Seth Gordon is an American film director who started off as a cameraman for the documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut up and Sing. As well as The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters being his directorial debut, it was accepted at the Sundance Film festival. He has also directed Four Christmases, Freakonomics and Horrible Bosses. On top of this, he has directed a variety of music videos and commercials, as well as two episodes of the American Office, and an episode each of Modern Family and Community. Overall, Gordon has worked with a variety of different media forms, granting him experience for directing all types of formats be it music video, fictional movies, or in this case, documentary.
The King Kong arcade game champion Steve Wiebe often makes a cameo in Gordon’s other film works, such as with Horrible Bosses and Four Christmases.
Reason for Selection
The reason I have selected this documentary is that I wished to analyse three documentaries that were at completely opposite points of the film spectrum. Firstly I analysed Inside Job, a serious documentary which revolved around a world event in the form of an economic crash. Secondly, I analysed Planet Earth, a less serious, albeit equally thought-provoking documentary. This brings me to King of Kong; I have selected this documentary because it is extremely light-hearted, easy to watch and differs to the other documentaries I have analysed.
Textual Analysis
The poster for this documentary is bright and attractive, combining varying shades of only three colours, blue, orange and white. The posters layout and design is reminiscent to the retro, vintage-styled posters that are now popular among youth culture. The poster is double-bordered by a simple orange then blue line, and is decorated in ribbons not unlike how a carnival/show poster would be. There are thin blue lines spanning the length from the edge of the border, centralising in the middle of the poster where the referee, Walter Day, is illustrated in a circle, which is most likely done as a reference to coins used to play the game; there are clear video gaming connotations observable on this poster. Above the referee, the two main people in the documentary (Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell) are encompassed by circles also, the colours used on each person is reversed on the other (i.e. one’s skin & hair is blue, the other’s is orange) to symbolise their rivalry. Below a ribbon summarising the plot of the documentary lies its tagline, “Don’t get chumpatized”; the line is centred around a word which was popular in the 70’s - “chump”, and has been adapted, however after doing some research I discovered that although Gordon claims he composed the line, it was around for a while before that. The font used for the title of the film is very childlike; the bubble-writing is reminiscent of the actual King Kong font used on the game’s menu screen.
Reception
The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews from various big-name movie review websites such as Rottentomatoes.com who reported 97% positive reviews, and Metacritic where it had an average score of 83/100. Robert Wilonsky of Village Voice went as far to call it a “miniature masterpiece”, stating it was his “favourite movie of the year” in 2007; the film also made an appearance on several critics’ top ten lists of the best films of 2007, earning a position in Variety, Empire, The A.V. Club, The Oregonian and San Francisco Chronicle. Richard Roeper quite rightly stated that the film deserves an “Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary”, and indeed it got one, although it came second-best to Sicko. However, it did win four of the other six awards it was nominated for, all for Best Documentary Feature.
The documentary received a rating of 8.2 on imdb.com from an average of over 17,500 votes, and has been slowly rising in popularity over the last couple of weeks, as of October 2011.
The YouTube video of the documentary’s trailer currently boasts over 250,000 views, and the movie grossed over $50,000 on its opening weekend across five screens in America, which isn’t bad for a low-budget film. The documentary also played in many independent cinemas across the UK.
Audience
The age rating for this film is PG-13; therefore the younger half of this documentary’s general demographic of this film which would be males under the age of 21 can enjoy it as well. Although males under 21 are the films general demographic, the documentary was made in 2007, meaning that the generation which would play this game in arcades in the 1970s would now be middle-aged, possibly working/middle class; meaning that both genders around the 50 age mark would also be interested in this film, due to the nostalgia factor. As well as these audiences, people who enjoy gaming in general would also be attracted to this film; as gaming is now much more accessible in homes across America (where this film debuted) the audience for this film is quite broad and reaches out to a number of people.
Genre/Form
Albeit not a conventional one, this documentary is rightly sub-categorised as a sports documentary, coming 4th in a popular movie website’s top ten list of sport documentaries (http://uk.movies.ign.com/articles/117/1171820p2.html). It contains the codes and conventions of “usual” sport documentaries: interviews with game officials, footage of the sport being played, the competitive factor etc.
Plot/Narrative
The documentary revolves around the task of achieving the global high-score of classic arcade game Donkey Kong; the record was held by Billy Mitchell for nearly 25 years since the early 1982, when he achieved the record during a photo-shoot held by LIFE magazine in front of some of the world’s top gamers. However when underdog Steve Wiebe (a teacher from Washington D.C, who started playing during a spell of unemployment) approaches the scene, Mitchell’s score is bested by Wiebe’s once-thought-impossible 7 digit score of 1,000,000 points. During the following months, the two contenders engaged in a cross-country duel throughout the year of 2007 to see whose name would become immortalised in the Guinness Book of World Records (2007).
Textual Analysis
The film opens to a montage of interviews with various video game players, Walter Day (video game referee) and Billy Mitchell himself to immerse the viewer into the subculture of retro arcade games. These shots are more snippets of interviews, carefully selecting short quotes from a variety of sources to allow for quick cutting, which synchronises well with the intervallic slow strumming of guitar strings.
In-between shots of the quick interviews which make up the opening credits, there are slow, low-key lighted, in and out pans of an in-focus arcade game element such as a joystick in the screenshot below, which are anchored by the name of the producer, director, or in this case the title of the film as it fades out.
We are then shown archived footage of the 1982 LIFE magazine photo-shoot, where Billy Mitchell along with Steven Saunders (who claimed to have a bogus score of over 3 million, only to be crushed by Mitchell later on that day) and many other gamers had accumulated. During this archived footage, a shot transition is used where there is a cross fade between an old picture of one of the current interviewees, and them now in an interview. This shot transition is used several times when switching from a shot of archived footage to a shot of one of the players now.
The documentary also includes another important code and convention which is the use of graphics to display facts and figures, as evadible below in the form of a graph, the line of Billy’s score transcends upwards as fast, non-diagetic violin music is heard over a montage of game footage, archived footage and shots of Billy.
When the scene switches to describing Wiebe’s background, the camera switches to a close-up of Wiebe’s hands playing a piano. This diagetic music switches to non-diagetic however remains continuous and unbroken as the camera cuts to a slow pan out of Wiebe on Donkey Kong with his son. The lighting is low-key here too, however the music is much more innocent than it was with Mitchell, helping to portray Wiebe as the “good guy, family man”.
After this scene, for roughly 15-20 minutes there’s a lot of scenes revolving around the “dark side of the game”, with regards to cheating, unverified scores, underhanded manoeuvres, etc. This creates a very competitive atmosphere as we realise that this is an actual sport; however later on we receive a feel-good shot which contrasts to the last few scenes.
Bill Mitchell arrives at Doris Self’s house, an 80 year old woman contending for the world’s high-score on the arcade game Q-Bert. During this scene, the lighting is high-key which contrasts to the last couple of scenes, the dark music is replaced by Joe Espisito’s hit “You’re the Best Around” and Doris herself can’t stop smiling. This feel-good factor provides some relief and reminds the viewer that the element of fun is not lost.
Production and Influence
Although this is a largely factual documentary, both Walter Day of Twin Galaxies (video game referee) and director Seth Gordon claim that there are inconsistencies and inaccurate events in the film. In an online forum, Walter Day has made a post stating several points, a few of them being:
- In 2000, a new contender Tim Sczerby claimed to have beaten Mitchell’s score, however Wiebe’s score bested both of the other two’s, and Sczerby’s score was impossible to verify and therefore did not demand inclusion in the film.
- Wiebe actually held the high-score for almost 3 years, and when his video-recorded score of 1,060,000 points was rejected, the record actually reverted to Wiebe’s previous score in 2003.
Gordon also claims to have portrayed Billy Mitchell to be a much lighter character than his real life persona, saying that he’s “so much worse than we painted him out to be” but Gordon omitted these scenes as the documentary would have been much darker than intended, therefore justifying his toying with the facts concerning the course of events.
Gordon also claims that instead of the rumoured fictional remake, there is a possibility of there being a sequel depicting how the original changed the men’s lives.
In the My Name Is Earl episode, "My Name is Alias", a tribal person references the movie by saying "Hey, there's about to be a Donkey Kong kill screen in the game tent... if you're interested”, the same line which Brian Kuh says as Wiebe is playing.
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