The Hollywood Shorties

THE HOLLYWOOD SHORTIES is a documentary on the birth of organized sports in the American dwarf community. Dating back to the 1950s, the Hollywood Shorties were a basketball team formed from an insular group of recognizable-but-typecast actors. What began as a rare outlet for these little people to gather publicly, by the early 80s saw the Shorties enjoying a niche in entertainment akin to the Harlem Globetrotters. Simultaneously, they found themselves the vanguard of a revolution to represent little people as something other than objects of curiosity. But, in a bittersweet turn, the very popularity that the Shorties singlehandedly created would phase the team out of the sport they pioneered. (South by Southwest Film Festival)