Susan Hannah Hadary and William A. Whiteford pick up their Oscars for "King Gimp." (AP)

Somewhere in the midst of last week's four-hour bore-athon known as the Academy Awards, right when they whipped out the envelope for best short documentary and intoned, "and the Oscar goes to . . . ," time erupted.  

In the long stretch of time that the camera homed in on Dan Keplinger's one-man celebration, those at home and those in the audience watched--and squirmed. 

As a man who spent a life struggling to control his body got happy. 

Real happy. 

Those who don't know him saw a man fall out of his wheelchair and land on the floor. 

Those who know him saw a man "explode with joy." 

Still, even if Keplinger could contain his glee at his documentary winning an Academy Award, well, he wouldn't. Winning is sweet. Why keep it under wraps, deny its delight? 

And so last Sunday, Keplinger did what he always does when jubilation grabs him: 

He threw open his arms, and he flew. 

"It was cool to people who knew me," the 27-year-old artist said. "Other people thought I was having a seizure. But I was just doing my victory dance." 

So the Towson native did his thing, dancing on the floor even as well-meaning security guards rushed to his aid. Then he sat back in his wheelchair and watched as Susan Hadary and Bill Whiteford, the filmmakers who'd followed his life for 13 years, collected their Oscar for "King Gimp." 

"When they read the names, it was this emotional explosion," Whiteford said later. "Susan and I were exploding with joy. And Dan's exploding right out of his wheelchair. It was intense." 

"In retrospect, I wish we'd gotten up there and said, 'Dan's okay. He's just celebrating with us.' " 

"King Gimp," which traces Keplinger's life from 12 to 25 and is edited from 100 hours of video and 80 pages of his own writing, opens with a declaration from Keplinger: 

"Most people think gimp means someone with a lame walk. But gimp also means fighting spirit." 

Look it up. 

The camera witnesses him zipping along in his wheelchair, stopping it with his feet as he's confronted with a glass door. The door doesn't budge. He pries it open. Later, in his tiny, one-bedroom apartment, Keplinger wrestles with his body, willing it to do his bidding as he feeds and dresses himself. Once dressed, he stares down the camera and spits out his assessment: "Another day of crap." 

Hadary and Whiteford, filmmakers whose production company, Video Press, is affiliated with the University of Maryland School of Medicine, first met Keplinger when they were working on a documentary about children with disabilities, "Introducing Six Kids: Beginning With Bong." Keplinger, who has cerebral palsy, was one of the six. Later, Hadary and Whiteford decided to take his story and expand it. 

In the end, they spent 13 years making this 39-minute film, which will air on HBO on June 5. 

Over the years they kept the camera rolling, watching Keplinger as he grew into a man. And somewhere along the way, as is wont to happen when documentarians share so much time with their subjects, the storytellers became part of the story. 

Says Whiteford: "You develop these relationships. If we get involved and it's a good outcome--so what? We might help the story along, just like a good friend." 

And, as friends do, they helped Dan apply to college, making him meals, intervening when he had trouble at school, becoming part of his pain and his joy. Loved him. 

"Dan is a rebel, he's a risk-taker, he's a person," Hadary says. "He's pretty outrageous. I don't know what he'd be doing with his life if he didn't have this disability, but I'm pretty sure he'd be riding a Harley." 

Cerebral palsy has always shaped Keplinger's life. His 18-year-old mother had a hard time giving birth to him; Keplinger had an even harder time breathing once he finally made it into the world. At 10 months old, when he still hadn't learned to sit up or crawl, his mother took him to the doctor. The news wasn't good. 

His dad couldn't deal with it; he wanted the boy institutionalized. When Dan was 6, he split. 

But his mother was made of stronger stuff. A sweet-faced woman with deep spiritual reserves, she was the kind of person who would put plastic bags on his feet and take him out to play in the snow. 

Keplinger never got "better," but then he never got "worse," either. Along the way, spurred on by the support of his mother, a consultant for Mary Kay Cosmetics, Keplinger learned to live. Vigorously. 

He didn't want to spend his life in a special school, so he didn't. He wanted to live on his own, so he did. He wanted so many things: To dance at his prom. To ski. To be an artist. To feel love. So he did them. 

And yet there are some things Keplinger can't control. 

His particular brand of cerebral palsy, athetosis, wreaked havoc on his muscular control while leaving his mental facilities in excellent working order. As a result, his condition makes it difficult for him to sit still for long. The athetosis frequently flings his head, arms and legs about in spasms of involuntary movement, making walking impossible and talking an exercise in frustration. His mother, Lynda Ritter, usually translates for strangers as Keplinger speaks in simple sentences, choking out each word. Getting out even a few words requires what seems like minutes of intense effort. 

Originally, this caused problems in the filmmaking process. Hadary and Whiteford thought of having an actor narrate for Keplinger. At first Keplinger thought this was a great idea. Why not get Al Pacino? Or maybe Kevin Bacon. Then, according to Whiteford and Hadary, the execs at HBO wanted Keplinger to speak through a computer-assisted device. But by that time Keplinger announced he wanted to speak for himself. 

He got his wish. 

Throughout the film, Keplinger either speaks directly to the camera, with subtitles translating his guttural speech, or he communicates by typing on a computer, slowly pecking out the letters that appear on the screen by using a stick attached to special headgear. 

"If I could change one thing about my disability, it would be the way I speak," he writes. "When the world cannot understand my words, I'm assumed to be deaf or retarded. People think I don't have any thoughts or emotions. It's a frustration that never goes away. My thoughts race to my mind, slowed to a near standstill when I begin to talk. Maybe I am brilliant. For sure I am an oxymoron." 

Inside his head, there is poetry. 

Usually, it flows out from his brush and onto the canvas, taking shape in darkly vivid paintings that range from self-portraits to landscapes to depictions of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. For the documentary, which he wrote over two summers, his thoughts poured out onto the keyboard. 

"When I paint, there is a sweet siren voice telling me where the brush will move," he writes in the documentary. ". . . I obeyed the brush. . . . The brush became a force." 

He discovered art at Parkville High School in Towson, learning to paint with his brush attached to his headgear. In 1993 he graduated from high school determined to both live on his own and major in art at Towson University. 

At first, school was tough. Keplinger was the first in his family to attend college, and he seriously feared that he'd be the first to flunk out. It didn't help when an "evil" art professor told Keplinger that he would never be an artist. 

Keplinger's reaction: "[Expletive] this [expletive]!" 

It's a statement that he makes frequently when the going gets tough. It does not come out as an admission of defeat; rather, it sounds like a marshaling of inner forces. 

Oscars are actually quite heavy. 

At Video Press, the Baltimore office where Hadary and White do business, there are two of them, standing side by side on the glass coffee table. And everyone wants to hold them. Even the UPS guy. 

For 20 years, the business partners have worked together, doing institutional films for the University of Maryland School of Medicine and, on the side, producing their own work. They like getting sucked into their work; because of that they're partial to documentaries that follow the lives of ordinary people facing challenging situations: a death in the family, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia. A glass case contains the results of their efforts: A CableAce Award for "Bong and Donnell"; six regional Emmys and 10 Golden Eagle awards from CINE, a group that recognizes excellence in documentary, instructional and short feature films. 

But this latest win takes their career into a whole new realm. 

Says Hadary: "We're not outcasts, but we're not industry insiders, either." 

That will change, this they know. 

But for this minute, they're kicking back and basking in the thrill of it all. 

"We got flowers, we got cake, we got Oscars," Whiteford cackles. 

In a way, Whiteford, Hadary and Keplinger are all outsiders. But for Keplinger, it is ever so much more acute. Being patronized is a regular occurrence. It is one of the greatest frustrations of living outside the lines. People want to put you on a pedestal. Or they want to diminish you. 

His condition has brought people into his life at the same time that it has kept others away. At the Vanity Fair party in Los Angeles following the Academy Awards, one Oscar winner snubbed him. On the other hand, there was Kevin Spacey, who grabbed his Oscar and made it do a little Oscar dance on Keplinger's lap. 

One professor dismissed his ambitions; another, Stewart Stein, was instrumental in helping Keplinger develop his talent. Later this year, a New York art gallery will showcase his work. 

In high school, at first, he had no social life. He ate with a teacher's aide in a storeroom closet. Slowly that changed. Friends meandered into his life. Some came to party--he loves hanging out listening to local rock groups like the Kelly Bell "phat blues" band--others introduced him to the joys of skiing. The introduction created an obsession. 

As he writes: "Yes, I ski. Taped into a bucket-like chair, tethered to another skier, I throw my weight side to side, shouting inside my head, 'Yes, it's me skiing.' It's organic, I feel at one with the hill. It's mother nature's drug, total rush, going down as fast as I can, trying to catch the bitching air. I'm hard core, skiing in any condition, even in bitter cold. . . . Leaning into my turns with a grace and a speed I have never known. . . . I am the hill, I am moving, free of the world, an object projecting through space. I call myself mountain dog." 

Scene from the film: Senior prom. Mountain dog becomes a dancer, sitting on the floor bouncing about with his date while the sounds of Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" rock the air. The camera slows down his movements as these words appear on the screen: "What is love? I've loved a few women, always dreaming about them, but it never leads anywhere." 

"Dan needs a girlfriend," Hadary says. "Put that down." 

So far, none has surfaced. Instead, he has female friends who lavish him with affection and (according to his mother) compete jealously for his attention. But no lovers. 

No sex. 

"Because they only want to be friends. My female friends can have their men, but I can't have any women," he says. 

"Most people think I am not a sexual being." 

He says this, stops, and stares off with all the frustration of a young, otherwise healthy 27-year-old man with normal, otherwise healthy desires that for now can't be satisfied. 

He fears it will always be this way. 

He fears he'll be an old man seeking solace in porno videos. 

He fears he'll be forgotten. 

He is quite open about all this. 

And yet he's not easy to forget. Inside the lobby of the Virginia Towers, the apartment complex in Towson where he lives, a huge computer printout reads, "Congratulations, Danny!" 

Upstairs, Keplinger entreats visitors, "Come in!," heartily swinging out his hand to be shook. His apartment, a dark, cramped space, is pretty much what you'd expect from a Gen X bachelor who just happens to be an artist. 

It's a mess. 

Paint-splattered rags and an unfinished canvas occupy one corner. On one shelf, empty wine bottles surround his bottle of Oscar champagne. The wooden cabinets and cupboards are covered with nicks from him bumping into them with his wheelchair. 

The tux is gone; in its place is a grubby tee given to him by his buddies from a local band. His dark hair is curly and tousled; a beard covers his handsome face. Not that he cares that much about what he looks like. Weekends are the best, he says, because he can paint all day, crash at night, and get back up to paint some more without having to bother with the drag of getting dressed. 

Of course, that could all change. Winning the Oscar has brought him a lot of attention. "20/20" has come calling. The phone rings and rings and rings. A steady barrage of friends drop by. His computer is flooded with e-mail. 

Naturally, he'd like to see the attention pay off. He'd like to be recognized for the artist that he is. Show his work every year. Sell a couple of paintings a month. Support himself. 

And yeah, he'd like you to check out his documentary. Watch it and weep. Not to pity him. But to feel. To recognize. 

"No dry eyes," he says. 

He rocks back his head. Looks up. And grins.