‘Eyes of Christmas’ Provides the Blind a Window to the Season

Helen Harris is blind, but she still “sees” Christmas every year, from the strings of popcorn and brightly colored decorations on the tree to a roly-poly Santa with a long, white beard, soot-dusted red suit and shiny black boots. It’s all due to Harris’ own perseverance and the wide range of celebrities she’s persuaded to lend their time, and their holiday memories, to a special television broadcast, “Eyes of Christmas.”

The Woodland Hills housewife, mother and artist, who lost her sight because of a degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, is the driving force behind the two-hour special, now in its fifth year. This year’s lineup of celebrity hosts includes Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Garth Brooks, John Travolta and Vin Scully. Each will contribute “audio greeting cards for the blind” in addition to sharing their holiday memories. The special also will include a frame-by-frame description of the 1934 British film “Scrooge.”

“Eyes of Christmas” will air early Christmas morning at 1 a.m. on KCOP, as well as various times on cable’s L.A. Channel. The special will be transmitted via satellite to more than 10,000 radio stations around the globe on Christmas Eve, and broadcast nationally on Cable Radio Network. “CNN World Report” correspondents will be contributing to the broadcast with news stories of holiday traditions around the world.

Harris, who founded RP International in 1974, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit organizations fighting RP and other degenerative eye diseases, conceived of “Eyes of Christmas” because “so many people who are blind are so lonely at Christmas.” An estimated 30 million Americans are either blind or severely sight-impaired.

“I felt if we put a broadcast on with greeting cards and described the television broadcast, it would help an awful lot of people get through what can be a dark period,” she says.

This year, 35 celebrities participated in the special. “It’s really grown since the first year,” says Harris. “We’re offering it to 44 cable stations for free [around the country] and the networks if they want it. It can be accessed for broadcast on radio as well.”

Though Harris is disappointed that “Eyes” will be airing locally at 1 a.m., she adds, “I have to live with whatever I can get.”

She continues to hope that “Eyes” will eventually make it to the networks, if not exactly on prime time, a better spot than the middle of the night. Harris believes the networks forget that the blind are not only consumers, but spend a lot of time at home, often listening to television, if not watching it.

Harris also created TheatreVision, a concept that allows blind people to go to movies and hear, via headphones, not only the film’s dialogue, but a description of the action. Currently the films travel from theater to theater.

The first TheatreVision project was “Forrest Gump,” which she unveiled four years ago to studio heads and celebrities “mostly to get the studio interested in the project so they would understand why [anyone would want] movies to be described.”

Presently, Harris completes one movie per month in TheatreVision. “We have maybe 40 or 50 now,” she says. “We’re trying to get ‘Stepmom.’ We are going to going to work on that soon. For Republic Pictures, we are going to do ‘The Quiet Man.’ Maureen O Hara’s going to do the description on that.”

The narration that is the central feature of “Eyes of Christmas” and TheatreVision movies makes for an experience that those with sight can also enjoy, says Harris.

“James Cameron described the ‘Titanic’ for me and we showed it in Houston with President Bush in November. We came out of the theater and Mr. Cameron said he closed his eyes to see what it felt like in a theater. He was very impressed. He made a commitment to [describe] some of his movies.”

Harris wanted to make an “impact quickly” with TheatreVision. “Sometimes things for the vision-impaired are slow,” she explains. “Books delivered to blind students in school are slow. The training of blind people is slow. I don’t think the world believes or understands how difficult 24 hours of darkness is, so some of the research for blindness has been swept aside.”

While Harris concedes that few sighted people understand why the blind would even want to go to the movies, that hasn’t stopped her from taking the case to just about anyone who will listen.

“It’s so amazing,” Harris says. “There is a whole social thing which occurs. To be in a room with a lot of other people who are doing the same thing--being part of society.

“If you are in the movies and you are blind, you have to have somebody tell you what’s on the screen . . . a lot of my drive to make this happen is from sitting in movie theater where people continually kick the back of the chair and say, ‘Be quiet.’ Pretty soon the person who is with you wants to die and so you stop going.”

* “Eyes of Christmas”’ airs Friday at 1 a.m. on KCOP and on cable systems with the L.A. Channel at 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.