll see that. And I hope everyone sees it. They can perform. They really CAN. They can act as well as an able bodied actor.

So let's talk about champions, because I saw it and I loved it. It's funny and it's moving. And tell us about the casting. Mean, you know, Woody Harrelson is the lead actor in the movie, but maybe just give us a quick synopsis of what the movie's about and how you went about casting actors with disabilities for the movie.

Yeah, well, woody's a good friend. He said, I found this movie. Champions is a remake from a spanish movie called campions, which is the same word in SPAnISh. And he showed me this Spanish movie that had been made, and he said, I love this movie, and I want to remake it for an American audience. And when I saw it, I said, okay, I see it. It's about a down and out basketball coach. He's a pro basketball coach. He's off the rails. He's drinking too much. He's making a lot of mistakes in his life, and he gets court ordered to coach a team. He either has to go to jail, or his sentence is that he has to coach this one team who has intellectual disabilities, and he has to do it for a certain amount of time. So, anyways, he coaches this team. It's one of those stories where they teach him more than he teaches them. And it becomes this kind of a love fest where they just fall for each other. So what we had to do was find this team. I had to find ten actors who could play basketball. They're not kids, they're adults.

They're mostly young adults, but some of them in their 20s or thirty s and they play rec league basketball. It was a little bit of a to do because there's just a lot of things involved. They had to play basketball. They couldn't get an actor who really they had to at least want to play basketball. And we're shooting it up in Canada. And so we opened up the casting process. We went out to all these different basketball leagues all over Canada and the US and said, do you have any young adults with some form of intellectual disability who love to play basketball and want to try their hand at acting? This was all happening during the pandemic and all that. So it was very difficult to get in front of all these people, but I had them all put themselves on tape and send it into us and we were just bombarded with people sending in their tapes and there were so many good choices about who to pick. It was really surprising, I think. So we whittled it down. We whittled it down to what we thought were the ten best. We wanted to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, little height, someone small, someone tall, male, female, different forms of disabilities and all that.

And so it was a little bit of a chess game. And we ended up with these ten people. And I got to believe we got it right because they were all just terrific, also authentic. And it was a tremendous ExPerience. It was a great experience for me as a filmmaker. It was really, I think, the highlight of my career doing, directing that particular story with all those particular actors, most of whom had never done any acting at all. So it was just a lot of fun. We went up to Winnipeg, Canada, in the middle of the winter. It was VerY cold, but we had a blast. We really did. We just had a blast making the movie. And so it's just SoMething that very proud of. And it did great. And particularly when it got to streamers, it's on Amazon prime and all that. And when people found it, it really got an Audience. So right now we're looking into making a sequel with these ten characters. But my feeling is I don't want to make another basketball movie because you're probably just going to be the same. It's going to feel like you're doing the same thing twice.

Okay. And I don't want to do that. We've already told that basketball story. So ideally, we get these ten same actors, and something else happens in someone's life where they all have to band together and involves WOody and all that. So right now, we're piecing together some different storylines, but Woody and Myself and CErtAINLY all the actors are very excited about redoing it, and so making something resembling what we'd call a champion.

Stew, I'm so happy to hear that, because I love the movie, and I didn't know until I talking to you now how it did, but I'm happy it did well, and I'm happy that the studio is happy about it, because more movies like this will get made, ANd THAt's great, ANd COnGratulations on your success. I think thAt's great.

Well, thank you, jay. I had this woman come to me last week, and she said to me, she said, are you the guy who made champions? I said, yes. And she said, okay, I just want to tell You, I saw the movie, and I didn't know where she was going with this. I didn't know if I was a draw trouble or not. Right. And she said, I have worked with special needs people my whole life, in schools and growing up and everything. And I'm like, okay. I absolutely loved it. And I was LiKe, oh, well, thank you very much. That's so great to hear. She said, I ALmost didn't see it because of the reviews. And I said, really? What was it about the reviews? She said, I read a review, and they said it was very condescending towards people in that world. And I was like, really? And I remember reading some of these reviews, and I honestly said to myself, like, I don't know if that reviewer saw the movie or if they just think they know what it's about, okay? Because it's a comedy and ThERe's people with intellectual disabilities in it.

I must be making fun of them. And, of course, we're not making fun of them. We're making fun with them. They're part of the fun. Yeah, there was jokes on certain people in it, but most of the joke was on Woody and how he needed to learn more. Okay. They needed to learn a little basketball, but he needed to open up his eyes and see the world in a different light, and he did in the movie. So it's just one of THose things. You can't please everyone.

You cannot please everyone. No.

Who the hell are you? I'm MARCUS, coacH.

Welcome to the team Constantino.

Look, DOn't flirt with me. Okay, LEt's Keep this professional. I'm MS. CASantiNO to you.

Beg pardon, Miss Cosentino.

Critics are TOUGH. They scared away a lot of people. But when it finally got to Amazon prime and all that, they give you the critic score, and it's, like, not good, 55% or something, but then they give you the audience score, and it's, like, 96%. And I'm like, what's this disparity between the audience, the people at home watching it, the whole world, and these critics? It's a bizarre thing. They're very tough on this genre, I think.

Well, I think we could have a long discussion about the community and looking for perfection, but I thought it was done very well. And audiences want to.

We make all of our movies for the audience.

They want to have a good time. They want to see something that makes them laugh, that they maybe have a tear in their eye that they remember. And this is a memorable movie. I want to ask you, Bobby, talk a little bit about the writing process. How do you go about. I mean, I know this is a remake, but who's in the room? Who makes sure that this is told correctly?

Okay, well, I just want to get it out on champions. When Woody brought it to me, there already was a script written, and it was written by this really great screenwriter named Mark Rizzo. He had adapted the spanish movie that said, when we have the screenplay, I have to make sure before I go out there that we're not doing something that is going to offend the people that I care about, namely the people in that world. So I found a lot of people that I know who have some connection, either have a sibling or someone they know who's in that world. And I wanted them to read it and say, hey, is there anything in here that's jumping out at you? Is there anything that's not true? Is there anything that you don't agree with? And we would get a couple of small notes, but like I said, the original screenplay was so well done that there really weren't a lot. But I take to heart anything that anyone says, just because, above all, I want the people in that world to appreciate this movie. If that world was mad at me for making that movie, I would be heartbroken and devastated.

So I want to get it right by them. And along the same lines, we'll send the script to the people that we know at the Special Olympics and best know Tim Shriver, those kind of guys. We have them look at the script, and we say, is there anything in here that we have to change. And again, small notes. This. That. The other thing, the vernacular changes. It changes over time. What used to say, you wouldn't say anymore. Those kind of things. I want to make sure there's nothing in here that's outdated or in any way insulting or anything. So that was the key thing is I wanted to make sure that we're starting from a good place. And then in the making of the movie, stuff happens where it's not always what was on the page. Right. It might be a little ad libbing on the set and all that sort of thing. So then when the movie is put together, you also have to show it to everyone to make sure that there's nothing that went wrong along the way or even tonally like that. So look, I listen to the audience and all that.

I want to make sure that if we do something like this that we get it right. Right.

Well, I had the privilege of watching Peter direct a movie and it was intense. I mean, the amount of people on the set, the amount of preparation that went into it how exacting he was in terms of what he wanted from the actors. So I'd love the opportunity one day to see you in action because it's fascinating. It's a world that most people don't know. They see the final product and like, oh, yeah, they're just going through it. And it's not that at all. It's bits and pieces and it's done over and over again.

Did you go to see Peter Green book or was it one of his other movies?

No, it was greatest beer run.

The greatest beer run. Yeah.

And it was interesting. And I learned a lot. I learned a tremendous amount. So I wanted to ask you. You have a large body of comedic work stuck on you. Something about Mary champions. What role do you think comedy plays in furthering social issues?

I'm one of those guys who thinks that comedy is really important. It doesn't seem like it is, but it is, because life is hard. It's difficult for everyone. Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Comedy helps us just laugh at it all. You laugh or cry? I'd rather laugh than cry. And so when you're joking about things, it has a collective way of kind of making it all make sense. Or at least making it not so serious and it eases the pain. I think you should laugh at stuff not in a disrespectful way but when the time's right. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Right? I think that's a formula someone smarter than me made up and I think that's true. So without the comedy, it's just tragedy, period. Tragedy plus time. It's liKe, no, sooner or later, you got to laugh at things. You got to laugh at it. It eases it, and it connects us all. When we had made our movie, there's something ABout marY. It was a big head, of course, at the time, and I remember at the time, Pete and I, some doctor reached out and he said, I just want you guys to know that we have these people that are in the hospital, and they're on their deathbed, and we don't know what to do with them.

We're showing them your movie, and they're laughing their butts off, and it's helping them. It was prolonging them. He's saying it's recharging them. They went on to beat all their ailments, but it prolonged it, and it brought a certain quality of life to their last days. And I think comedy does do that. Laughing does do that. It's tHerapeutic.

It is.

So you don't want to go through a life not laughing at all. And so you have to leave for a little comedy in your world.

Well, you have had a major impact. What's next? What do you see coming down the road? What are some of the things that you'd like to do?

I'm looking forward to doing champions two. Mark Rizzo again, is going to write the screenplay because he did such a good job the first time. So I'm dying to see what he comes up with. Woody told me his favorite movie he ever made. I don't doubt him, because, like I said, it was my favorite, too. I think it's just how much fun we had and overcoming challenges and all that, but it was just a blast. So definitely looking forward to that. But also, I got one that I think about to do now, and it's kind of a throwback comedy where it's a big, goofy comedy that they have, like I was saying, they haven't really made in the last few years. So I'm hoping to make one of those, too, just to energize the comedy world, hopefully, and just to make a good old school, laugh out loud comedy.

Bobby, I really thank you for being my guest and all about change. I know you don't think of YOURSelF as an activist, but you have changed our world. You've made our world better. You've taken some moral stands and acted on it, and you made us laugh at the same time. So thank you so much for being my guest today. I really appreciate the conversation.

Jay, thank you. Thanks for the kind words. I never thought of myself that way, but I appreciate it and it's great talking to you. I appreciate the work you guys do, and I don't know who else is doing it. Certainly no one better than you. So I appreciate you. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Bobby Farley's movies never cease to amaze me. They can make you laugh, open your eyes, and warm your heart all at once. Hollywood may be moving toward a more inclusive view of our world, but there's a lot of work left to do, and I'm glad Bobby is there to do it. That's it for today's episode. Join us two weeks from today as I sit down with a member of the trailblazing conservation group, the Black Mambas. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Chasson with story editing by Joy Metal and Mijan Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website, allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We'd really appreciate it. All about change is produced by the Rudiment Family foundation in partnership with Pod people. That's all for now. I'm Jay Rudeman, and we'll see you next time on all about change.

You, but not goodbye.