by Ron Suskind
“I’m working on that,” he says.
“But I’m really excited to meet him!”
And he certainly is.
Owen shouts out his name and hugs him as Hahn, a big, bearded guy, with large, soft eyes, enters his outer office. He tells his assistant it’ll just be a few minutes—indicating it’ll probably be a short meeting—and leads us inside.
He first looks at Owen’s sketchbook and seems genuinely impressed. “You’ve got a little bit of everything in here; wow, good for you, these are really good,” he says with a sincere tone. Every time he looks at a sketch, he adds, “That’s a very good Rafiki,” or “This is a strong Sebastian”—that character’s voice, care of Owen, comes from the couch.
And soon, they’re doing voices. Or, mostly, it’s Owen’s doing them while Don laughs. Soon, both Don and I are egging Owen on.
My anxiety fades; my pushiness, perhaps? Pitch? Who cares! Owen’s telling his story in voices. I tap a reference, or Don does, and out one comes, sidekick after sidekick, from Iago to Rafiki to Merlin. Owen does voices from all of Don’s movies and at one point sings, “Witchcraft, nothing but witchcraft” in Frank Sinatra’s voice—a scene from Roger Rabbit that Owen loves. By the time he gets to “although, I know, it’s strictly tabooooo,” Don is singing with him.
At my prompt, Owen talks about his first call with Jonathan, how he told him Aladdin was about “accepting who you really are, and begin okay with that,” and Don tells him that for each movie, they post the main idea above the drafting rooms to inspire the animators: “Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” for Beauty and the Beast; “Remember Who You Are” for The Lion King. All I can think of after this exchange is how Owen’s interpretation, what he sees, goes so much deeper.
“You’ve figured us out—it’s not fair,” Don laughs. But, in a moment, he sees it, too: “You see so much more in these stories than most people.”
Which bumps things right along to the deeper meaning of Owen’s idea—that one line, about a band of sidekicks searching for a hero and, not being able to find one, they have no choice but to summon heroism from within themselves.
“I love that idea,” Don exults. “It’s an everyman idea. You can actually walk in the shoes of the sidekicks,” as they search. “It’s just so cool.”
I’m feeling a little light-headed. We’re actually talking about the concept and its possibilities. Don’s working it—“it’s so much the way life really is—we might be a hero for one day; then it’s back to being a sidekick. Or not even a day.”
Alright, I think, now we’re getting somewhere.
“Can I ask you a question?” Owen interjects. It’s about Mary Wickes, who voices one of Quasimodo’s three gargoyle sidekicks, and died during the final days of production for Hunchback. “She was replaced by Jane Withers, wasn’t she?”
Owen knows this answer, knows everything there is to know about these two old ladies. Wickes, who he bonded with when he embraced this character as a young child, died right as the movie was being finished in 1996. She was replaced by Withers, who was mentioned in a mysterious nonspecific credit. Once he discovered what happened, he fixated for years on which lines were done by Wickes, and which were handled by Withers. And he thinks he knows based on the slightest vocal variations. But he wants confirmation from Don, who marvels at Owen’s factual knowledge—“almost no one knows that Owen”—not realizing it’s the edge of a cliff.
What I realize, sitting next to Owen, is that there is a God and he’s having some fun on his lunch-break: let’s put the salesman-father in a pitch meeting with his autistic son, and—what the hell—throw a thousand pounds of pressure on the nape of his neck. Oh, what fun!
I tamp down panic. If we go down the Wickes/Withers rabbit hole, they’ll call Disney security in a half hour and drag us out. I’ve been down there—Uranus Trench. There’s no bottom. Owen will run through the movie, line by line—which line he thinks is Wickes’s, which ones were done by Withers, and opine whether Mary Wickes should have gotten mostly full credit for doing the voice. There are deeper issues driving it: how this unanswered question, of who did what and who deserves credit, undermines his confidence in the veracity of a few thousand credits he’s cataloged in his head and weighted with emotions. If this one is imprecise, which others are as well? It’s like Ben Bernanke buying groceries and realizing the bills in his hand are counterfeit. Should he keep spending or call in federal marshals?
As Owen and Don plow through the Mary Wickes filmography, Don mentions that she was friends with Bing Crosby.
Did he say Crosby?
“Owen, do a little of the Binger for Don!” I say, urgently, and Owen leaves behind the Wickes/Withers vortex for several lines of Crosby doing Ichabod from Disney’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Don and I jump back to the sidekicks, and Hahn seems grateful.
But Owen has another question, and moves like a “Jeopardy” champion to a Hunchback “Daily Double” about how the movie’s theme song is sung one way during the movie, proper, and a different way during the credits.
“Well, Owen that’s a little complicated,” Hahn chuckles. “Can I get back to you on that?”
Then something dawns on Don. “Wait, Owen, I have a book for you that I can sign,” and he pulls out a large, art book about Beauty and the Beast.
Owen looks at it, unimpressed. “I already have that one.”
“But you don’t have one signed by Don Hahn!” I crow, a desperate man.
“Oh…right.”
The assistant ducks in his head—we’ve been there an hour. Hahn waves him off; Owen—thank you, God—opens the book. Don and I quickly pick up the thread, the conversation jumping swiftly between the dynamism of a hero emerging from within a group of sidekicks to cross-platform marketing of iconic sidekicks to a new audience, until some invisible threshold is crossed. He begins to do what a producer does, which is to fit the key components together: who might help with a script; who at Disney should be involved—“Eric Goldberg’s the king of sidekicks”—and where we might go from here. He said he’d try to dig up some development money for a young screenwriter to come east and flesh out concepts.
Everybody rises. Owen tears a picture of Rafiki out of his sketchbook and hands it to Hahn, who then draws him a Cogsworth—the clock from Beauty and the Beast—to return the favor.
After warm farewells, and assurances to be in touch soon, we’re out in the hall and then the car, driving through the Studio’s gates.
I’m not sure I know what just happened.
But, for Owen, it’s a huge moment—an unmistakable breakthrough, as he explains it to me after we drive off the lot.
Something about sitting with the definitive Hunchback authority created an epiphany: “It’s not about the voice actors,” he says, dreamily, like a prisoner savoring freedom. “It’s about getting the voices right, so you don’t even notice—and the characters can live forever!”
To engineer a life, you have to cover the basics.
Shelter. Check. The clubhouse fills the bill, outfitted with minimum requirements: a sofa, a TV, two comfy chairs, four throw rugs, beds, bureaus and desks for each bedroom, standing and desk lamps, bulbs, plus the cleansers, pails, rags, cleaning implements for the kitchen, a separate set for the bathroom, vacuum cleaner, garbage cans and bags, broom, mop, dustpan, and a key for the door.
Transportation. Check. There’s a DC Metro bus that passes outside the clubhouse’s front door every thirty-five minutes during peak hours that connects to plenty of other buses and the subway that runs through Washington, DC, and Maryland.
Job. Check. Owen is now an employee of the Giant Foods Corporation (or at least one of their entities) in Bethesda, Maryland. As he was learning on the job, his hours were modest. Two hours a day for two days per week. Four hours. At $7.25 an hour, that gave him a gross income of $29 a week. He is also now a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, the union that represents food workers, retail clerks, and farm w
orkers. His monthly dues for the UFCW are $25, all taken out of his first week’s check. That makes Owen arguably the most selfless labor activist in America, with 86 percent of his pay going to support his union.
Cornelia thought that the first check would be a good time to do a budgeting lesson. Instead, she and Owen go to the computer as she pulls up photos of Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis and tries to explain how, over a century, rights had been won by workers.
“Like me!” Owen cries before looking quizzically at a photo of Wobblies being whacked by Pinkerton guards.
“That’s right,” Cornelia says, reducing the screen. All you need to know.
The Owen Economy, meantime, is worthy of some study. A country of Owens would halt rampant consumerism. He still doesn’t watch television, and ads on the Internet, where he trolls sites for movie-related memorabilia, have no effect on him. Their come-hither tone, that some purchase will make the buyer a better person, or at least more content, wash right over him. The equation that someone could be changed or enlivened by what they buy—a birthright of just about everyone except Burmese Buddhist monks—never took root.
Needs, he knows—they’re modest and covered by us. Wants? Barely any. His only consistent desire is to rent two videos each Friday night at Potomac Video, not far from our home. Because he is also immune to the siren song that some new movie will be better than all those that have preceded it, he’s happy to have discovered, over many years, various genres of old movies in modest demand—mostly animated—that are the cheapest to rent in the store. And the oldies tend to be VHS tapes, which suits him. In the early days, he’d rewind the tape and play a short, favorite passage almost frame by frame, then rewind and repeat. Until recently, that slow-play option was impossible with DVDs. Beyond function, there’s familiarity: the old VHS tape is in the beloved format, albeit grainy and less precise than its DVD cousin. But that spells comfort for him.
Final tally: at $1.25 per VHS tape, he has $1.50 to spare, from his $4 first week’s take-home pay. Unlike his parents or brother, he always returns the videos promptly—rules are meant to be followed—so there are no late fees. He’s a prudent, young man.
Cornelia grabs the car keys in the front foyer. She has to drive to Giant Foods on a Monday evening—April 25, 2011—to pick him up. His hours have gone up to four hours a day, two days a week. As she races out, she checks her watch and wishes me luck on a phone call I’m about to have with Don Hahn.
After we left California, Don sent me a heartening note, but—once returning to Washington—I was being assiduous about tamping down expectations. Having gone through two full scripts and three options on A Hope in the Unseen—none of it amounting to anything—I had no illusions about the distance between an interesting idea and anyone hoisting a camera or, in this case, a CGI stylus. Projects that spend an eternity in development hell are as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way.
But those long shot odds are almost beside the point I think as I slip out to my office for tonight’s call. Something deeper than scripts and treatments is under way. We’ve spent more than a decade wandering in a hall of mirrors—between Owen’s rich imaginary world and his terrestrial life of daunting challenges. Now, those mirrors are shifting as he bends more and more toward interactions and experiences in our world that he finds satisfying.
His stated desire to someday turn that internal story into a movie—as a way to bind him to others like him, ostensibly creative autistic kids like Connor and Brian—is a way of integrating his inner self with his growing needs; refitting what he knows best into a kind of conveyance, a vehicle for his escape from a life spent too much alone, trapped in his head. His emergence as a healthy, self-aware adult—that’s the goal.
Don is a particularly valuable visitor to this hall of mirrors. He’s both an expert on Owen’s source material and on the common urge to craft stories as a mirror to life.
We pick up right where we left off in California. “I keep thinking about it,” Don says on the phone. “To have the sidekicks, themselves, searching, changes the model of the hero being identified early and everyone slotting into their expected role. This turns it on its head. It allows for more ways to enter the story, for both the kids and their parents.”
He wants to know more about Owen, what’s he up to? What’s his life like, now? I tell him a bit about him having his first real job, working at the supermarket, and about him going to a college program in the fall. “I’m sure he’ll be bringing his sidekick advisers with him,” I say, half in jest.
“Does he rely on them now?” Don asks.
“I’m sure he does. It’s part of his internal voice.”
“You mean, like Jiminy Cricket and conscience?”
I hear the car pull into the driveway.
“Look, he’s just back from work. I’m going to talk to him. I’ll call you right back.”
A moment later, I see Owen slumped on the couch in the sunroom, just off the kitchen. He’s in his black giant foods cap and his apron.
“Hey buddy.”
“Hi Dad.”
“You look bushed.”
“I’m exhaaaaausted,” he says, a flourish he picked up from his mother.
We talk for a minute about how much harder he finds the four-hour shift. The energy he needs to expend to stay focused, to stay on task, is daunting, as his mind is being pulled in many directions.
“Let me ask you something—you bringing any of the sidekicks along? You know, to help.”
He nods. “Two of them.” He says it casually. This is commonplace to him.
“Which two?”
“Well, I bring along Phil,” he says. “When I’m getting tired, he says, ‘Listen Kid, it’s not enough to be your best for a minute or an hour. You’ve got to be at your best…for every minute of every hour of your shift!’” Of course, he does it in Phil’s voice and, with a little laugh, brings up the volume for the “every minute of every hour” exhortation.
“And also Sebastian.”
Phil, I get. But Sebastian?
Owen sees I’m perplexed. “Well, Dad, when people are coming through the line, and I’m bagging the groceries, Sebastian says to me, ‘A smile can go a long way, when you don’t got a lot to say.’ And it reminds me to smile at them, all of them, even if I have nothing to say.” This is an elegantly altered line from the movie.
He pauses. “But I do talk to them sometimes!” and laughs, hopping up and doing a little twist/turn with his hand, a jolt of energy, sidekick energy, running through him.
I slip out back to report these latest findings about Phil and Sebastian to Don. I paint a picture of Owen on the couch in his uniform, what he says, and the way he says it. It is what I do—tell stories. Don does too. Mine have to be factual, crafted from real lives, and often, of late, get weighted down by having to sift through heavy, self-referential analyses by sources and subjects that are often designed to conceal rather than reveal. He and his team do stories, as well—ones they make up. But I have no delusions. You often find more subtle truths in a pure, powerful story—fictional or real, but borne from the heart—than in reasonable, logical, and fact-heavy versions of reality.
As we talk, I look over at a quotation I’ve tacked to the wall next to the phone; it’s a favorite line from G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist: “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden, its wildness lies in wait.”
I’m using the quote as a guidepost for the book I’m writing, almost finished, about the misplaced confidence of Wall Street in its seemingly logical models of the way the world worked; and how Obama, struggling to reset the nation’s course, may have relied too much on his own powerful faith in logic and bloodless reason. It’s the wildness, lying in wait—inexact and startling—that deeply animates our lives and that of the nation. And we carry it, sloshing this way and that, in our stories. Obama knows t
his as well as anyone alive: he told a redemptive story of his life and then lived it as a candidate—before people’s eyes—such that they lifted him to the presidency…against all reasonable and exacting expectations.
As president, though, he told me in an interview in February 2011, that he lost his “narrative thread”—sinking into policy combat with powerful political and economic interests, each wielding their self-interested analysis and irrefutable metrics; he forgot, he said, that “what the president can do that no one else can do is tell a story to the American people about where we are and where we need to go.”
I’m ever-more sympathetic to his struggle. Owen has done that. Those metrics are a language, of sorts, a lexicon of analyses that form the so-called meritocracy, which allocates money and power in society, and judgments about human worth. Meanwhile, stories—interpretive and hard to control—are dangerous and disruptive, creating humility, self-recognition, an opening of the pores. That’s where the deeper answers often lie.
As Don thinks over what Owen just said—seeing an image of him on the couch with his black cap—he gets philosophical: “This is about all the people who work so hard, every day, to make the hero—the chosen one—look good. People who are never thanked and easily forgotten. That’s just about everyone in the world. This is a global movie…Hell, it’ll start a new labor movement.”
When he says that we laugh, but I can’t help but think of Owen inside in the apron. What of him? As a young adult, he’s entering an ever more exacting, logical, mathematical world, that’s discounted effort, alone, in favor of analytical abilities he’ll never summon. Those who can will be the victors in his lifetime. He’ll bump into plenty of them, I’m sure, as he grows. He doesn’t register in their meritocracy. A nonperson. That means he should be happy and grateful to wear that uniform for the rest of his life.
I wait five days, until Saturday afternoon, before I approach Owen. He’s hanging around the house, nothing scheduled. Cornelia’s seeing a friend. It’s quiet.
He’s in the kitchen, just having finished his lunch. Makes it himself, always the same—peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, three Oreos, an apple, and a glass of orange juice.
