‘BREAKING GROUND’ FOCUSES ON ACTORS WITH DISABILITIES

“Four out of five roles go to white able-bodied men,” Victoria Ann-Lewis notes on “Breaking Ground,” a locally produced documentary airing at 8:30 p.m. Sunday on KTLA Channel 5.

Hence, performers with disabilities are not the entertainment industry’s only underemployed minority. Blacks, Asians, Latinos and the post-60 crowd don’t do so well either. And in the majority category, females of all sizes, shapes and colors continue to draw the short straw.

But this low-key, soft-sell, valuable and encouraging program is about actors and actresses with disabilities. That it’s even on the air--hosted by TV star John Ritter and his brother, Tom Ritter--demonstrates that a more positive employment climate now exists.

For example, there is Marlee Matlin, the deaf actress nominated for an Academy Award for her work in “Children of a Lesser God.”

Yet performers who are blind or deaf or who limp or walk with crutches or are confined to wheelchairs have traditionally found the road to TV jobs strewn with traffic bumps.

Now the good news.

Directed by Neil Goldstein, written by Nancy Becker, with Ginger Myers and R. J. Johnson as supervising producers, “Breaking Ground” tells the relative success stories of such performers as Ann-Lewis, Geri Jewell, Chris Templeton, Jim Troesch, Gordon Ross, James Stacy, Solomon Smaniotto, Cheryl McMannis, Henry Holden and Alan Toy. Their disabilities have not stopped them from getting either recurring roles on series or guest TV shots.

And why not? When “Cagney & Lacey” auditioned actual wheelchaired actors for a story about wheelchair muggings, the drama “took on a level of pain, a level of feeling” that he hadn’t expected, says executive producer Barney Rosenzweig.

On the other hand, Jewell reports here that two years of unemployment followed her stint as a semi-regular on “The Facts of Life.”

Hence, unpleasant reality continues to intervene in even this success story. Better, but not good enough. So put the happy ending on hold.