Title: 'Patrice' Documentary Follows One Jersey Couple's Fight for Nuptial Rights

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're celebrating independent films today on All Of It with some of the conversations we've had with the people who made them. Now we'll turn to a documentary titled Patrice: The Movie. Patrice Jetter is an excellent school crossing guard, a natty dresser, a train collector, figure skater, a girlfriend, and an advocate for disability rights.

Patrice Jetter: Hi. My name is Patrice. I am a totally cool person with a disability, who could do most anything with the exception of bungee jumping, pyrotechnics, and uber-dangerous stunts because then I need a stunt double for that.

Speaker 1: Patrice is a big magnet for people.

Garry: She is hands down the most famous cross guard in Hamilton Township. She might as well be Madonna.

Alison Stewart: That was Garry, her longtime partner, and he has cerebral palsy. The film shows the couple, who are both in their 50s, in their day-to-day life. They share meals together, go swimming, make each other laugh all the time. Patrice and Garry spend time together almost every day. However, they live in separate towns, about 20 minutes away. That's important because while the couple dreams of getting married, doing so would put them both at risk of losing their disability benefits. This includes Social Security, Medicaid, and help with basic needs.

Despite the challenges, the two of them decide to proceed with a commitment ceremony, but roadblocks pop up along the way. Patrice: The Movie is now streaming on Hulu, and most recently, it has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. Director, writer, and producer Ted Passon and the star herself, who is also a writer on the film, Patrice Jetter, joined me to discuss the film a few months ago. I started the conversation by asking how Patrice met Ted. Take a listen.

Patrice Jetter: I was introduced to Ted more than 20 years ago by my niece, Kimya Dawson. Kimya's an awesome musician with the Moldy Peaches. She got her big break when she did the soundtrack for the Juno movie.

Alison Stewart: I know her from the way back Machine. Holy cow. That's awesome. [laughs] Ted, when did you realize that Patrice's story would make a really interesting movie?

Ted Passon: Well, the first time I met Patrice, I realized that she was awesome immediately, as I think anyone does, and always had it in the back of my head that it'd be great to do something together. We didn't do that until around 2021. I worked on a series for Netflix called Worn Stories that was created by one of our producers on this project, Emily Spivack. We discovered that Patrice is extremely comfortable on camera, as it turns out, which is not a shocker.

It was so fun working together. We just felt like, okay, maybe there's just something more to do. Let's talk about it. As we were thinking about what might be a story worth covering from Patrice's life, right at that time, Garry asked her to marry him. I did not know at the time that if you are disabled and you're collecting benefits and you get married, that you will likely lose those benefits. That really seemed like, okay, that's the story that we're here to tell, and we should be following that.

Alison Stewart: Patrice, when Ted said, "Okay, we're going to make a movie," what parts of your life that you really wanted to see on screen?

Patrice Jetter: I wanted to put something with all aspects of my life from growing up because at the age of 50, I had some pretty interesting stories to tell. I had started trying to put the stories in a graphic novel because as outrageous as some of the stories are, you need the pictures to go with them because then it makes it funnier. Some of the stuff wasn't funny at the time it was going on, but if you know how to tell it, it can make people laugh.

When we started coming together to do this, we wanted to incorporate those stories in the movie because one day I'm not going to be here to tell them to people. We, of course, had to include my mom in. I wanted it done from all sides so that it wasn't just from my side, but it was also from my mom's side and the events that led up to what made me Patrice today.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about that, Ted. These recreations from Patrice's life, they feature Patrice, and sometimes they have little kids playing different ages. Sometimes they're playing her mom, sometimes they're playing a teacher. Patrice plays herself at various ages as well. When did the idea for recreating these moments come from?

Ted Passon: We knew we wanted to include Patrice's backstory. In trying to figure out how we were going to visualize that, we knew that we also needed to get Patrice's artwork into the film. She's a phenomenal artist, and her aesthetic is so strong, and the film had to see the world in that way. At some point, the idea was, well, Patrice should probably draw the world. It should just be her design. We started with the idea of her designing the sets and placing her in that world as herself.

Patrice also used to have a kids television show on public access years ago for kids. She loves kids and loves being around them. As we were trying to figure out, how do we also mimic Patrice's storytelling style where she can tell you something really dark but keep it funny, we realized that if we had kids playing all of the other parts in this world, that that would allow us to kind of keep it light while at the same time also providing a sneaky gut punch. Because when you hear some of these things in the system coming out of the mouths of children, you really get a stronger emotional sense of how inhumane the system is when you put it up against the innocence of a child.

Alison Stewart: Let's let people hear this a little bit. This is the clip from the movie, Patrice: The Movie, where she's telling a story about her mom. Let's listen.

Patrice Jetter: Before I was born, mom always dreamed of being a dancer, but she had to do other jobs instead. Mom used to work in Willowbrook Hospital. It was a notorious institution where they used to keep people with developmental disabilities, and it wasn't a nice place. My mom couldn't take it. She quit. Mom knew that I could end up in one of those places, and she always got worried when I attracted too much attention to myself.

Speaker 2: She did what?

Patrice Jetter: And I was good at that.

Alison Stewart: Patrice, how did not talking about your disability shape how you were treated by teachers and other kids?

Patrice Jetter: One of the problems was that no matter how much you try to hide or mask something, other people pick up on it and they don't buy it. It's almost like in the Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, when his dad put that cap on his nose to try to hide it and thought nobody would notice, but eventually, people notice when you're trying to hide something, and it always comes out.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Patrice Jetter and Ted Passon. We're talking about Patrice: The Movie. It's streaming now on Hulu. A big part of the film is your relationship with Garry. Patrice, how did you and Garry become friends? Just friends first.

Patrice Jetter: Me and Garry met over 35 years ago in a sheltered workshop for people with disabilities, and our personalities just matched. We just clicked, and we would make each other laugh, even at work. It got to the point that the supervisor would separate us and put us on opposite sides of the room, and we would still make each other laugh.

Alison Stewart: Ted, when you saw Patrice and Garry together, what did you want to show about their friendship and also about their relationship?

Ted Passon: Honestly, I think Patrice and Garry just love each other so much and so openly and so authentically that they have what I think everybody wants to find. Just being around a relationship like that, honestly, I could even just say for me personally, it fills you with hope that that is possible, and it just makes you feel better about the world. The idea that these two people who love each other so much would be prevented from getting married or even just living together by a system that professes to help them is just maddening.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk a little bit about the benefit situation. It's frustrating. Two people who love each other so much, they can't even move in together, they can't get married. They might lose their benefits. How did you think about incorporating that in the film, because it could become the focus of the film, but it isn't?

Ted Passon: In some ways, I think, we consider this film this, maybe, part of new wave of disability cinema, starting with Crip Camp and I Didn't See You There and CODA. There was a lot of tropes in stories about disabled people, especially when non-disabled people make the stories, where you usually have a story where somebody is overcoming their disability. That's not what this is. This is people trying to overcome a system that was not built with them in mind.

The idea is that this so much in the system is really just getting in the way of the simple, basic things that they're trying to have in their life, including loving each other, being together, but also just daily survival every single day, we wanted to acknowledge it as the heart of the conflict of the story. At the end of the day, it's about how the two of them deal with it. That's our main focus. How do they, as a team, as two people who love each other, do the best they can given the unfair circumstances that they've been thrown into?

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to this clip from the film. This is Garry sharing his frustrations about potentially losing benefits for getting married. This is from Patrice: The Movie.

Garry: For me, personally, I have several pulls. I was born with the Medicare and Medicaid thing. I have to have it.

Speaker 3: Right.

Garry: I mean, we'd never be able to pay for the bills. They don't care. It's just simple as that. It's just not right. They punish you for feelings that everybody else feels, and it's like, "Oh, you're disabled. You're not like everybody else."

Alison Stewart: Patrice, tell us some major misconceptions that people have about disabled people who want to be together, want to have their own rights.

Patrice Jetter: One of the major misconceptions is it's not as easy as folks think it is. A lot of folks don't even know what a person like myself goes through on a regular basis. They don't know that I have restrictions on the amount of money that I'm allowed to make. You're constantly always trying to make sure you have enough for living from paycheck to paycheck. Folks don't understand that I'm doing everything that I can, but no matter what I do, because of the cost of living, the amount of utilities, the amount of food, you're already in a negative balance every month, and you're constantly on this hamster wheel that you can't seem to get off of or get ahead.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Patrice: The Movie. You can stream it now on Hulu. My guest is Patrice Jetter and the film's director, Ted Passon. Ted, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I watched the film, and I'm not sure Patrice's disability is mentioned in the film. Was that intentional?

Ted Passon: Yes. One, it's not a secret or anything, but the reason we didn't do it is just because there is a new movement in the disability world to just not assume automatic disclosure of one's disability. In the spirit of that, we made a decision, as we were telling the story of the film, that we would only disclose somebody's disability if it was organically related to the story and it was something that was necessary to know. Then if not, then we just left it out.

Alison Stewart: Patrice, what are you hoping lawmakers will do to make the lives of you and your fellow disabled people to just make their lives easier?

Patrice Jetter: I'm hoping that this movie will help bring change because I know that some of my fellow disabled friends have been trying for years to get this law changed and that maybe this movie will give a boost to help that along. Then not only will we be able to get married, so will all of my friends, and we'll be able to go to everybody's wedding and have a good time.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with director Ted Passon and Patrice Jetter about Patrice: The Movie. That is All Of It for this hour. Stay tuned because next hour we'll continue bringing you conversations about some of our favorite independent films released this year. Coming up, we'll talk about the comedy action film Thelma, the SNL origin film Saturday Night, and the sci-fi thriller I Saw the TV Glow. That's all on the way. This is All Of It.