The history of disability discourse in the movies is one usually filled with trauma and misrepresentation. Too often, critics explain away the lack of disabled representation on-screen by citing a lack of actors, and when a disabled actor does arrive, they’re a new phenomenon. But disabled actors aren’t new. In fact, they’ve been around since cinema’s foundation, and the proof is in 1926’s “The Flying Ace,” which turns 100 this fall.
“I remember [wondering during] my first viewing was how is this dude riding a bike using the crutch as one of the pedals, pushing it up and down?” said Joseph Amodio, who works in writing assistive descriptions for the blind and low-visioned, when first seeing “The Flying Ace.”
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“The Flying Ace” seems revolutionary in many ways. Filmed by the little-known (to today’s audiences) Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Florida, the 1926 silent film features an all-Black cast and was produced entirely outside the Hollywood studio system. It’s an aviation mystery that follows Captain Billy Stokes (Laurence Criner) and his assistant, Peg (Steve Reynolds), who is missing a leg. Stokes and Peg must solve the mystery of who stole $25,000 from a railroad payroll.
It’s a silent feature that prioritizes its Black cast, none of whom are in blackface, while giving them romance, adventure, and comedy. Unlike other movies of the period, racial oppression isn’t the sole reason for its existence. In fact, it’s entirely absent from the film. It’s just a movie. Furthermore, it’s less a Hollywood story than an American tale. In a cinematic landscape that so often fails to find the intersection of race and disability, “The Flying Ace” did just that.
Disabled actors have appeared in Old Hollywood features, but most were white. Intersectionality rarely appears in movies of the period (let alone today). And yet while watching “The Flying Ace,” Steve “Peg” Reynolds isn’t just a Black man. Or a disabled man. He’s a disabled Black man. One who gets the opportunity to shine as a funny, intelligent character who just happens to have a disability. Living in a world that wasn’t built with you in mind can make improvisation, adaptation, and invention part of everyday life. The film gives Reynolds room to put that ingenuity to work, treating it as a matter of course. Through one dangerous predicament after another, his stunt work reveals a performer who seems entirely comfortable in his own skin. He has little time for what anyone might think of him. There’s a job to do. And he does it with aplomb. Unfortunately, next to nothing is known about Reynolds’s life today; he died in 1945. Of the six features he worked on during his career, “The Flying Ace” is the only one that’s complete, according to searches of both IMDb and the Library of Congress.
For Lawrence Carter-Long, director of engagement for ReelAbilities International, the chance to give Reynolds a second shot at stardom was intriguing. “I went down the rabbit hole and discovered the Library of Congress restored it, and it’s the only surviving complete film of Steve Reynolds, and I was off to the races,” he said. Reynolds, a Black disabled man with a limb difference, is given a character of substance that isn’t tragic or inspirational. “The thing that really struck me after watching it is that Peg is nobody’s fool,” Carter-Long said.
The recent Annenberg Inclusion study, in its sample of the 100 top-grossing films of 2025, cites that only 6.9 percent of disabled characters onscreen are Black. Yet nearly nothing is known about Reynolds’s life, his other features, or even whether he was married or had children. How did he get into stunt work? How did he become disabled? And what did audiences think of him in 1926? None of this is known. Carter-Long hopes that screening “The Flying Ace” will inspire historians to look into him and answer those questions. “Maybe some folks will come out of the woodwork who can help us find some of those answers.”
“‘The Flying Ace’ is a vital work of Black film history, and its centennial gives us a meaningful opportunity to bring that history back into active public conversation,” said Dr. Novotny Lawrence, director of the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University. “By revisiting the film with ReelAbilities, FMDG, and Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, we can explore how disability, music, and contemporary access practices deepen the ways audiences encounter and understand that history.” The IU Foundation’s Black Philanthropy Circle also provided key resources for the project and supported BFCA’s co-sponsorship.
“The Flying Ace” certainly feels like a movie that highlights the best of Hollywood’s history, or at least one that would have existed without racism and ableism stymying everything. “Here we have this film that’s showing how long ago the Black community was actually being represented, and yet I don’t know who knew about it,” said Allyson Johnson, professional voice actor and audio description narrator. “People don’t always realize that there’s already that connectivity happening,” Diane Nutting, Accessibility and Inclusion Consultant working with Smithsonian Folklife, said. “I just think about this film in terms of an all-Black cast, in 1926. All these things that were so groundbreaking at the time.”
“Film history is American history. Black history is American history. Disability history is American history. Music history is American history,” says the ReelAbilities site, and the organization is bringing the film back to movie screens on its centennial in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as part of the “Culture of, by, and for the People” initiative commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States.”
The film will run as part of the ReelAbilities Rediscover project that “invites audiences to encounter the film anew, bringing together Black film history, disability culture, archival preservation, live music, accessibility, and public dialogue.”
“The Flying Ace” becomes an opportunity to examine American history through multiple communities and traditions. “As we think about America 250, and we think about celebrating, this just seems like it’s a total fit for what we’re trying to do in telling the story of America through culture and folklore,” said Nutting.
Though the movie was filmed in the 1920s, everyone involved in the project wants to make it accessible from both a contemporary perspective and a disabled one. “For a silent film, music is not the background. It is how the story moves, breathes, and reaches the audience,” according to ReelAbilities. Grammy Award-winning blind musicians Matthew Whitaker and Robert Derke are creating a new, partially improvised live score that responds to the film in real time and is described as a “living interpretation” rather than a fixed soundtrack. This was helped by Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School, which “brings live music and the artistry of blind and visually impaired musicians into the center of the audience experience.”
Concurrently, the movie’s audio description was unique because it required descriptions of what’s on-screen, silent dialogue, and the film’s intertitles, the written words put on screen to tell the story.
“It was completely the opposite of a standard audio description writing experience,” said Amodio, who worked alongside Bridge Multimedia. “There was not only no dialogue, but no ambient sound, and that’s what I hadn’t expected. There was no door opening or closing. There was no wind blowing, or crickets outside to indicate you’re outdoors. There was no subway train rushing by to indicate you were on a subway platform. So the watchword of any audio description writer [is] keep it short, [and that] kind of went out the window because the entire sonic landscape that is usually in a film I had to provide in the audio description writing. And Allyson had to provide, in her read, the things that she knows about vocal inflection, and rising and falling, and pacing certain things, saying certain phrases quickly and slowing other things down.”
As Amodio, Johnson, and Carter-Long all assert, they hope those without visual disabilities will check out the audio description on this, as well as movies in general. “I am never going to watch a show without the audio description track again,” Johnson said. “The audio description was so beautiful and lush, and it added so much more to my viewing as a sighted person.”
After premiering the film on October 7 at Indiana University, the team hopes to see this presentation of “The Flying Ace” as a pilot for a much larger project that includes other features starring little-known disabled actors. It’s also an opportunity to ask viewers the question of who gets to be part of film history.” “It’s a collaboration that spotlights so many things that deserve to be in something like the America 250 celebration, but more often than not get left out,” said Carter-Long.
From Black historians to disability scholars, archivists to musicians, film is a global medium through which people learn about the world and each other. Disability, for too long, has been left out of that conversation, let alone the intersectionality that comes from being a person of color with a disability. And the bigger hope is that this screening isn’t a one-off. Carter-Long has several disability-centric movies and stars that people have forgotten; he hopes this series will help viewers “rediscover” them.
ReelAbilities Rediscover brings history, community, culture, and access together to change how audiences encounter a film and recognize whose contributions matter. A century after Steve “Peg” Reynolds took the screen, “The Flying Ace” is finally being given more than a second look. It’s being given a wider frame. And it will hopefully dispel the belief that, then and now, disabled actors don’t exist. They’ve always been here.