Becoming Helen Keller

Short Synopsis

Becoming Helen Keller, a 90 minute documentary biography for American Masters, will explore the long life and legacy of this global media celebrity and advocate for the disabled and disenfranchised.This project is a co-production of Straight Ahead Pictures, Inc., American Masters-WNET-Thirteen, and WETA-Washington DC.

Description/Treatment

Description: Becoming Helen Keller, a 90 minute documentary biography for American Masters, will explore the long life and legacy of this global media celebrity and advocate for the disabled and disenfranchised.  

Helen Keller, blind and deaf since early childhood, was in her lifetime the world's most famous disabled person. By the age of ten, she was the first real-life poster child and already raising money for the education of blind and deaf children, herself included. The story of Keller's awakening to language through the devotion, innovation and cunning of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, thrilled the Victorian public. In 1904, she graduated from Radcliffe College in Boston with honors, having already published an autobiography that has never been out of print.

The earliest weeks of Keller's encounter with her Teacher, Anne Sullivan, have been immortalized in the movie and play The Miracel Worker, the fifth most commonly produced play in American community theater. The story is a staple of Women's History Week in grammar and middle schools nationwide, and Keller is as recognizable as a national brand name, familiar across the generations for more than a century. Yet Keller is both honored and spoofed, idealized while being the subject of innumerable jokes -- even an episode of South Park takes her on. This project will ask: who was she? What did she actually do? Why does she have the power she does? What does her experience and image represent today, and to whom?

Keller spent most of her adult life working as a professional writer, spokesperson, advocate and fundraiser. She was an outspoken Socialist and a suffragette, she worked in Vaudeville and was featured in a silent film biography. She gave some 200 speeches a year, and in her 70s she visited 37 countries. Though in her speeches she spoke in a rhetoric of darkness and light, affliction and redemption, she never abandoned her youthful utopian political hopes. But Becoming Helen Keller is also a buddy movie with a twist, a Horatio Alger tale about two disabled women who created their own way. (Anne Sullivan, Keller's Teacher, was vision impaired for much of her life.) This work will trace Keller's act of self-creation, as her life evolved amid the shifting values of an America becoming modern, through world wars and Depression into the age of JFK.

Treatment: The production team will employ innovative visual and sound techniques in making Becoming Helen Keller. In keeping with a life lived as a performance, the program will use actors speaking to camera to portray characters critical to Keller's biography, in non-naturalistic theatrical spaces. However, Keller will not be played by an actress in costume imitating her appearance and very limited power of speech - it would not be credible to pretend we can recreate the experience of a dead-blind individual. Instead, we will use an engaged and expert Reader to speak Keller's written words, taken from the letters, books, journals and articles that poured from her typewriter, in a voice passionate and forthright. Interviews and archival footage will round out the portrait, enlivened by animation and visual effects. Use of the manual alphabet will be visible periodically through the film, so that the audience won't forget how Keller was "spoken" to.