By Stephen Taylor / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
"Pick a 3-digit number less than 364."
"254."
"254. That's September 11th. That's the 254th day of the year."
"Pick a 5-digit number less than 86,400."
"22,411."
"If I count seconds from 12 a.m. midnight, 2.2.4.1.1...it's gonna be 6..ah 6.13 and 31 seconds in the morning."
To say that Jerry Newport has got a head for figures is a bit like saying that Tiger Woods knows his way around a golf course.
His extraordinary ability with numbers is one of the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a form of autism. Newport was in Tokyo to promote the film based on his life, Mozart and the Whale, which focuses on an AS support group and particularly the relationship between the group's leader, Donald (played by Josh Hartnett), and a female member, Isabelle (played by Radha Mitchell).
To coincide with the movie's Japan release, a book with the same title was translated into Japanese and published by Japan Broadcast Publishing Co. It's an autobiography cowritten by Newport and his wife, Mary, who also has AS.
"Somebody asked me before, 'How do you do that [mental arithmetic]?' I just said, 'Fast,"' he explained in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri on his first trip to Japan. "I guess my brain's just wired differently. There's something about numbers that give me a great sense of security.
"To me, fooling around with four or five digit numbers is as simple as if you ask most people what's 3 times 7. It could be, what's 12,132 times 3,048 and I can tell them it's 36,930,336 with the same amount of ease that someone can say 3 times 7. It's just relative."
Newport was diagnosed with AS after a friend advised him to watch Barry Levinson's Oscar-winning movie Rain Man in 1989 and found himself identifying with the main character.
"When the guy asked him to multiply a couple of numbers...I came up with the answer faster than Dustin Hoffman said it in the movie," he says.
In the same way that Barry Levinson's Rain Man raised awareness of autism almost 20 years ago, Mozart and the Whale, coproduced and written by Rain Man cowriter Ron Bass, aims to highlight the plight of AS sufferers.
There are differences between the two conditions, as Newport was keen to point out.
"They [autistics] don't usually start having difficulties until they face the social challenges after puberty.
"I think the difference is that people with Asperger's have an uncontrollable interest, an obsession with some subjects and collecting lists of information," he says.
Newport believes in spreading the word about AS and feels the movie can do just that.
"It's a wake-up call saying, 'You know, it's OK to talk about therapy and all this, but you'd better be ready to help these people when they're adults 'cause a lot of them are gonna need it,'" adds the 58-year-old Newport, who currently organizes an AS support group and writes and lectures about his experiences while working part time as a taxi driver in Phoenix, Ariz.
But it's been a long road for the film's producers, one that started in October 1995.
"The movie started about a year after my wife and I got married," he says. "We were interviewed by the Los Angeles Times...They did a front page story about our support group, but it was mainly about the two of us.
"People who make movies were gonna read it, see a picture of my wife with a cockatiel on her head and say, 'Oh this might be a story!' This might be our next movie."
And more than 11 years later, was he happy with the final version?
"They did a very good job. It's similar to the way things happened. Where it's different it's still something I can imagine someone with that condition doing," he replies positively.
Though Newport had to wait until middle age for his condition to be formally identified, he was was aware of his tendency to obey rules too rigidly, another symptom of AS and a trait that goes back to when he was 5 years old.
"I got home and it was getting dark and I was supposed to be in the house, but there was nobody home. So I took my lunch box and just smashed the glass of the front door and reached through, opened the door and let myself in. I obeyed the rule," he reveals.
On reaching school age, his remarkable knack for solving difficult calculations became apparent and led to him entering the University of Michigan as a mathematics major. But after a promising academic start, Newport ran into barriers that he feels could have been avoided.
"People with autism and Asperger's Syndrome really need mentors in college," he says.
As a student in the United States at a time of social and political upheaval, he admits that it posed problems for him.
"The last couple of years [of university] I got kinda lost. It was partially the lack of a mentor, it was also going to college in '68, '69 and '70 when there was a lot of stuff going on that was disillusioning a lot of people, not just people like me," he sighs.
"I went to Los Angeles and started driving a taxi 'cause it was easy to do...I was very lost," he admits.
These days, Newport is very positive about life.
"I found a soul mate...That's made a huge difference and not just having Mary in my life. It's also being able to start the first support group we had in Los Angeles.
"I think there's a lot to be said for...having a group of people that you can hang out with...For some people that's church, maybe for some people that's their bowling league. I feel really good about being able to contribute on a worldwide basis," he says.
Newport is proud of his achievement and recommends the advice of his father when he was a child as an inspiration not only for him but everyone.
"We went to this art exhibit in New York City [of things] that they found in the tomb of King Tut [Ankh Amon], and I found out that he had a pyramid and said to my father, 'Someday I'm gonna do something that's so great that I'm gonna have my own pyramid,'" he says. "My father says, 'Do you realize what kind of world it would be if every great person had a pyramid named after them? Do you think there'd be much land left for anything else?'
"I said 'Dad, if I can't have a pyramid, what can I do?'
"He says, 'You know what you could do? Someday, do something that's so good that it'll live longer than you. If you do that, you won't need a pyramid. What you give back the world will be your pyramid.'
"For me, the movie, the book and the support groups, those are my pyramids. All it took was the belief that something good could and should happen. Everybody in the world can have a pyramid without wasting any bricks. Everybody in the world can do something, sometime in their life that makes a difference."
And if that's not worthy of the Hollywood treatment, nothing is, though the speech doesn't make it into Mozart and the Whale.
Nevertheless, the movie succeeds in portraying the plight of AS sufferers with wit and sensitivity.
As we were winding up the interview, Newport seemed a little anxious before revealing the cause for his concern.
"I made a mistake on that calculation, though. I was afraid you were gonna play the tape and bust me. I'll just show you that I did it correct and this is the real answer," he explains, holding up a piece of paper with the number 36,978,336 written on it.
As brilliant as he is with numbers, even savants like Newport get it wrong occasionally.
"Mozart and the Whale" is currently playing.
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