Excuse me?

I think that there were a lot of stories in the film that

fell on the cutting room floor

because we made the decision to tell the film

as, kind of, the story of a band of friends.

One of the things I remember was, we talked

about my, getting my first car.

It was really kind of, where did my liberation

start happening? Where I didn't feel like a burden

or a problem, where I didn't feel penned in.

I got my driver's license when I was 17

for my senior year in high school.

And my first car was a used

1967 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser Station Wagon

When I got my driver's license, everything changed.

There's a part of driving that was like a great equalizer

for me, it was like I could do it as well as anybody else.

And behind the wheel, no one knows that I have a disability.

I can be out in the world and not be stared at

or know that I'm sticking out.

One of the best things about having a car was

that I could go see Nancy

without having a friggin' chaperone.

We didn't sleep together until a trip I made to see her.

She was going school and living in the dorms.

It felt kinda natural when we really kinda knew each other.

We knew that we didn't have to explain

that our bodies were different, we knew that.

Some characters' back stories had to stand in for others.

Some characters' journeys had to stand in for others,

and one of the things that I felt sad

to lose was the back story of our character Denise Jacobson

because she grew up in the Bronx

in an apartment building that was on the second floor,

and she couldn't get up and down the stairs.

There was no elevator, so she was literally stuck

in an apartment completely isolated,

and she had a very vivid, powerful way of describing

that experience of isolation and then the joy she felt

in landing in the camp and finding friends and being able

to roll wherever she wanted and having freedom.

We edited for about a year and a half on this project.

Yeah, our first assembly of the film was

about two and a half hours long.

A bit longer than I think that we expected at first,

but like every documentary,

it kinda reveals itself to you in a lot of ways.

One of the exercises that we were really encouraged

to do was to try to make a 90 minute cut,

and it became clearer and clearer

how important the camp was,

and how the evolution of these people's lives were,

and kind of make it not seem like two different films.

Camp and after camp.

In the long run, at least, you know,

we found the right length of the film.

Well I think we believed from the beginning

that it had to be a feature film to start with.

The narrative structure was the power of the camp

through to the passage of the ADA,

and seeing how the spark of the camp and the power

of these individuals coming together was gonna make

things change throughout the entire world.

The challenge that was exciting was,

how do we take all of this complexity

and all of this history across time,

and how do we blend this really immersive footage

that we had from the camp with the scraps

of archival that we were digging up

from all over the place to follow people

across time and how do we make that one story arc?

Because of that, a lot of things did have

to fall on the cutting room floor.

We definitely had in our minds-eye tracing things

up to the ADA, and we thought that the kind of end

of the second act would be the incredible victory

at the end of this 26 day takeover

of a federal building, and the enforcement

of the first disability rights legislation.

We worked our way towards I think knowing

that where we had to end the film was back

at camp, back where everything started,

and kind of the resolution of the life journeys

of the characters that we had followed.

One of the things that got us there was playing around

with combining the camp footage,

the old camp footage with the return to the campsite,

and this incredible song "Sugar Mountain" by Neil Young,

and there's something of kind of like a longing

to go back to that place in your youth

in that song that had the emotion

that we wanted to end the film with.