It all started with a pair of jeans.
Nine years ago, when Mindy Scheier's son Oliver was eight, he wanted to wear jeans, as his classmates did. But having muscular dystrophy thwarted that simple desire: he couldn't fit jeans over his leg braces, nor did he have the fine motor skills to fasten and unfasten them.
So Scheier, a fashion designer, modified a pair, ripping out seams and using Velcro.
"It was overwhelming to witness how a pair of jeans changed Oliver's feelings about himself," she recalls. "It was the first time he had ever been able to independently dress himself with something that [originally] had buttons and zippers. I saw a change in his confidence: he went to school with his head held a little higher that day."
The moment was life-changing for Scheier as well. In 2014 she launched the nonprofit Runway of Dreams Foundation, which collaborates with fashion brands to produce adaptive clothing for people with disabilities; it also offers design and fashion programs for disability awareness and inclusion. In 2019 she established GAMUT Management, a consulting and talent management agency that represents more than 800 people with disabilities for television, film, modeling and other endeavors.
"We'll get specific requests — for somebody of Asian descent who is in a wheelchair, between the ages of twenty and thirty — but, I'm excited to say, we have broadened to casting calls where the character may or may not have a disability; it's not pertinent to the role," Scheier says.
GAMUT team members meet in person or via Zoom with reps from major companies such as Paramount and Netflix, as well as with agents and casting directors. The agency also offers training webinars.
"We want to help [industry members] understand the nuances and the language of working with people with disabilities," Scheier says. "They learn how to speak to people with disabilities, how to write the best casting call, so that somebody with a disability would feel included if they read it." (Hint: don't use the word tragic.)
The company provides productions an accessibility contract tailored to each shoot, stipulating, for instance, that a wheelchair user must have a ramp rather than be lifted onto an elevated set. Understanding needs in advance makes work more comfortable for everyone, Scheier notes.
"People want to learn; they want to do better," she says. "GAMUT was built to help the industry feel more supported in having talent with disabilities, having more accessible sites and productions and being truly inclusive."
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #11, 2022, under the title, "Running the Gamut."
