SUNDAY STORY:A tight focus on success

One warm night in June last year, Tyler Norman sat on a panel in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s boardroom and talked about his burgeoning film career. School had nearly ended and only a few attendees lined the room, but they stayed to hear the young man with the modest goal of making a better Biblical epic than Cecil B. DeMille.

Norman, who took film classes at Orange Coast College, had recently scored a job as the cameraman for a Costa Mesa insurance company. He had dreamed of being a famous director since he was in school, he said, and a small production company had recently expressed interest in one of his scripts. When finances picked up, he wanted to make a new version of “The Ten Commandments.”

A latecomer to the meeting might not have guessed that Norman is autistic. The Irvine resident, who creates movies to communicate with hundreds of people, once could barely communicate at all. But that hasn’t stopped him from writing a stack of scripts, having a film shown at his local theater, and even traveling to Arizona to shoot a documentary.

“I basically grew up on movies because I didn’t have a lot of friends,” Norman said. “I was kind of the weirdo in class.”

Norman, 22, is a success story — and one of a lucky few. As understanding of autism has grown in recent years more children have been diagnosed with it. The Orange County Department of Education reported a 140% increase in autistic students from 2001 to 2005, and school districts like Newport-Mesa have raced to open special classes for them.

To many parents, having a child diagnosed with autism — a disorder marked by impaired social interaction and narrow interests — is devastating. Those born with the condition, however, are not always impaired for life. With the right treatment and self-motivation, autism sufferers can learn to interact with strangers, graduate from college, and excel in careers.

It’s been a tough road, but Norman has ended up in that group. Or, at least, he’s getting there.

“To me, the success is already there,” said his father, Lowell Norman, who also works at SafeGuard Investments in Costa Mesa. “The odds of him being another [Steven] Spielberg are against him. They’re against anyone. But the success with Tyler is that he can write, he can articulate the world through his eyes, and ultimately, that’s going to serve him.”

To many who meet him now, Tyler Norman shows few, if any, signs of being disabled.

His speech is precise and deliberate, the sound of a thoughtful young man who chooses words carefully before uttering them. At more than 6-feet tall, he towers over most of his family members, and he has a robust build. He shows a quick memory of the past and can describe events in detail, sometimes remarkably so.

It didn’t used to be that way. As he entered preschool, he could barely form a complete sentence. He feared the tricycle that his parents bought for him. Shortly before he entered kindergarten, a doctor diagnosed him with autism.

“As Tyler became more aware, he became more depressed,” said his mother, Debbie Norman, a nurse for the Newport-Mesa school district. “I remember when he was in kindergarten, he was in the bathtub and he looked up and said, ‘Mommy, what’s wrong with me?’

“I just said, ‘We’re not sure. We’re trying to figure it out.’ ”

At Greentree Elementary School in Irvine, Norman shifted from class to class, sometimes sharing a room with all special-needs students. He made few friends in school, but he didn’t seek them much to begin with. Fourth-grade teacher Peggy Walsh remembered him as a bright student who often slept at his desk and had a knack for dismantling sprinklers on the playground.

“Even if some other student had said, ‘Tyler, come play on the swings,’ he would act like he hadn’t heard them,” Walsh said. “He would go over and squat down like a catcher and start working on a sprinkler. That’s part of the syndrome. It’s just a fixation.”

Norman had discovered a pair of more grown-up passions, though. At the age of 4, he witnessed his first fireworks demonstration at Irvine High School and sat spellbound as the colors streaked the air. His second love was a more common one. For Norman, putting up with taunting at school, movies offered an escape from reality.

“That’s why all movies have a slightly unrealistic element to them — because people don’t want to pay $9 or whatever it is now to sit and have the ugly reality shoved in their faces even further,” he said.

Film wasn’t just an escape for Norman, though. It quickly turned into a career plan.

He still lagged behind most of his peers at Northwood High School. Driving proved an insurmountable obstacle. Rob Stuart, his advisor and art teacher, sometimes had to tell Norman to sit down when he wandered around the classroom during lectures.

A change had begun to take place, though. As he approached graduation, Norman grew more aware of the outside world — and of how to control his behavior.

He trained himself to sit still in class and avoid blurting things out. Also, he worked to hone his technical skills, rounding up his sister and friends to make short movies on his hand-held camera.

“By the end, you wouldn’t know he had any type of disability, at least not in my classroom,” Stuart said.

One afternoon during his senior year, Norman got a movie exhibited for the first time. A theater in Irvine was holding a student film day, and he had managed to get a movie on the playlist: “Quest for Bethany,” a 10-minute thriller that he filmed around the neighborhood. It didn’t go off without a hitch — the theater projector stretched out his picture horizontally — but the crowd laughed and cheered anyway.

Norman, while grousing over the projection, knew he had found his calling.

“Obviously, at the time, I was kind of upset about the technical difficulty they had, it being up there all distorted,” he said. “But I was glad it was up there.”

Norman has a screenplay in his desk that symbolizes much of his journey in life. It’s gone through a number of incarnations over the last two years — rewrites, new characters, a different ending — but the core of the story has stayed the same.

To Norman, it’s the fantasy of every person with a disability. A scientist, flying over the California desert with his autistic son, discovers an idyllic village in which people with disabilities can be cured. There is only one catch — if they leave the valley and return to their families and friends, the afflictions will return.

He sent the script, titled “The Valley,” over the summer to dozens of small studios. A company in Burbank had shown passing interest a few months ago, but no deal had come of it. Still, even as Norman sat up late at his computer and e-mailed producers, he had one substantial film under his belt.

On Presidents Day Weekend in 2005, Norman and his family took a drive from Irvine to Arizona, cruising down lonesome stretches of desert road in the winter chill. It wasn’t a sight-seeing trip. Norman had loved fireworks as long as he had loved the movies, and now he headed for the Western Pyrotechnic Assn.’s annual show in Lake Havasu to be a documentary filmmaker.

Norman glided around with his camera and asked the technicians for on-the-spot interviews. He stood enraptured one evening as lightning followed fireworks in the sky. After a second trip in October, he returned to Orange County with 3 1/2 hours of footage and set to work.

He called the finished film “Keepers of the Flame.” In July, he gave it its first screening for a crowd of fireworks experts in Hawthorne. Chris Spurrell, one of the fireball artists interviewed in the film, grew teary-eyed watching some of Norman’s elaborate shots. Toward the end of the night, someone mentioned Norman’s condition to him. He hadn’t even guessed.

“He was maybe quirky,” Spurrell said, “but I wouldn’t have thought this person is obviously autistic.”