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'Handicapped?' is a short independent film by Lane Fournerat. In this short our main character, played by Blaine Peltier, Jim, is considered "handicapped", and his handicap is the fact that he is a TV on a rolling A/V cart. When his friends Tom and Steve ask him to come over and hang out is where we find out that Tom, played by Daniel Ballard, is not too fond of Jim. Steve, Ricky Briggs, gets them to settle down and just 'watch some TV'.

This project began its conceptual stages as three short films. One was the idea of a "handicapped" person whose handicap is the fact that he is a television. In this concept the three characters would be watching TV, then there would be a flashback of the guys doing ridiculous things that couldn't be done by a Handicapped TV, I.e. swimming, playing cards, wrestling, etc. Then when we come back from the flashback, the two non-handicapped guys would be playing Nintendo on the TV character and their dialogue was "Whatever happened to Jim?" "Hmm... I don't know... that's a good question... Ohh well.

The second concept was the idea of integrating the look and feel of an old age film, but introducing technological aspects with the "Charlie Chaplin-esque" look. One idea for one of the scenes was someone climbing up and latter and instead of someone poking their rear with a pitchfork, someone would open a laptop and make the beeper on their pants explode.

Finally the last concept was Night Recycler. Peter, Night Recycler's sidekick, would use a program called "Scandar" to alert Night Recycler of where recycled goods were around town, and he would be there to recycle them.

I was on a trip with my dad when one night I was thinking about all of these concepts, and I took out a hotel notepad and began to form a premature outline for what Handicapped? became. For about a year or two, while finishing up in college, I expanded on the stories and the characters and the situations that each are involved in. Then right after college I began to piece together the set of the old age bar scene and I began shooting mid-summer.

In this film I am playing with the audience's perspective of what exactly does that word "handicapped" mean to him/her. In this case, handicapped means a head on a rolling teacher's cart projected through a TV. Later as I developed the script, I focused on a lot of social aspects, especially in the flashback scene with Tom and another television. In this section you might ask yourself how television, and screens in general, are raping the mind of people, and at the end you might ask the question "or are we raping the mind of ourselves?"

You can find out more about this short film and all of Lane Fournerat's other short films at www.handicappedthemovie.com.

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