Late one night in Minneapolis ten summers ago Billy Golfus was riding home on his motor scooter. He came to a halt at a stoplight. Suddenly the car behind him lunged forward, hurtling him 67 feet to the pavement. Golfus wasn’t wearing a helmet; he slipped into a coma that lasted more than a month. Adding insult to injury, the cops investigating the accident ticketed him for having an expired city sticker. Thus began a series of painful ironies of coping with disability while battling bureaucratic indifference, some of which are recounted in When Billy Broke His Head . . . and Other Tales of Wonder, an hour-long documemoir recently completed by Golfus in collaboration with Chicago filmmaker David Simpson.
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“We didn’t want to go for the cliche of a cripple’s inspirational story,” Simpson remembers, “even though Billy did make a remarkable recovery. I encouraged him to take the first-person-narrative approach, to vent his anger at all the prejudices against the disabled.” Golfus agrees. “David and I want the audience to understand that disability is not just a medical fact,” he says. “It also has a political dimension.” Simpson, who holds an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute, first met Golfus five years ago when Golfus took an introductory video-production course from him at the University of Minnesota. The class assignment was for each student to make a five-minute tape set in the bedroom. “In Billy’s case, of course, he wanted to put on tape the inconveniences of being disabled, his coordination and memory problems, his crankiness.”
In November 1992, after receiving a generous PBS grant, Simpson and Golfus embarked in earnest on their documentary; they also decided that it would be in the form of a road trip–Golfus’s journey through the segregated world of the disabled from coast to coast. “A political odyssey too,” Simpson says, “as it turned out. Billy is a supreme individualist; he rejects any organized ideology. But in the course of making this film, his political awareness was heightened by the overt discriminations everywhere against the disabled. There was also a sense of frustration. He realized he might’ve had enough talent to be a top reporter and commentator, but that was not to be.”
Billy will premiere tomorrow at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division. Both Simpson and Golfus will be on hand for a discussion after the screening. Starting time is 8 PM. Tickets are $5, $2.50 for members. For more info call 384-5533.
