Five years. That’s how long it has taken Steven Delano to complete his first feature-length film. In independent-film years, that’s nothing, really. Money crawls in. Time gets carved from life’s other obligations.
In reality, “No Bigger Than a Minute” has been in production since June 30, 1958, the day Delano was born. That night, James and Josephine Delano learned from their doctor their child – first and only – was not as long as he should be. Later they would find out Steven was a dwarf.
Delano’s nearly finished film is 80 minutes long. Delano stands 48 inches tall. As he puts it, “Four feet, even.”
While Delano’s is not the first documentary about dwarfism, it is the first from a filmmaker who experienced the genetic hiccup that occurs once in 100,000 births.
Don’t think that means lots of low-angle shots, although there are some (Delano’s cinematographer is average size). Instead, Delano has used one of the best tools offered by cinema – the documentary – to show how the world has depicted dwarves and how dwarves have seen themselves in reality and in the not-so-funhouse mirror of pop culture.
A writer, producer, director and editor at Denver Center Media, an arm of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Delano and editor Chad Herschberger have been shaping 90-plus hours of interviews, not including clips, into an odyssey about dwarfism. Earlier this month, the 28th Starz Denver International Film Festival, one of the nation’s top regional festivals, announced it will screen the documentary as a work in progress in November.
Delano’s movie is twisted, thoughtful, thorny.
“What,” asks narrator Delano, “would the world be missing if there were no dwarves, no freaks, no people like me?”
That rhetorical question heralds a strikingly personal tone in a film that didn’t start out that way.
Delano, of course, planned on owning up to being a dwarf. A movie about dwarfism made from a dwarf’s eye view, well, that’s a selling point. And he always intended to do a first-person narration, he just didn’t want to become a miniature Michael Moore horning in on the show.
“I’m an interesting person,” he said one recent afternoon at Starbucks, his burgundy scooter parked outside. “But I didn’t think I was movie-worthy.” He paused. “The other thing is I don’t like being photographed.”
He figured turning his camera on little people who don’t mind being photographed might be good enough. He interviewed actors such as Peter Dinklage (“The Station Agent”) and Meredith Eaton (“Family Law”). He even tracked down scene-stealing rapper Bushwick Bill. He got them to share their experiences of size and celebrity. And since the first dwarves Delano ever met were introduced to him by movies and TV, focusing on images made sense.
Five years, however, turned out to be a long time to ponder material that cut so close to the bone.
Five years can bring painful wear and tear to the skeleton of a person with Spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, the form of dwarfism Delano has.
Five years means waking up one day, gazing into a mirror and realizing that you have spent your life like Gulliver in reverse.
You have made your way in the company of giants: your average-stature parents; your loving, extended average-stature family; your average-stature colleagues, friends and lovers.
“He never really considered himself different. For good reason,” said Tom Macedo, who has been friends with Delano since ninth grade. The two traveled to Colorado from Massachusetts in a car caravan of friends in 1981. “It was never an issue. Socially it was great because he was always clever and funny. That opened a lot of doors.”
Even for him, Macedo laughed. “Everyone was drawn to him because of his stature. He was everybody’s bud. Because we were best buds and people wanted him around, I got to hang around, too.”
Obstacles in sharper focus
Since finishing the film, Delano said he spends more time than he had before considering his physical and psychological challenges. Part of it is just getting older. Part of it is experiencing less mobility. Part of it the outcome of a cinematic reckoning.
“I was getting used to living with it. Particular things associated with dwarfism can be a pain,” he said. “What have I had – one, two, three, four surgeries and some other stuff? There are people who have to have surgeries every year. Even now I don’t want to dwell on the physical difficulties.”
Friends and family say he has been like this since he was a kid: reticent about his ailments, physically different but not anguished.
When asked what period for her cousin was the roughest, Kristine Gagne answered, “Adolescence was the hardest.” But then added, “It was really hard to tell because we all felt the same way: that life sucked.”
You were never quite sure, she said, “what was the adolescent angst and what were his issues.”
One afternoon, Delano was talking about some of the reasons why he didn’t want to be in his film. “The other day I got out of a taxi cab and I looked up,” began Delano. “The light was such that I was reflected in a glass window, and I’ve got this bag and I’m struggling. Other people address it in the film, saying, ‘Hey, I don’t look like that’ when they see other people at conferences.”
Delano’s documentary gets a great deal of its power from its maker’s tussle with these tensions: What in his personality was shaped by dwarfism? At one point in the film, he begins describing himself in ways that will be familiar – yet unfamiliar – to any viewer who has had their own body issues.
Time turned out to be a disastrous thing for a director intent on making a smart but emotionally safe documentary. But for a filmmaker willing to be shaken by his project, Delano’s plunge has been a breakthrough, artistically as well as personally.
A hard look back
On a sunny afternoon in 2003, Josephine Delano wears the attentive look of a mom. Her son has remained the height of a small child. Only his cropped hair is silvering, and he is asking her profoundly adult questions about emotions decades old.
“If you had known earlier than the night I was born that there was a problem and that life might be more difficult because of it, would you have considered terminating the pregnancy, as they say?”
The conversation that follows is just one of the moments in which Delano pursues the personal with an almost journalistic detachment, yet what could seem chilly at times makes for tender revelation.
The truth is that when Delano was born, his parents had no idea what he, or they, would experience.
“You accept it, you can’t change it, and life goes on,” was how Josephine Delano put her feelings about Steven’s condition recently. “I haven’t met any other parents with a child with the same problems. But he wasn’t hidden from anyone.”
In the late ’50s, New Bedford, Mass., once the whaling capital of the world, was populated by Irish, Portuguese, Polish immigrants and their offspring. James and Josephine came from large families – his Irish, hers Polish. They lived on Rodney French Boulevard, near the Acushnet River, with Steven’s Polish grandparents. Josephine lives there still. James died in January 1998.
Onscreen, Steven recounts a childhood memory. After a surgery that left him in a body cast, Steven’s father and a friend engineered a contraption to squire him around. “They took a plywood plank and attached it to a baby carriage. They plopped me down on that and pushed me around the boulevard.”
Grainy black-and-white footage of the waterfront flickers. “And that for me is the best thing they did. It was sort of like, ‘Here we are!”‘
Tales from Delano’s childhood may sound like Dickens’ Tiny Tim. But Steven was too stubborn for that. Until detached retinas sidelined him (he’s blind in one eye), he played hockey in grammar school, rode his bike and roughhoused with Thor, his German shepherd mix.
This story also lacks a Scrooge, only a bully Steven whacked with a crutch once and for all. That was on the advice of his dad: James Delano was hardly Bob Cratchit.
“The smiling Irishman” is how Josephine characterized her husband. A black-and- white photo in the movie proves her point. Dark-haired, handsome, James beams at the infant in his arms.
“His father was a little rough around the edges,” recalled Gagne. “But he got Steven out in life. There was no feeling sorry for ourselves. His father’s attitude was ‘Play the cards you’re dealt.”‘
“Maybe it’s because of my dad. Maybe it’s because of me. Because when I walk into a place people remember me,” Delano said. He knows this is a tricky statement.
“There’s an experience that people with dwarfism share, and that is undue attention, unwanted attention you can have walking down the street,” he said. “I’m fond of telling people that I bet you I’ve had a lot more human interaction than your average Joe. People are less reluctant to come up to me and say ‘hi.”‘
He pauses. “Whether you care to hear it or not is a whole other question.”
If Delano’s ability to glad-hand the world came from James, his urge to understand it came from Josephine and her family.
“If I did well in school, it’s because of my mom,” said Delano, who studied English literature at Providence College in Rhode Island. “She’s a smart person. My dad was smart, but he was a street kid.”
Josephine and her six siblings all earned college degrees. And it was Josephine’s older sister Sophie Smietana, who lived in Boston and worked at the New England Medical Center, who put the young couple in touch with the doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“She put up my parents for all the extended visits,” Delano said of his aunt. Smietana was also the person who fostered Steven’s interest in movies, taking him to “That Darn Cat” and “Mary Poppins.”
“Being spoiled, expectations were made of me,” said Delano. “I wasn’t going to go out and lay gas pipe like my dad. So I got to do exactly what I wanted to do. I studied English, read books and did not worry about whether I had to earn a living or not. And so I learned to enjoy how you can create meaning out of nothing, whether it was words or pictures.”
Early starring role
One Saturday afternoon, on a monitor no bigger than a small television set, Delano queues a rough cut of his film.
“My name is Steve, I’m 40-plus years old and I’m a dwarf” is Delano’s opening salvo. What immediately follows is a wonderfully surreal re-creation that would do “The Thin Blue Lines’s” Errol Morris proud. The adult Delano totters around in a hospital gown, then briefs while a pepped-up version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” blares.
“In 1967, I had my first starring role in motion pictures,” Delano says in a voiceover. “They were films taken at a Boston Children’s Hospital as part of a growth and posture study. There I was, a 9-year-old kid in a dingy hospital basement. Even while the camera was rolling I could imagine what those invasive little movies would look like. Almost dirty. I feel like I’ve been in the spotlight ever since.”
At the time, Delano’s type of dwarfism was misdiagnosed. “It would take decades to find out what sort of dwarf I am.”
Once reluctant to be onscreen, Delano has become the film’s invaluable guide.
In one scene, he stands outside Boulder’s Chautauqua Auditorium, hoping for an interview with Randy Newman, who hit No.2 on Billboard’s singles chart in 1977 with “Short People.” When they meet, one expects a gotcha moment. After all, Newman’s ironic song about the stupidity of discrimination was often treated as a catchy anthem of just the opposite. Instead it plays out with understated humor.
We also see him at a Little People of America conference – not for the sake of his soul but for the soul of his movie.
If Delano takes us on such an eye-opening journey, it is because so much of the director’s own excursion is as fresh to him as it will be to most viewers.
Like so many of us, Delano met his first dwarf via images. Carnival freaks. Side-show curiosities. Dwarves real – even famous: Billy Barty. Michael Dunn. Herve Villichaize. Tom Thumb at the knee of P.T. Barnum, patron saint of the big top. And those imagined: Munchkins. Willy Wonka’s Ooompa Loompas. Those wee seven fellas tending that porcelain beauty, Snow White.
“Frankie (Bois) was the first dwarf I could relate to,” Delano says onscreen, referring to the title character of the 1995 film “Frankie Starlight.”
“And I had to meet him in a movie.”
In fact it wasn’t until he was in his mid-30s that he met another person with dwarfism.
“When he decided to do this film what was surprising about it was the fact that he had no association with other little people,” said Macedo. “So when he first got involved with this, I thought this is really curious because he’d said it wasn’t his community. It’s opened doors for us to have many conversations about being a little person.”
“What I’ve noticed is that the entire experience has transformed him,” said Diane Markrow, who along with Dirk Olsonand Brockman Seawell, is an executive producer on the documentary.
“If we’d been lucky enough to have all the money up front and completed it in a year and a half, it wouldn’t be the same film,” she said. “Living with the material and having the whole exploration of history and generations and family. Having the courage to ask difficult questions of his mother and father’s friends are really part of what’s transformed him.”
Delano’s is a saga about identity. Like documentaries as different as last year’s “My Architect” and this summer’s “Murderball,” Delano’s movie depicts an individual wrestling with the various influences that made (or remade) them – be it paternity, a spinal-chord injury, or a genetic glitch. The list of human wrinkles goes on.
Size matters. Bodies matter. But in “No Bigger Than a Minute,” character matters most. In spite of what he intended, Delano’s character turns out to be his movie’s North Star.
“I’ve covered a lot of ground,” says Delano during the final scene of his film. His summation takes place as he ambles with his slightly labored gait along one of Hollywood’s monuments to celebrity, the Walk of Fame.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people. And I’ve learned a little about my place in the universe. It’s for sure I’m just a glitch in the universe. Someone who doesn’t like the sound of his voice. A guy who’s never liked the look of his own reflection. Now I’ve made a spectacle of myself.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or at lkennedy@denverpost.com.
