Michael J. Fox, Harrison Ford Team Up For New Parkinson’s Disease PSA

Fox And Ford Made A Video

You could also say that the MJFF put some “Maximum Effort” into the video, since that’s the name of the company that produced it. Maximum Effort was founded by MJFF Board Member Ryan Reynolds, who once said, “I’m teaching my daughter that the sun goes down each night because it’s mad at her. Probably gonna write a book on parenting at some point.” So you figure the MJFF spot would be all serious, formal and everything, right?

Not exactly.

The PSA begins with Ford—who’s played iconic movie characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones—sitting down next to Fox—who’s played iconic TV and movie characters like Alex P. Keaton and Marty McFly—and casually asking, “OK, who’s going to start? You want to start?”

When Fox responds, “You start,” Ford then comes back with, “Please, don’t make me start.” And that’s how things get started as you can see here:

After someone off-camera with a Ryan-y Reynolds-y voice reads the title of the video, Ford remarks, “Ah, so you’re part of this too” and along with Fox launches into four tips on how to respond when you learn that someone has PD.

PD, as I’ve detailed before in Forbes, is a complex progressive brain disorder that currently affects around a million people in the U.S. alone. With PD, brain cells that are supposed to produce dopamine over time stop working and die. Since dopamine helps control a variety of functions like body movement, this can result in symptoms like tremors, muscle stiffness, movement and balance issues, depression, memory changes, and constipation. There is currently no cure for PD.

Tip 1: Don’t Make It Weird

After the 84-year-old Ford makes the beginning of this spot, oh, a bit weird, the 65-year-old Fox, who was diagnosed with PD at age 29 in 1991, mentions the first tip: “Don’t make it weird.” And he tells Ford to write that tip down. Yeah, it’s not that easy to get Han Solo to write something down. So, Ford responds with “I don’t have to write it down. I have a mental note.” To which, Fox remarks, “My handwriting sucks.”

You can already see the lightheartedness in their conversation. This first tip can help counter what frequently happens when people hear of someone’s serious medical diagnosis—people can get seriously weird. This can range from dramatically changing how they act towards the person to manufacturing some kind of “reason” why the person got the diagnosis to disappearing to even acting as nothing’s happened.

Tip 2: Start Simple

When Ford then asks Fox, “What do I say to my friend,” Fox suggests, “How about, ‘Thanks for telling me,’” and explains that “You need to do any fancy speeches.” This prompts Ford to say, “Good, I hate big speeches.” This is the Ford whose most famous movie speeches include “Get off my plane!” from Air Force One, ”I know” from The Empire Strikes Back and “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go,” from Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, it’s not super surprising that Fox notes, “That’s clear.”

Yeah, no one expects you to make the medical equivalent of the Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 delivery on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Even saying something like “I don’t know what to say” can work. Your continuing presence can help say a whole lot more.

Tip 3: Help, Don’t Fix

The third tip aims to fix what you may try to do when looking to help. Fox does indicate that helping is great but warns “Try not to confuse helping with fixing” and gives the following example: “Well, saying you found a cure on the Internet is not helping.” Yeah, no one’s ever done that ever, right? Ford does state, “I wouldn’t do that. Have you seen the [bleep] on that thing?”

We all know people who have no real medical background or expertise yet start to rattle off all these supposed treatments and cures—many of which they heard from other people, social media, some AI platform or the Internet in general. This can be a big swing and a miss, as in misinformation, like influencers telling people to eat dirt and those claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine will turn you into a gigantic magnet.

Tip 4: Keep Showing Up

Finally in teh PSA, Ford asks Fox, “What’s the biggest mistake people make?” That, “show” enough, brings up the fourth tip: keep showing up. Fox answers Ford by saying, “They worry so much about saying the wrong thing that they stop saying anything.” When Ford asks what’s the right thing, Fox offers one possibility, “You want to get lunch?”

One of the most disheartening and tough things about going through tough times can be seeing longtime supposed friends disappear. It’s easy to find so-called friends when things are going well for you. But the tough times are what separate the true friends from the pretenders, opportunists, posers and LARPers.

Ford concludes the video by summarizing the four tips, “Don’t make it weird, start simple, help, don’t fix, keep showing up,” which earns a handshake from Fox and an “officially qualified to be a friend” declaration from Fox.

Of course, these four tips are just a start, what you could call the tips of the iceberg when it comes to being a friend for someone with PD. PD can be a very long journey with many different turns for those with the condition and the friends and family traveling alongside. While there is currently no cure for PD, different treatment possibilities have continued to emerge, and the MJFF has been playing a major role in supporting research to identify more such possibilities.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation Patient Council Was Enthusiastic About The Lightheartedness Of The PSA

Now, back to whole “light” and “heart” thing. As you’ve noticed, the spot from Ford, Fox and Reynolds is rather lighthearted. There can a mistaken belief that anything about a serious disease should be by definition very serious. But I can tell you from talking with many patients with many different health conditions that the opposite can be the case—especially since people often use humor to cope and connect with each other.

“Obviously, Parkinson’s is an incredibly serious topic, and the last thing we would want anyone to think is that the Michael J. Fox Foundation thinks that it’s funny or that this is a topic to be treated with anything less than real seriousness,” MJFF’s chief marketing officer Holly Teichholtz emphasized. “And so, one of the messages I think we heard loud and clear, was that our patient council, as representatives of our community, really sparked to the idea of what that could bring to broader audiences in terms of awareness. They were excited about the prospect.”

So, the MJFF, Ford, Fox and Reynolds did seem to put “Maximum Effort” into making sure that this spot had the lightheartedness to reach and resonate with broader audiences while at the same time being appropriately respectful. After all, everyone should want to see more research into conditions like PD and make sure that support for such research is expanding and not shrinking.