Golden: A film by Susan Hadary and Bill Whiteford is up for an Oscar. (Sun photo by Chiaki Kawajiri)

The days leading up to the Academy Awards are days to relish for nominees Susan Hadary and Bill Whiteford, a filmmaking team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

 Hadary has been pleasantly amused by numerous offers of precious jewels to wear to Sunday's Oscars.

 Whiteford fancied himself making it after Tom Cruise wished him good luck last week at an Oscar nominee luncheon. With Cruise hovering over his table, blocking his way to his seat at the Beverly Hills Hilton, Whiteford put out his hand. "Hi, I'm Bill Whiteford," he says. "Hi, I'm Tom Cruise." Duh.

 The team learned a month ago while driving to work in Baltimore that their documentary, "King Gimp," the story of a Towson boy's fight with cerebral palsy, was one of three nominated for an Oscar. Congratulations from friends and colleagues have poured in, and today they fly to Los Angeles for a last round of parties.

 "It's an honor you live with and enjoy up to the minute they open the envelope," says the Annapolis-born Whiteford, whose silver hair and blue eyes against black clothes mark him as some kind of Hollywood celebrity. And then, as the pair knows from other award nominations, the winner is announced and the camera that has been stuck in their faces walks away. Just like that, it's over.

 But like parents who celebrate the success of a child who goes to college, these filmmakers are too invested in their work of art to ever let it go.

 For 14 years they have watched Dan Keplinger grow, on and off camera. What their intimate portrait doesn't reveal is their own unique relationship with Keplinger, now a 27-year-old artist. In an interview in their office on Greene Street, a case of gold

 trophies behind them, Hadary and Whiteford spoke more about the scenes on the cutting room floor than those in the final edit.

 Keplinger was just 13 when they met him, a child in a Boy Scout uniform making dance-like movements with his arms. Unable to control the muscles of his arms, legs or mouth, he could neither speak nor dress himself. They chose him and five others from among 50 children they interviewed and played with to star in a 1986 federally funded documentary on mainstreaming children with disabilities.

 "Other people look for disease," says Hadary, the loquacious side of the team. "We looked for people with disease. Bill and I would spend two or three months looking for people. Casting, if you will."

 They made that film -- a training film still in use by teachers -- but afterward, Hadary and Whiteford realized they had developed strong relationships with the children. They wanted to keep watching them.

 "They are our film children, if you will," Whiteford says.

 Just kept going

 In the years they grew to know the children, they created four piles of video tapes -- one each for Keplinger and three others. Their grant money long gone, they did everything in their spare time -- the filming, editing, writing, visiting, keeping relationships going. "It was wonderful to watch," Whiteford says, "and then, there was the completion problem."
 
 

"King Gimp" is his life: Dan Keplinger, 27, has battled his cerebral palsy to become an artist. (Sun photo by Chiaki Kawajiri)

They didn't know when to stop.

 They recorded Keplinger's move from a state school for disabled children into Parkville High School. They filmed him moving from his mother's home into his first apartment. His first art show, his friendship with a young woman hired to help him with homework, his senior prom and his tears at his college graduation -- all were captured on film. Before they realized it, 14 years had passed.

 One by one, the films about the other children began to be published, to critical acclaim. But Keplinger's was more complicated. His pestering forced the busy producers to hire an outside editor and win money from HBO to finish it.

 From the beginning, the producers wanted Keplinger to tell his own story, as had the other children. But they couldn't understand him. Finally, Whiteford suggested that Keplinger write down his story and offered to pay him. It took two summers.

 Using a head stick attached to a helmet, he typed four or five days a week in the producers' downtown offices, often after reviewing the film they'd shot. At night he'd rewrite. Then, the producers would quiz him: Is this what you meant? No, he'd say. Their communication got easier when e-mail came along.

 The emotions Keplinger revealed in writing about his life surprised even his mother, Linda Ritter. "Dan and I had been so busy together, lining up meetings and fighting, we didn't take time to sit down and talk about feelings and emotions," Ritter says.

 "King Gimp," a 39-minute film, was edited from 80 hours of tapes and 80 pages Keplinger wrote.

 It illustrates Ritter's belief that her son would become independent through education and life. Initially diagnosed as mildly retarded, Keplinger is shown in class answering an algebra equation. On camera, too, he does battle with a shirt, eats spilled popcorn from the floor with his mouth and paints with a stick attached to a helmet. He tells how bad he felt when one teacher told him he would never paint, and later, his delight at hearing people say, "How the hell can he paint like this?"

 Fighting spirit

 He also explains the film's title: King Gimp was the name neighbors gave him as a child because his house was on the top of a hill and he liked to roll down it in his wheelchair. A fighting spirit, he calls himself.

 The filmmakers couldn't have known how successful Keplinger would be or how their own lives would be affected. Hadary and Whiteford would visit or speak with him five times without a camera for every time they came with one.

 

Screenings  "King Gimp" will be shown at the Charles Theatre during the Maryland Film Festival April 28-29 and will air on HBO June 5.

"Susan in some ways is kind of like a mother," Keplinger writes in an e-mail. "She tells me to go to the doctor when I'm feeling ill. When it comes to big stuff, Susan and Bill take action whenever I ask them. There were many times during the college years when I would call and we would all go out to lunch to talk about a problem. They didn't interfere in my life, just when I needed them. Sometimes it is hard for me to do some things for myself or explain my feelings to some people. So Susan would do that for me and then let me know what the next steps were that needed to be taken."

 One issue Hadary helped resolve was a sculpture requirement for graduation. The film shows Keplinger designing a sculpture on a computer and watching a friend assemble it.

 "We are not objective filmmakers. How could we be after [all those] years?" asks Whiteford.

 The producers also struggled with how to let Keplinger tell his story on camera. Subtitles could work, but he spoke too slowly. Having someone his age read was too easy; the human voice didn't reflect his frustration or that experienced by family and friends when they tried to communicate. Ultimately they used a mix of subtitled interviews with Keplinger and conversations with others who worked with him -- his mother, his tutor friend and Stuart Stein, an art professor at Towson University.

 While they filmed Keplinger and the others, Hadary and Whiteford worked feverishly on their bread and butter -- tons of training films and public relations work for health care workers. In the past 15 years, the mailing list for their titles grew to 80,000 people.

 "Their gift lies in the way in which they approach a story," says Ann Engleman, former chief of programming for Maryland Public Television who first aired their films on the children. "Bill's cinematic eye is fabulous, and Susan has the gift of allowing people to feel comfortable with them. They become family," says Engleman, now a consultant to Wisconsin Public Television. "They get stuff on film you just don't see."

 The lasting relationships they have with their subjects also are unusual, she says. "Nobody else would stick with it."

 Whiteford and Hadary say their way of work evolved, like their films, without a vision or strategy. Hadary was hired initially by Whiteford to win grants and speak for him while he shot film. Both loved to tell stories, and in the 20-plus years since, they developed as a creative team. "No skill is duplicated between us," says Hadary.

 Ultimately their films have the same theme. "They are a celebration of the human spirit," says Whiteford. In "King Gimp," Keplinger's resilience is not the only thing to celebrate. There is also the relationship he has with those who took him under their wing, including Stein, the art professor, shown trying on Keplinger's helmet to understand how he maneuvers a brush.

 "At first, his physical presence and his outward appearance can be intimidating," says Stein, "but anyone who gets to know Danny gets to know remarkable stuff."

 Keplinger sobbed when Hadary and Whiteford showed him the unedited version of their film. Neither was there a dry eye at a Towson University screening last week. The university has since offered Keplinger a scholarship to continue studying painting.

 HBO is framing 14 of his paintings and expects them to be shown in a New York art gallery. Hadary is working on a Baltimore showing. She has also placed his manuscript with an agent.

 "We are not out of his life yet," Hadary says.

 Trip to L.A.

 Keplinger and his mother will accompany the producers to L.A., where he will address an international group of filmmakers. He says he chokes up every time he sees the film.

 "The parts that get to me most are when I talk about my friend Pete, who died the first year we were making the program, and when I see myself at graduation. I think it is a great documentary because people will finally get a chance to get a glimpse of me, the person beneath the disability," Keplinger explains.

 For a few days more, Hadary and Whiteford can savor the attention on the last in a major body of work. "It may not be the last great piece, but it is the last video child," Whiteford says.

 Two of their films, including one from the 1986 series on children, have made it to the Academy's annual screenings of the 10 best documentaries. "King Gimp" is the first to be nominated for an Oscar.

 They can't help but laugh at the attention they are getting and how they give into it.

 "Oscar madness is consuming," Whiteford says. "It's the dream you have in film school."

 They expect to remain calm at least up until about four categories before theirs.

 "You sit in that room, and you tell yourself, 'I can handle it if I don't win,' " Hadary says. "You tell yourself what's important. Then, you sit in that audience and you're infected with a disease and you say, 'I've got to have it.' "

Originally published on Mar 22 2000