E-mail a friendRon Livingston
airdate October 26, 2007
Actor Ron Livingston pulls off comedic roles as well as dramatic ones. The Iowa native began his career as a stage actor while at Yale. After graduation, he moved to Chicago to further his career and then on to Los Angeles, landing his first major film role in Swingers. His small screen credits include Band of Brothers, The Practice and Sex and the City. Last summer, Livingston returned to the stage in the world premiere of In A Dark Dark House and has two upcoming features, Music Within and Holly.
Ron Livingston
Tavis: Ron Livingston is a Golden Globe-nominated actor whose credits include the acclaimed HBO series, "Band of Brothers" and films like "Swingers" and "Adaptation." His latest project is called "Music Within" which tells the story of the Vietnam vet whose courageous work led to the Americans With Disabilities Act. The film opened in select cities around the country earlier today. Here now a scene from "Music Within."
[Film Clip]
Tavis: Ouch! (Laughter) Take that, Ron. That clip kind of caught me off-guard, man. I guess you told it to him, huh?
Ron Livingston: Yeah, I got him on that one.
Tavis: Before we came on the air, we were sitting here watching a couple of clips right quick and you were saying to me that you didn't mind watching this. Of the work that you've done, you enjoyed looking at this project. Why do like this one so much?
Livingston: I'm really proud of this one. You know, because of all the selfish, narcissistic, just actor stuff, I think we're all good in it (laughter). We're not good in all of them. But it's a great story, you know. This one kind of catches me and the music's great.
It's very rare that you can get a movie that I think kind of crosses between entertaining, but also having something to say that you haven't heard a million times. This one, I think, it's really got some things to say.
Tavis: Tell me more about the story line.
Livingston: All right. It's about this guy named Richard Pimentel who came back from the Vietnam War with his hearing blown out. At that point, they told him pretty much that his life was over. He was going to get his disability, but they weren't going to pay for him to go to college because it was a waste sending deaf people to college.
At that point, a lot of people would have just said okay and laid down, but he didn't. He's a bit of a pain in the ass in the real life and he enjoys that, so he fought it. He and a number of other people kind of worked a real revolution in the United States in the way that we look at and treat people with disabilities, a kind of civil rights movement that worked in about fifteen years.
Tavis: When you get a chance to play a character like this and star in a film like this, it does what to you on a human level? You were joking earlier about the acting business, but I suspect that a project like this must make you kind of look in a mirror.
Livingston: I'll tell you what. You look in a mirror, but you look out first, you know. It's a little bit like doing a documentary. You get to go do an exploration about some subject that you know nothing about.
Generally, you get about six weeks to go learn as much as you can about something you know nothing about and then, six weeks later, you have to pretend like you are an expert and have lived your whole life doing it. So that six weeks is kind of intense, you know, especially when it's a real person.
So in this case, I got to know this guy, Richard Pimentel, and at the end of that six weeks' time, I was basically going to expose all of this stuff about his life and his personality and his demons and his accomplishments and what he did. At the end of it, you got to look at the guy and say, "How'd I do?" To do that, I think that's when you go back to the mirror and you got to say, "What is it about me that I can bring to this?"
When you do that, it makes a bridge between that person and the audience. Because if you can find what you have in common with the guy in the story, you can also find out what everybody sitting in the chairs have to do in their lives with this guy in the story.
Tavis: I'll tell you in a second why I'm asking this question. There are two questions I want to ask, but I have to ask them in the proper order. This is your first time playing a real live character?
Livingston: It is not.
Tavis: So you've done this before, then.
Livingston: I've done this before. This was the first time - I played Allen Ginsberg and I also played Lewis Nixon from "Band of Brothers." Allen Ginsberg was famous enough that however I played him wasn't going to affect how he was going to be remembered. Lewis Nixon was unknown in most circles, but had passed away, so if I screwed him over, I wouldn't have to look him in the eye.
Richard was the first guy that I was going to have an effect on how people thought of him and I was going to have to see him after the movie.
Tavis: I asked that and your latter point leads me nicely where I wanted to go, which is the challenge in playing a fictitious character and playing somebody who is a real live character, to say nothing of your latter point that here's a guy who's not just a real live character, but a guy you got to go talk to afterwards and say, "How'd I do?"
Livingston: It's two very different things. It's got a lot in common because ultimately what you're doing is you're playing a character in the story that the audience is going to see. So ultimately it's got to make sense to them more than it's got to be completely true to life.
The hard part about playing a fictitious person is that you got to make up a bunch of stuff up that feels true. When you play a real person, a lot of that stuff you don't have to make it up, but you do have to be able to kind of suss it out, you know. You're always looking for truth, though, not necessarily from some kind of high-handed thing, but truth works.
Audiences are smart and they've got a B.S. meter that knows the difference between truth and not truth. So if you show them truth, they get it and they like it and they think it's good. If you show them something that's not truth, they sniff it out and say, "Nah, something's up."
Tavis: You know what I was reminded of when I got a chance to peep some of this? I tried to make this point. I hope I made it well in a particular speech one night. I was just trying to say to the audience about how as Americans we have all benefited from those who oftentimes we look down upon as the least among us and oftentimes the least contributing.
Those who are disenfranchised oftentimes give those of us who are enfranchised a better chance at improving our quality of life anyway. The point is this. When you think of Americans with disabilities, you think, for example, about the fact that everywhere we walk, there are these cut-ins on the curbway.
But for the disabled who really pressed for a cutaway on every curb in the country - you think about now you walk out of the airport, you pull your roller bag right through that curb cutaway that ain't there for you. Somebody with a disability fought for that curb cutaway. How many of us take our shopping carts through the parking lots? Our luggage through the airports?
I'm just making this point that that happened because somebody who was "less than" made that possible. I thought about that when I watched this movie about how Mr. Pimentel and others fought for the Americans With Disabilities Act and the rest of us, in many ways, have benefited from what they fought for. Does that make sense?
Livingston: Well, it does. It's not just the cutaways on the curbs. Ultimately, you know, Richard made the point that those are the true disabilities. You think of a wheelchair. The sign for a disability is a wheelchair. He's saying the wheelchair is not a disability. The wheelchair is an enabling thing.
The loss of the legs is actually not the disability. He's saying the stairs are the disability. Somebody that can't walk, he's all good until he gets to some stairs. If you take the stairs away and put a ramp there, he's all good even then.
But beyond that, and this is kind of one of the amazing things that he did and he did it out of necessity because, you know, it really was a civil rights movement, but he didn't have the numbers that the Black civil rights movement had. He didn't have the numbers that the women's civil rights movement had and he figured he didn't have a hundred fifty years to make it happen.
So what he was able to do was short-circuit the whole relations between us and them and turn the thing upside down and make it not about justice, but he made it about untapped resources.
He was able to say, you know, you want to give these people a shot not just because they deserve a shot and blah, blah, blah. You want to give them a shot because they're going to make your company better. You're going to be able to make money off of them. They're going to be cheaper than other employees because they can't get a job somewhere else.
By doing that, what he found was that you could stick people in a conference room for four hours and you wouldn't have to talk to them about disabled people, disabled people. He'd do an exercise where he'd take one of them. He'd sit him in a chair. He'd give the group the exercise to do and he'd say, "This person can't get up out of the chair." Then when they weren't looking, he'd tell the person in the chair the answer.
Invariably, they'd run the exercise and, at the end of the forty-five minutes, they wouldn't have the answer. He'd ask the guy that had been made the project manager, "Did you ask the guy in the chair what he thought?" Invariably, they'd say, "No, we didn't think to do that." He'd go, "Well, you should have because he had the answer the whole time."
In four hours, people would walk out of these hotel ballrooms and they'd say, "You know what? I feel differently about how I'm going to do job hiring interviews for disabled people."
Tavis: That's a powerful example.
Livingston: It's a tremendous example. I mean, it was really brilliant in kind of the way that it jumped into us. You know what I mean? It was saying that there's no need to make anybody "them" here. We're all "us."
Tavis: There's no connection between the two projects except for the fact that tremendous courage was expressed in both projects, but is there something about playing vets that you like? I'm thinking of "Band of Brothers," of course, and now Mr. Pimentel.
Livingston: Yeah. You know, it's one of those kind of random things that I think there's got to be like some kind of higher purpose behind. When I was in college, I kind of stumbled into doing this documentary video project with Vietnam vets.
I don't how the hell it happened, but I think I was just trying to get an easy credit that turned out to be not quite so easy and ended up kind of consuming my life for about a year. I spent a lot of time talking with Vietnam veterans and then the whole thing kind of went away. That experience really helped me out a lot when I did "Band of Brothers."
But fundamentally, I think there was something different about the experience of the Vietnam veterans and it did have to do with how they were treated when they came back. So I was able to draw on a lot of the voices of the guys that had been there that was kind of invaluable in making this movie.
Tavis: Finally, speaking of "Music Within," the soundtrack in this thing is pretty cool.
Livingston: Oh, the soundtrack is phenomenal.
Tavis: Yeah.
Livingston: Yeah, the soundtrack is phenomenal. It's one of those things where I didn't think we were going to get all this music. You know, when the movies go to festivals, they get a lot of music sort of for free for festivals. Then when they come out, commercially you have to give all that music back and replace it.
But because this movie has to do with hearing loss and because there's a lot of people in the music industry who lost their hearing during all those loud concerts they did, a lot of people, I think, have a personal connection to this particular issue and a lot of this music has been donated.
Tavis: It's a great title. I always wonder how they come up with some of these titles for certain movies and, every now and then, you see something where the title really does fit the project.
"Music Within" is the new project starring Ron Livingston and others and opened earlier today at select theaters across the country, I hope and pray coming to a theater near you sometime soon. Glad you came to see us tonight.
Livingston: I appreciate it.
Tavis: Good to see you. Glad to have you here.
Livingston: Thank you for the time, Tavis.
Tavis: That's our show for tonight.
Back to October 26, 2007