I was honest - I didn't know what purpose, but we set a meeting for the next day. Even though Anthony is a rarity - a profoundly deaf man who speaks well and reads lips perfectly - I still wanted to learn some words in Sign Language just to be polite. So I ran out to the largest video store that serves all the major studios, sure that I could rent some Signing videos, and found there were none - not in the store and not in the reference books. Horrified, I vowed on the spot to invest my entire inheritance - $100,000 - to create one. And I hadn't even met a deaf person yet.
The creation of the video
So Anthony Natale and I met the next day, and I was fascinated. He had a full time job in addition to regularly winning acting roles (a short elevator ride with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, a huge part opposite Ellen Degeneres on "Ellen," co-starring in the USA TV movie His Bodyguard), and a bunch of commercials. He drives (as all deaf people do - boy, did I have a lot to learn!), watches TV, goes to the movies, has long conversations with friends, and talks on the phone - everything that hearing people do, just . . . differently. And Sign Language itself! How wonderful for me to learn signs out of a book and get to practice with Anthony. So I shared all of this new information with my friends, studied their reactions, and began to write the home video script.
Frustrated with creating TV shows and waiting for some network executive to give me the go-ahead, here was something I could do with no one's permission but my own. Having been a freelance photographer, actress, and writer in Hollywood for twenty years, I knew how to put together a broadcast quality show for less than it should cost by doing a full seven of the jobs myself. And I didn't cut any deals - I feel people work at their best when being paid what they're worth. Brady Connell came on board as the director, with years of doing shows such as "MTV's Beach House," presidential spots for Bill Clinton, and more recently the ratings hit "Survivor" for CBS. Brady put together a professional crew, and I hired the actors: Karen Malina White of "Malcolm & Eddie," who already knew Sign, Kathy Buckley - America's first hearing-impaired comedienne - and nine other working actors. But I needed one more actress who could sign and be comfortable with Anthony, so I cast myself - I knew I'd be free and show up on time. And then Beth Ruyak, who commentates for NBC sports, agreed to do the introduction.
We taped five full days with a union crew, and I edited for 10 hours at home and over 100 in the Avid bay and sound studio, where we added music by Brian BecVar written just for this video (he also composes specially for Deepak Chopra). A graphic artist executed my design for the video box, and on December 10, 1996, How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear was released to the public.
An instant success
The very next night I was watching "ER" on Channel 4, when I heard the fax ring. And ring and ring. Marta Waller, news anchor on local KTLA Channel 5, had just finished a story on the video, ending with our fax number and saying "this is the best Christmas present I've seen in a long time." Wow! Over 150 faxes came in before morning, and I stayed up all night reading them.
With one hard-of-hearing, one deaf, and one hearing employee, we began filling orders from my attic. Faxes kept coming. Then hundreds of purchase orders began arriving at the mail drawer I'd reserved. What in the heck was a "purchase order"? It turned out that these were the responses from the beautiful color flyers I'd sent out weeks before, when a group of friends sat at my dining room table and folded, stamped, and affixed mailing labels I'd purchased for schools, libraries, hospitals, and emergency service providers - 11, 867 flyers to be exact. In one month we had a 10% response to the flyers, which continues today - probably a 60% return. I hired a fulfillment house, a telemarketing service, and bought three 888 phone numbers - vanity ones, so people with learning disabilities could memorize them easily. Within two months it was more than I could handle alone.
A record set - making back my investment in 7 months
Awards & Broadcast:
1. Anthony Natale won 1st place for Talent when we entered How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear in the US International Film and Video Festival in Chicago.
2. The video itself won 3rd place for Creative Excellence at the same festival.
3. Aimee Walker, a state champion gymnast whom I featured in the only documentary-type portion of the video, won a scholarship as "Best Young Artist" from the Young Artist Awards in Los Angeles.
4. KOCE, a PBS station in Los Angeles, aired our video (remember, I treated it as a prime-time show) in November. The prestigious Media Access Awards from the California Governor's Office nominated How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear as Best Educational TV Show of 1997.
Sponsoring my first event:
Doing research, I had found that Martha's Vineyard, that magical island off the coast of Massachusetts, had for 270 years been bilingual; everyone there spoke English and Sign Language. I traveled to visit the Vineyard and discovered that the present-day inhabitants didn't know or remember their unique history, and so I decided to sponsor an evening there with speakers, performers, film and video. The Martha's Vineyard Sign Language Heritage Event took place at The Old Whaling Church (the same hall where Presidents speak) over Thanksgiving weekend, with 180 people in attendance. ABC reporter Diane Sawyer sent a check of support, which I donated to the local historical foundation.
Initial success:
1. When I attended the VSDA (Video Software Dealers Association) convention in Las Vegas, I was a hit, and a curiosity - apparently it's unique not only to make back your investment in just 7 months, but to make back your investment in a special interest video at all.
2. Anthony and I began appearing on local morning talk shows around the United States and Canada. Our biggest single success was Portland, Oregon - three shows and a newspaper article, and within four days we received over 300 orders, and people there still send us letters and checks.
3. Leonard Maltin gave How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear a wonderful radio review, and finally we were on the road to success.
Blindsided by success
Signs of trouble did appear during that first year, but as a freelance artistic person rather than a business owner I kept focused on the success and poured money into charitable works. I should have been financially conservative. I hired a fancy publicist who did absolutely nothing. My first review appeared in the LA Times and was picked up by national wire services. It was a great review; however, the reporter had listed the wrong box number, repeated by syndicates nationwide. By the time the post office notified me, thousands of checks and orders had been "returned to sender." I'll never be able to calculate or recoup the loss of sales from that reporter's mistake.
This video is head and shoulders above the frankly laborious and uneventful ones made for interpreters for the deaf, as well as the only one specifically for the general public.
The other bad news was that after seven months I desperately needed publicity to get the word out there, and I spent a great deal of money getting an East Coast interview tour set up. I flew to Miami to begin the PR trip, which happened to fall the day after Princess Diana died. I was canceled in every city, even though halfway through I called ahead to make sure I was still on. No newspaper reporter took time to backlog a story that could run after I'd left town, except for my last stop - Martha's Vineyard. A grateful me then chose to invest in the town and sponsor the heritage event mentioned earlier. The 100 beautiful and interesting press kits I sent out also resulted in not a word of press about the event, my work, or the video. So I entered 1998 already in trouble.
Disaster strikes
On January 24, 1998, I discovered that my trusted fulfillment house had shipped out at least 1,000 Sign Language videos with no captions on them. Even though only a quarter of our customers are deaf, captions are simply not an optional item! When I confronted them they hid behind the contract clause that stated "any faulty video must be claimed within 7 days of shipping." But it takes about 10 days for delivery, so I was had. I paid my final bill, received my master reel and paper work, and headed back to my attic to start over.
Walking away from unusable, paid-for units in stock is like having a warehouse fire, except without the insurance. I replaced the noncaptioned videos out of my pocket, at $12 a unit, as each video had extra quality control and a personal apology from me. I hired a great person who'd been fired from the fulfillment house, and she helped go over the files they had kept, finding payments I'd made that hadn't been credited, orders shipped out but not paid for, orders paid for but not shipped, and checks to CJ Sign Language that they had cashed for themselves. It was a disaster. One big problem with doing damage control is that with all your time spent taking care of the past, you skim by the present and have no hours left in the day to work on the future. And now there was no money for the planned and much-needed advertising, as journal reviews had stopped on a year-old product. I scrapped along with the standard purchase orders from institutions and schools, thankful my initial and only mailing had been to them.
I was determined not to declare bankruptcy and put this project to rest. Fan letters kept coming in as more and more people checked How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear out of their city library. People were so grateful to finally have a way to communicate in Sign, and some of the letters were accompanied by checks for 10 more copies. I had to keep afloat. So I sold the good utility car I had bought to help with shipping, moved from a lovely big home with three offices into a tiny rental home/office, gave up all social life, and kept my head down, determined.
Zen and the Art of Figure Skating
The good thing about growing up training for the Olympics in figure skating, as I did, is that it teaches you unflagging self-motivation from an early age on. The bad thing is that since one literally takes a body fall on the ice and gets right up to try the jump again, actually falling for years as harder and harder moves are learned, when it comes to taking business hits I just don't know when to quit.
Virtually homeless now, I still run CJ Sign Language from whatever desk happens to be in front of me. Schools and libraries continue to send purchase orders, individuals find us on the Internet at www.signlanguagevideo.com. But orders have decreased dramatically ever since the day Amazon.com began stating "This video is unavailable and out of print" whenever someone logs in my title - an error they take no responsibility for and refuse to fix.
I cannot give up. There are almost 30 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people in North America alone, so if each of them has just one relative and one friend and one co-worker, that is 90 million people who need this video. According to the hundreds of fan letters, my clients are not only family members of the deaf who've had no resource to learn to Sign, but also mothers of children with an array of learning disabilities - attention deficit disorder, autism, Down Syndrome; adults with a parent who survived a stroke and cannot speak but can use their hands; accident victims who have lost speech capabilities; school kids who learn sign-songs in class and are fascinated; and teenage girls who just want to know a secret language so they can talk about boys in front of them!
My life as a pop-culture entrepreneur
In the 80s I was a popular talk show guest for having created a trend from scratch, just by following my own interests. BUNS: A Woman Looks at Men's was a landmark coffee table book for G. P. Putnam, and New York literary circles credited me with "creating the women's market in publishing." Photos of men for women had not been done before. Every publisher I met with thought I was "a funny blonde actress/photographer from Hollywood with a silly little idea," and while five houses made offers, no one - including Putnam - thought it would sell over 15,000 copies, the first run order. But my prediction was correct, and the book, along with the subsequent five BUNS calendars, sold over one million copies.
I wrote a "Seinfeld" on spec - it didn't get produced but the unique script was requested, and that storyline was copied on sitcoms all over town, my original one-liners turning up everywhere. Well, that's part of dues-paying in Hollywood. Then I bought the TV rights to national ballroom dance competitions in 1993 - ahead of the curve as it turned out - and while networks didn't finally green-light any of the specials I wrote, advertisers paid attention to my pitches, and commercials featuring dance hit the airwaves and continue today. I have many plans for bringing back the Fred & Ginger heyday, and, as always, am wondering how to find backing. The classic artist's problem.
And I think, no, I know, that How to Talk to a Person Who Can't Hear can also sell a million - or more. All I need is some serious backup, like a corporate sponsor to help with advertising, or a famous spokesperson. I want to do a Spanish-language version and need a company that is ready to mine the potential of that world, too. The possibilities are endless. Do I wish I had invested in a home with my $100,000 instead of investing in my ideals? No, not really. But I do look forward to home ownership again, or simply buying theatre tickets would be nice. Stay tuned. I have plans.
Christie Jenkins
To hear recorded information or leave Miss Jenkins a voice message, call anytime
P.O. Box 11429
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110
Fax: 1.888.749-7446
VideoCreator@aol.com
1.888.LEARN-SIGN (532-7674).