What's Bugging Eli- The making of the film, "What's Bugging Seth"

“What’s Bugging Seth” was a story I avoided telling for many years. When I started writing scripts as a 16 year old, my first effort was about a young deaf man overcoming his handicap in order to succeed in the so-called “normal” world. It was a struggle I was intimately familiar with having been born with a profound hearing loss. The finished story ended up okay, but something about it bothered me and I put it aside. Looking back now, I think I know what bothered me. I had put it aside because I did not want to be seen as a deaf filmmaker. I spent all my life overcoming my handicap and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. You don’t hear Martin Scorsese described as the asthmatic filmmaker or Spielberg as the “child of divorced parents” filmmaker. They’re filmmakers, period, and I wanted to be considered the same way. So I wrote many scripts: comedies, period pieces, action, etc. Several were well received, convincing me to continue working part-time jobs at Starbucks and the Post office after going to NYU’s Tisch School For the Arts and Claremont McKenna College. Along the way, I received a cochlear implant, an advanced hearing device that allowed me to talk on the phone, hear music and movies in the theater for the first time in my life. Throughout all of this, the story of the deaf man would pop up periodically in my consciousness only to be pushed back down. One day, while struggling with an action script, a powerful image popped up in my head: a young man driving his old beat up truck along the Monterey Coast. Then I realized he was wearing hearing aids. I tried to erase the image, but it evolved into many other images and soon I had several pages of scribbled notes. As the story of Seth Singer came to life I saw him struggling with his identity as a deaf person. In his struggles with his bug extermination business and his romances with Alma, a double amputee, and Nora, a model, he did not want to be seen as a deaf person. He wanted to be seen as Seth Singer, the individual. It wasn’t long before I realized that his problem was the same as mine: denying my handicap while being undeniably handicapped. What are the consequences of denying part of who you are? The ultimate irony that Seth discovers is that it is not until he finally accepts his deafness that he is truly free to be whatever he wants and to love whomever he wants. And it wasn’t until I embraced my deafness as an integral part of myself that I was able to make “What’s Bugging Seth,” and, in the process, establish myself as a filmmaker.