Film script highlights former high school wrestler
An actor and writer from Beacon is hoping to bring to the big screen a movie inspired by the true story of an autistic high school student who conquers his fear of touch by joining the wrestling team in his freshman year.
Carrie Gibson is raising money to turn her script Squeeze into a 20-minute fictional film based on the story of Adam Curry, the son of Gibson’s co-writer Tony Curry. Gibson and Curry this week launched a crowdfunding page and hope to raise $34,000 to produce the film and enter it into festivals.
The short, which would be shot in Beacon and Ossining, could be a stepping stone to a full-length feature estimated to cost between $3 million and $4 million, said Gibson. It would be produced by Blend Pictures in Beacon, she said.
The script doesn’t transform Adam — onscreen he’ll be “Noah” — into a champion wrestler, said Gibson. “The beauty of this movie is not that he wins at wrestling,” she said. “It’s that he conquers his fear of touch. When he loses a match but ends up having touched somebody, that’s when the school erupts.”
Gibson said that the growing interest in autism spectrum disorder could help Squeeze break through. Rates of autism have increased dramatically over the last several decades, from one case in 150 children in 2000 to one case for every 36 children in 2020, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When Adam, who now lives in Seattle with his father and works in a mailroom, was born in 1978, the autism rate was 1 in 5,000, according to the National Institutes of Health.
His autism manifested in several ways: He was extremely sensitive to touch; his language was delayed and he developed quirky interests, such as an obsession with television game show trivia, his father said.
When asked on a call recently to name the first celebrities to compete on The $10,000 Pyramid, Adam, now 44 years old, immediately said: “Rob Reiner and June Lockhart.”
Because he recoiled from being touched, when Adam’s physical education teacher suggested that he join the varsity wrestling team as a ninth grader, Tony laughed. “We said, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” he said.
Adam never won a match and Tony “sat in terror” as opponents pinned his son. But each match ended in a win, said his father. “Just stepping out onto the mat, facing off with another person and actually making contact was a huge victory,” he said.
Most importantly, his father said, wrestling allowed Adam to build friendships outside of the special-needs classes he attended. The team’s wrestlers “rallied around him” and “were his protectors,” said Tony.
Gibson said that she and Curry have always gravitated to human stories in the 25 years they have been writing partners. They have written and produced many plays, including Into the Fire, a story based on recordings they made of war veterans’ experiences. They toured the country with that show from 2009 to 2017.
“The movies that have really good stories and that are really compassionate about real human beings are the things that I want to watch,” said Gibson, who has many acting credits, including a recurring role as a barista in the recent HBO hit Barry. Curry also has had many television roles, including in Jake and the Fatman and Northern Exposure.
More recently, she said, they sought a full-length production of their script The Sand Sea. It is based on the true story of two photographers sent in 1926 to northern Africa to capture footage of a French Foreign Legion post for the production of the film classic Beau Geste.
The photographers were kidnapped, held for ransom and never heard from again. Gibson called The Sand Sea an “epic female ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ ” But the project crumbled due to Covid and other production challenges, she said.
“We’ve come close,” said Gibson. “It’s really hard to get the right combination of people to believe in you [in order] to come up with the money to make a movie.”