There’s No Holding This Actor Back

Scott Warneke, 13 years old, a skinny kid with red hair and freckles, has a voice that projects . It seems pretty serious, this voice, earnest, although it cracks its share of jokes. It is a very confident voice.

“My first director, Jody Davidson at the Laguna Playhouse, helped me a lot,” Scott says. “She always told me not to hold back and just go all the way.”

This Scott plans on doing, even though there have been suggestions that he should not, that he is not capable, that he could get hurt, that a boy with a disability is not something that Hollywood would ever want.

Such suggestions are misguided, the implications wrong. The people who offered them must not really know this boy who makes sure to enunciate each word.

“It’s still very difficult,” Scott says, “and, you know, I’m searching for work. . . . I do think we are making progress, but there is still a long way to go.”

Scott, a Dana Point eighth-grader, is talking the big picture now. Disabled actors and models, finally, are gaining a toehold in the world of fashion and film, where bodily imperfection has been virtually taboo.

Chris Burke, with Down’s syndrome, stars in “Life Goes On.” My baby’s favorite music video, “Baby Rock,” also features a little boy with Down’s. He’s the one with the enormous smile.

Fashion layouts for Nordstrom, Target and K mart are using handicapped models too. Mervyn’s will start soon. The Easter Seal Society gave its photographers and stylists a special sensitivity training session about this the other day.

“It was one of those real human moments,” says Mervyn’s spokeswoman Terry Cunningham. “It was wonderful.”

“We are not going to go away,” says neophyte runway model Ginny Alderdice, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease, diagnosed on her 64th birthday last year. “So if we can send a message to people, why not? And the manufacturers should be aware of this too.”

Scott adds this: “Before, it was a really big deal to use a black, or an Asian, or whatever. It’s not anymore, and now we are moving on to the disabled. Soon even the disabled actors won’t be that big of a deal.”

Yet this is why I am here. In Hollywood, especially, an industry image makeover can be glacially slow. Scott, who started acting when he was 7, is blazing a trail even as he squirms a little under the burden of such a role.

He’s a kid like any other--he spends time with his computer, his dogs and his friends--except that this kid has a big-time Hollywood agent and money in the bank.

“A car, I want to buy a car,” Scott says. “What kind? A fast one, a very very fast one.”

Scott’s disability, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, limits what he can do. Walking can be difficult, bike-riding and skateboarding are out. “ That’s why I need a car!” he says.

With his disease apparently in remission, Scott only uses a wheelchair for sports or if it’s called for in a script. Often, it is.

He co-starred, wheelchair-bound, in last fall’s TV movie “When You Remember Me,” the true story of muscular dystrophy patient Michael Patrick Smith, played by Fred Savage. Before that, Michael flew to London to play the role of a physical therapy patient of Sigourney Weaver’s character in “Gorillas in the Mist.” Scott’s scene, however, was later cut.

“I’m hoping that more and more there will not be that stereotype about handicapped people,” Scott says. “But for a very long time people who were handicapped were played by somebody who was not, which is worse. . . .

“I am very grateful to the people who have used me in their movies and plays, but I would like to see this taken a step further by using disabled actors without making their disability the main focal point or plot line of the movie.”

What Scott says he hopes for is a day when disabled people will be represented in the mass media as representatives of humanity, no different, in that sense, than anyone else.

That’s why he seems a little impatient, perhaps, when I ask how he stands the rejections that are part of an actor’s life.

“Well, you must have gone on a lot of interviews,” he booms. “If they say, ‘No, we don’t want you,’ you’re not going to go back and crawl into bed. You’re going to go out and get another job!”

And, of course, the kid is right.