The Audience Is Listening

While James Cameron’s “Titanic” unspools on two monitors, actor Efrain Figueroa is laying down an audio play-by-play in Spanish, bringing the action into the realm of the blind. At this relatively calm moment in the film, Titanic survivor Gloria Stuart settles her 101-year-old eyes on Leonardo DiCaprio’s nude portrait of Kate Winslet.

“El retrato esta en solucion liquitada para no se desintegre,” Figueroa intones (The drawing sits in clear liquid to keep it from drying out). “El cabello blanco de Rose delinea las facciones todavia hermosas de su cara [Rose’s white hair frames her still lovely, fine-featured face] mientras contempla la replica de su juventud [as she looks down at the replica of her youthful self].” All of his description culminates in Gloria Stuart’s on-screen zinger: “Wasn’t I a dish?”

“Now that it’s working in rehearsal,” Helen Harris vows from the control booth, “we’ve got to convince the powers that be [Fox and Paramount] to let us do it.” Thanks to her gale-force powers of persuasion, Harris already has Cameron and Angie Dickinson volunteering their time to describe English-language visuals for “Titanic,” through a process Harris has named TheatreVision. (Viewers in special screenings for the blind wear headphones, and the extra dialogue is dubbed in when the actors are silent or during musical interludes.)

She likewise persuaded such voices as Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully to narrate the trajectory of the feather in “Forrest Gump”; weatherman Fritz Coleman to recount the flinging around of barns, cars and cows in “Twister”; and game-show host Monty Hall to chart the lava flows in “Volcano.” To describe the frilly costumes and hugs and tears of the 1993 remake of “Little Women,” she enlisted the stars of the original: Katharine Hepburn, Janet Leigh, June Allyson and Margaret O’Brien. In addition to the special movie theater screenings, Harris is now pursuing video versions; “Titanic,” released last month, is her first.

Harris, 63, was a painter before and during the 15-year span in which she lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa (she is president of RP International). As her vision declined, she found herself absorbing images with an intensity and precision that has informed her TheatreVision work. “I looked at my kids’ faces very closely, all the hair lines, the tips of their ears, the width of their shoulders. When the kids got out of the pool, I’d look at their footprints as they dried on the concrete.”

As half-devoured chicken sandwiches lie scattered around the studio, TheatreVision mainstay and Emmy-winner Mario Machado arrives, in blue sport jacket and Gucci loafers, for the afternoon session.

“The Iron Giant,” Machado says with a smile. “Is that what we’re doing today? It’s an amazing cartoon.” But just as much a revelation--to the sighted as it will be for the blind--is Machado’s bravura declaration of something as seemingly familiar as a studio logo: “On a black background, a yellow shield containing the Warner Bros. initials appears in center screen, the words ‘feature animation’ sprawled across its middle. As a red radar wave tunnel surrounds it on all sides, the picture slowly fades away at the edges, one at a time, until the screen is all black.”

RP International, (818) 992-0500. To purchase “Titanic” video, call (800) SEE-FILM or access https://www.RPinternational.org.