Searching for Treasure Island

by Mark Zimmer

Scott King is the writer/director/cinematographer of Treasure Island, a picture which defies easy description. Set in 1945, it concerns the efforts of two cryptographers at Treasure Island, a (recently defunct) naval base in the San Francisco Bay, to create a past for The Body, which will be used to deceive the Japanese as to America's intentions in the Pacific Theater. But it is also a darkly humorous examination of sexuality in the 1940s, as well as a slightly surreal take on human relationships. dOc spoke to the witty and articulate King recently about his film, and the state of independent motion pictures today.

dOc:: Why Treasure Island?

King: What do you mean? The location, or the title?

dOc:: The title.

King: The important thing to start with is that it's based on the book called The Man Who Never Was, which is an account of a true story, written by Owen Montagu. He wrote about this thing where they actually took this dead body in Great Britain, and they planted it in the ocean and created this personality for it. That sort of was my jumping-off point. I wanted to set it in America because I knew a lot more about the American psyche and their experience in the war, so I figured I couldn't call it that. Also I didn't want to get into trouble with the author or whoever owns it now. It's a good title, but the problem is it gives everything away. I wanted something more evocative, and it's certainly evocative to call a movie after something that's very famous, which would be the pirate story, Treasure Island, and yet it's not that at all.

dOc:: I noticed there weren't any pirates.

King: No, there were no pirates. But Treasure Island is a real place. It's kind of interesting, it's an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay that was created for the World's Fair and then turned into the naval base. The whole idea of this artificial [landfill] island, that was just sort of made for the war, was also part of it, and the fact that it would be called Treasure Island, which always fascinated me. It's kind of funny, because certainly people in San Francisco or in the Bay Area, never confuse it with the Robert Lewis Stevenson version, but of course everyone else does because you're not used to hearing Treasure Island, or "I went across the bridge and stopped at Treasure Island," and things like that. So it was for me natural to call it that and everyone else got a little bit off. But it's also fun because the movie is obviously about trying to make people think things, or rethink things, and the thing that it does is make people think, "O! Another pirate movie?" and then you hear what it's about, you would think, "Well, why would they call it Treasure Island?" Already you're sort of taking the journey, to wonder what it's all about. So, it's for all those reasons.

dOc:: The movie's really chuck full of historical detail. What got you going to completely recreate the 1940s?

King: Yeah. Well, there are a bunch of reasons. The biggest is I'm always frustrated by period films because they don't do a very good job. When you watch them, you're kind of angry because you know that tie isn't from that era, or why would he have that kind of phone or teletype, and those kind of things. They always took me out of the story. I thought, if I was making a movie that was so explicit and showed a 1940s that in a way had never been seen before, it had to seem really real. The physical aspects of it had to make it seem very authentic in order to make it more believable because it was such a jarring difference between the realistic style and the dialogue and what was going on. All those things were very important to me. And it's a challenge to recreate the look of it, when movies that spend millions and millions of dollars trying to do it, fail. All you really need is ingenuity and desire, and we certainly had all that when we were making the movie. Whenever you have an artificial moment when something seems phony or out of place—at least in the set and that kind of stuff—for me it always takes me out of the movie. I wanted people, because there were so many other things that would be taking them out, to have one thing that grounds them in the reality of the era, as it were.

dOc:: Yes, the take on 1940s sexuality was pretty interesting. We always think of that as a repressed time, but it seems, in your movie, as if there were really more possibilities than there are now.

King: Well, that's also true. That's not just me having fun, which is part of it. Part of it is like after seeing this movie, when you see other old black & white movies and you say, "I wonder what they're doing after the fadeout." But the truth is, during World War II, it was this big psychological upheaval for everyone, and everything was up for grabs. Women were working and everyone had these identity crises, and no one knew who they were because everything had shifted to create this war. All of the stuff I came up with is pretty minor in comparison to what I've read about. A lot of it comes from Krafft-Ebbing and Psychopathia Sexualis. The stuff in there is just nuts; it's way beyond what I could even try to come up with. It's just one of those things you wouldn't do because it's too implausible. So, in a way, I toned it down a little bit. It's true of everything—if something is so repressed, it makes it more extreme. When everything's out in the open, it's not as fun any more, so you don't go as far. That, to me, is accurate, certainly in San Francisco. San Francisco was famous throughout the country as where you would go if you were interested in hedonism, moreso than Los Angeles. And of course if you look at Hollywood in the 1920s, nothing really compares to that; that was a pretty radical time for anything. You had all these people with all this money and no restraints. The stuff you hear about from the 1920s makes today look very pale by comparison. In the 18th century, too, there was a lot of that. It comes in hundred year cycles, they say, so I'm sure that'll change. It's pretty accurate as far as I know.

dOc:: You mention in the commentary that you were determined to get an X rating for the film.

King: Yes, I absolutely was. I could have. The great thing about the X rating, I found out, is—it's free. It's one of these weird loopholes, that when they created the ratings system in the 1970s, they didn't charge anything for the X, so you could literally take whatever movie you had and rate it X because the MPAA doesn't own the trademark. So if you just had bunnies playing in a field, it could be rated X. I wanted to take the film farther, but I couldn't. There were certain other reasons that I didn't want to do it, but it turns out that even as though it's what I think of as very restrained, it is still technically an X-rated movie. It cannot show even on cable. It's been turned down by all those progressive, independent film channel places, not necessarily because they don't like it—although maybe they are saying that—but because they can't show it for a variety of reasons. There are all kinds of rules about how many seconds you can show a penis, and interesting rules about what pushes you past NC-17.

dOc:: So was it ever actually submitted to the MPAA?

King: Oh, no. It costs like $10,000.00 and then it would come back with them saying, "Well, we can't give it a rating. Here's your bill for $10,000.00." It wasn't really worth it for us to do that. We did talk about it, but we were told it was just a waste of time. But it's fun. To be honest, the reason I wanted it to be a rated-X movie was that movies just don't do that. Sex is an area that really needs to be explored more and it isn't because you can either make it soft and fuzzy for an R-rated movie, or you can make it hard-core pornography, but you can't do stuff that is about sexuality, that makes you think about it. That's what I really wanted to do. If you have an X-rated art movie, it's something different. It gets your attention.

dOc:: Sort of like Midnight Cowboy was thirty years ago.

King: Exactly. It's hard to believe. You can imagine how shocked people were when it won the Academy Award®. Now it has been re-released, re-rated R. But even then, in the 1970s, which was certainly a great period for making movies, there were movies like that where they would explore these ideas, and I don't think people are willing to do that any more.

dOc:: One of the things that makes the film re-watchable is that there's so much great imagery, right from the beginning, with that incredibly cool logo for King Pictures.

King: Yeah, we've had that for a while. It's actually been in a couple movies, believe it or not. I wanted to make a model, and we did. Olympia, which is a movie I was executive producer for three or four years ago, is now playing on the Sundance Channel, so you can see it there. It was actually meant to do that, to be the logo, and it just turned out that for this movie it fit, moreso than the other ones.

dOc:: Another one that I really like is the overhead map shot where they're kicking the blocks around. Was that in the script?

King: Oh yeah. Everything was in the script. It was a very strange experience for everybody because we didn't change a line of dialogue and all the shots were how I imagined them, within reason of what my budget would have been. I couldn't do any wild crane shots, but I didn't want to.

dOc:: I suppose it helps to be your own cinematographer.

King: It does. I think it's a good idea. I think everyone should just combine jobs. When you're on a movie set, at least here in Los Angeles, there are usually from fifty to two hundred people. You really don't need that many people to make a movie. It saves time. You don't have to ask the cinematographer, "Is this possible?" You know already. It speeds things up.

dOc:: Was this your first cinematography work?

King: Other than short films and that sort of thing, it was. In all fairness, you do depend on a pretty big crew. We had twenty people, which for me is huge. If you make a mistake—and I guess I could have in the beginning—they'll say, "You need to put some light here" or "This shot won't work because of this." So that's going to help you a great deal. There are too many people working there for you to make too many mistakes. Hopefully I didn't do too badly.

dOc:: A lot of the imagery is also disturbing.

King: Oh, good!

dOc:: I know you really wanted to outrage people with this movie.

King: Well, that's true. I think "provoke" would be a better word.

dOc:: One of the ones I found most disturbing is when The Body is swinging on the camera, and his face is going in and out of shadow.

King: I'm glad you liked that. Good.

dOc:: It's pretty unsettling, even moreso than the sex in the church scene.

King: That's always a classic. We get a lot of walkouts there. I wanted to get across the idea that you're seeing his unconscious unravel, and in a way I wanted the audience's unconscious to unravel, by him actually grabbing the camera and continually switching what camera you were grabbing, so that's where that came from.

dOc:: The reveal of Anna in the closet, I know was supposed to show her skin disease, but certainly on first viewing it looked to me like she had been abused, which I guess was even more disturbing.

King: That was unfortunate, in a way. I think I mentioned in the commentary that that's my biggest regret. It changed the whole film in a way, because originally, if you get the strong impression that she has this disease, then even though it's gross, Frank having this love affair with her makes him oddly sympathetic because he's seeing past the disease. I wanted him to be more sympathetic at first, and it just didn't play that way. That's why we re-ordered the film. Originally, the structure—which I don't really talk about in the commentary—was that the first half of the movie is just Frank's story. You're setting it up that you're watching a movie about him, and there's this one protagonist, and then it suddenly switches to Samuel, and Frank disappears into the periphery. I wanted to have another thing like that, where you're expecting one kind of movie and you get another. You believe that Samuel is this oafish character, and he gradually becomes more sympathetic and Frank actually becomes more heinous.

In Hollywood there's this thing called a "character arc", where you have a character that starts out one way and then slowly changes to be a good person, or something like that, and I always thought that was pretty bogus. What I wanted was a perception arc. When you meet people, they generally don't change that much, but your perception of them does as you see them in different environments. The idea was, to start out, you perceive Frank as a sympathetic character and he becomes less and less so, and Samuel appears to be this idiot, and gradually becomes more sympathetic, and they switch places in that way. It sort of works that way, but not in the way it was originally structured, so it definitely did change quite a bit while we were doing the editing. To get back to the original question, in a way it's because of that one scene, because it changes how you see Frank. So there you go, that's the long answer.

dOc:: The image towards the end of The Body clutching the bomb, and then smiling and turning his head and hugging it, that was just wild.

King: That actually was not in the script. That was something we just did come up with that day. It was kind of funny. It seemed appropriate that he was happy about his fate. Unfortunately, a lot of the movie is thought out, where you figure, "I want to say this; I want to talk about these things." But a lot of it also comes from that part of your brain that you don't understand. And that's definitely one of those moments. When they're talking and both sharing this madness—this idea that if they cover up his face with a rag no one will see him—that, to me, is where when you're writing and you have a glimpse into another kind of thinking. It's really rare, and it just pops into your head. That's what I mean, when you're unconsciously motivated and you don't really have any reason for it. You just say, "Okay, let's put that one out there, that's kind of cool." Some of the stuff is planned, where you want to make a point and some of it comes from those darker places you don't really know about. That's definitely one of those moments.

dOc:: All the way through, Jonah Blechman as The Body does a superlative job. He's like a kaleidoscope.

King: He's really great.

dOc:: How did you come across him, and how do you sell an actor on a part that doesn't have any lines?

King: Well, it has some lines. It's not too many. In a way, how can you not sell an actor on that part, because you get to play six different roles. Even though you're not one of the main characters, you have an opportunity to really play around, more than anyone else does. In a way, that's the easiest part to cast from the actor's point of view. It's the most fun, even though it's not the most lines. It's the most characters and the most playful. Actors like that. It was very difficult casting this, especially here. There's a difference between film acting and theatre acting and we were relying more on theatre acting. So we had to cast that way. Also, the more established people who had been in movies and who had name recognition were certainly not willing to do it because of the content and the subject matter. At the same time, the people who were more into the acting part were really excited because what actors like more than anything is a challenge, and there are a lot of challenges in this. Almost more than a lot of movies, you're much more dependent on the actor for the meaning. The dialogue itself, even though I knew all of its subtexts and what was happening, you're totally relying on the actor to put across what it means. If they fail, then the dialogue fails, because it's not explicit. It's not telling you everything you need to know. As far as I know, there isn't a single line of dialogue where the character is actually saying what they're thinking. There's always going to be some level of subtext. Certainly what the actors told me was that they were excited by that, and that was the greatest fun for them. In a way, they really are the stars because without them it all falls apart.

dOc:: Another instance of that sort of subtext that I really loved was the scene where Samuel is dictating and Frank is typing something that's sometimes the same but sometimes completely different, weaving in and out. How long did it take you to write that?

King: Not that long, actually. It's funny, but the movie only took four weeks to write. I spent five years doing the research, so it's not really fair to say that. The actual writing process was very short, but getting all the notes and the structure.... I'm writing a film right now, and I take about a novel's size of notes, about 100,000 words, and then from there I distill it and then just crank it all out. Once the structure's in place and all the scenes and you know what everyone's going to do, you don't want to think too much. You just want to see what the characters are going to say.

dOc:: You just sort of let it happen?

King: Yeah. I was talking with someone about this the other day. There are two kinds of writing. One is where you have it plotted out and you know what the characters have to do and you make them do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. The other way is like Elmore Leonard, who gets this really well. You create these interesting characters and these interesting situations, and then you step back. You already know what the characters are going to do and how they're going to act. It doesn't really matter who wins or who loses or if the good guy gets away; you just want to see. This was definitely like that. Even though the plot is ostensible, I knew what the characters were like, I knew what the situation was, I knew what the capabilities of all the characters were, and I just found out what they did. To me, that's the most enjoyable kind of writing. That's another long answer to the question. As I said in the commentary, I did steal that idea from the Blue Man Group, which is one of my favorite things, where they have all these signs running at once. I wanted to see if people could comprehend two ideas at once, and they could, as it turned out.

dOc:: How did something like this get made? What were the chain of circumstances, because this isn't your typical first feature...?

King: No, no. I'd been putting money into movies for about seven years, and I'd had a little bit of success and a little bit of failure. I executive produced Star Maps, which we did make some money on, and another one called Shotgun Freeway, which you haven't heard of, but I also made some money on. I think I was just getting ready for.... When you're an investor in movies, what you're looking for is your money back. Movies don't really make money back. I think one percent of them do, at least on this level. So actually I've been very successful because half of my movies have made their money back. The reason I think I've been successful is that I always invest in movies that I really care about and I want to see. In this case, it was the same thing. I had been investing in all these movies and they just weren't going far enough. It didn't cost that much money, but it seemed that if I'm investing in artistic statements, I might as well invest in one where I'm doing it.

I wanted to push filmmaking as far as I thought I could, certainly with the amount of money, but also the things that I wanted to try. I found that a lot of people weren't interested in that. There's definitely a shift in attitude in independent film because of all the money that has been flowing in the last ten years. It's unfortunate, I think. Independent films twenty years ago were a lot more interesting and tried different things that people don't try any more. People now are thinking about what their future career is going to be and they're focusing less on what they're doing right now. It's very strange, but as executive producer I got to see a lot of scripts and short films and unfinished films, and it's really the only chance in your life that you're going to have that much creative control and that much freedom. If you go beyond $50,000 for a movie, someone is going to be looking over your shoulder. Yet with that freedom, people restrain themselves because they're afraid of what people might think, and that's unfortunate. I think that's the opportunity to go as far as you can go, and a lot of people weren't willing to do that, and I guess I was. That's where I headed. I'm sort of out of the business.

Of course, this movie didn't make its money back, to say the least, so it's going to be hard for me to invest in any more movies, but it's also hard to find movies that are worth investing in. Not from a money point of view, because who knows what's going to make money, but from an artistic point of view, to find something you really believe in. I got to the point where I said, "Well, if I believe in it, why am I not doing it?" So that's the jumping-off point. How movies like this get made, I can't tell you, because the truth is the only way a movie like this would ever get made is because the person believed in it enough to do it.

There are movies, like Guy Maddin in Canada makes movies that are even more far out. I think they're great. There are plenty of people out there. It's very hard to make movies like this in America. I can say that. Virtually impossible to have it distributed. We ran into a lot of challenges there. I think American audiences are used to a certain kind of movie and that's fine. I guess there is an audience for it, but the way the marketing is structured now—John Waters was talking about this—there's no Midnight Movies any more; there's no alternative distribution. You either have a two million dollar advertising budget, or you can't put out a movie. It's sad. What David [Kalat] at All Day is trying to do is create the Midnight Movies in a way, doing it for DVD, which I think is a really good idea. Maybe that is the next step. I think there is an audience out there, because movies have become more conventional. When that happens, that certain audience that's waiting for them is wondering where they are. If that's true, maybe we can find a way to do it. That would be great. I wonder what would happen with someone like John Waters today, if there were no venue. I'm not comparing myself to that genius, believe me, but I'm curious about it because I see it with other filmmakers that I like and find interesting and wind up disappearing. It's kind of sad, because there are lots of people that want to see them, but the distributors are standing in the way because they have a certain idea of what the audience is expecting.

dOc:: I take it Waters is a sizeable influence on you.

King: Oh, yes. I didn't even realize myself how much. There was a lot more in the original version that was shock value. I'm glad now that we took it out, because people would have said, "Well, it's a John Waters movie." But you know what? If you're going to copy somebody.... People are copying Quentin Tarantino, and it's boring. Nobody is copying John Waters. Come on! Let's go!

dOc:: Who else is an influence?

King: Oh boy, everybody. To me, the biggest influence is bad movies. Bad movies always make a mistake. A really great example is Hudson Hawk. Movies like that, where conventionally they fail, because they don't fulfill the requirements that the genre expects of them. But if you see them in a different light, if you see them as art movies, they totally succeed, because they're insane. They're these crazy movies. Hudson Hawk is a great example; Mad Dog Time, there's a Dennis Rodman movie that's really good for that too. It's not because the filmmakers really want to make a statement, but it's because they made all these mistakes that created this very odd piece of art. It's fun, because you can steal from them and no one will know that you're stealing, even the people who made them. The central idea of the movie is that you can have a central image of one thing, and have someone narrating it and be different. I'm sure that happened when I was watching a movie going out of synch. When you have a movie with mistakes, those are a big influence. And besides that there are lots of filmmakers that I like. Certainly [Andrei] Tarkovsky, whom I'm a big fan of, and David Cronenberg, and all the surrealist filmmakers. People who don't care as much about trying to make a realistic film, yet want to have a film with a structure and a specific environment. They're not making an experimental willy-nilly mess, but they're not making something that fits into this realistic expectation. Those are the films I like the most.

dOc:: I thought there was more than a little of the feeling that I got watching Eraserhead.

King: Oh, good! Now that's another really good example of someone like that. Clearly David Lynch is not the sort of person who is going to say we have to get this character from point A to point B. He's much more interested in this suggestive, dreamlike environment. It's true, you have this medium that is so evocative and can express so much, and most people are only willing to tell a story and make a narrative movie. What has the capability of replicating dreams more than film does? Nothing, really. Books can't do it. One of the secrets is to create something that's familiar and strange, and obviously that's a linchpin of all those filmmakers' works. That's what you strive for. It's funny because it seems that that's what film is almost designed for. I think thrillers and action movies—I guess action movies are kind of fun because they have big explosions—but thrillers or romantic comedies seem more like books to me, or sitcoms. I don't mean that in any insulting way, because there are sitcoms that I really like. And there are a lot of TV shows that I really like. But films are limited. I think I'd like to see more people try surrealism, because I think it's a perfect fit for the film medium.

dOc:: A lot of the mood in Treasure Island is helped along by Chris Anderson's score; I thought the isolated score on the DVD was a very nice touch.

King: Oh, yes. It's a very good score.

dOc:: Did you just turn it over to him and let him run with it?

King: Pretty much, actually, to be totally honest with you. We have the same tastes. I have enough of a musical background that I made a couple of tweaks, I think two really big ones, but mostly I just said, "Here's how we're supposed to be feeling now." I'm certainly not taking credit for this, but it's also the idea of using themes, which is something you don't hear in movies as much any more, where you have three or four major thematic elements that repeat in a score, or change. That's something I really like and it's a more classical thing. Both of us are, of course, big Bernard Herrmann fans and Max Steiner and all those kind of composers back then, who were much more interested in thematic irresolution. What he does with his scores, and Chris did with this score, is you have a harmonic that's supposed to resolve. If you have a major ninth, it's supposed to go to a tonic, where you're waiting to hear the next note, he pulls back and goes to another note. He's continually doing that, putting you on edge. That's something I really like.

dOc:: Is it a safe bet from the DVD package we have here that you're a fan of DVD?

King: I am! Yes! I've got all the cool ones. Absolutely. What could be better? I've listened to director's commentaries on a couple of them, but sometimes I just don't want to hear what they have to say. It's odd. It depends on the director. Sometimes I think the director was just lucky and I want to leave it at that, and don't want to know they were just lucky. But if I like the director and their work—like Steven Soderbergh is a good example, because he's someone that's very thoughtful. He is actually a big influence because he made Schizopolis. I don't know if you ever saw that, but it's pretty awesome. It's like a brand new genre of film. It's pretty cool because he made this movie that's really surreal, and then moved on to do Out of Sight, which is this incredibly tight, clear narrative film. It's worth checking out; I don't even know if it's available. He's definitely a big influence. Now, David Fincher, though the Fight Club DVD is really awesome, I don't want to hear it because I have a feeling he didn't know what he was doing and I'd like to just leave it at that and just imagine that he did. But I could be wrong. Yes, I am a big fan of the DVD thing.

dOc:: Hands down, Treasure Island has the wildest packaging I've run across.

King: Well, cool. That was a tough call, I have to say. I spent a lot of time doing the various commentaries and the video loops, and I was pretty tired. I just thought, I'm here, not a lot of people will see it, so I might as well leave a landmark. And actually, I think a lot more people will see it on DVD than ever saw it in the theater, so you want to give them the full experience. And of course, it's a gimmick. In a way it's like the X rating. In one sense, you want to do it because it's part of the movie, and in another sense it's not a big movie and doesn't have a lot of advertising. You want people to go, "Hey, what's that?" Hopefully if they see it on the shelf they'll say, "I haven't seen that one before." At least they might pick it up, and if they do, I think the kind of people who might buy it or might rent it will take it home. Or so the theory goes. We'll see.

dOc:: What projects do you have coming in the future? You mentioned another film in the works.

King: I'm working on something. Treasure Island I got to do because I had enough money left over that I could do it. Now I have to work on something where, as I was saying before, you're restricted by someone else's money and you don't have the same freedom to do whatever you want. You have to be specific about what kind of genre it is, for lack of a better word. You can still make a great movie, don't get me wrong. What I'm trying to do now is to write an action movie. It's the kind of thing that will be incredibly disturbing to people, but because it's in a genre it has a chance of getting made. I think. It may not. It's got a lot of very, very dark elements to it and people may hate it and say we'll never give you a penny. But there may be people that will. It's not very expensive, so there may be people willing to take a chance. It's sad. At this point, unfortunately, it's not up to me, but I'm willing to try it again. It was a very exhausting experience but very rewarding. I think the movie turned out pretty good, so I was happy. If I could do that again, I'd be happy.

dOc:: Are we likely to see another period piece from you, or have you pretty much exhausted the 1940s?

King: I've definitely exhausted the 1940s, but there are so many more periods. I've exhausted 1945, I should say. I haven't exhausted the '40s. I actually was working on a Technicolor movie because they've recently revived Technicolor. Because of all the research I did for this movie, I happen to know a lot about the three-strip process. So I was really interested in getting a Technicolor camera. I don't know if you've ever seen them; they're huge. They're pretty scary because they actually shoot three strips of film.

dOc:: I saw one on the extras for Black Narcissus; it looked about as big as a truck.

King: Exactly. Yes, that's it. They're wild. There's no way to reproduce the Technicolor look, number one, without a Technicolor camera, and number two, the dye process, which Technicolor revived. If you do a Technicolor film then you have to have it in a period, or otherwise it just confuses people. I actually wanted to do a movie that was set in the 1950s, just because of the Technicolor process, but I couldn't come up with anything for it. So that was the sad part of it. The Technicolor company is doing a special print now. I think a couple prints of The Thin Red Line were done in a three-strip process. They take the original color negative and they print three different strips and they marry them, so it's still a Technicolor process, and it produces an extra-saturated color, and it's very beautiful, much better than the usual Kodachrome stuff. So that's one thing I'm going to do if I shoot something in color, because you have so much control and it just looks great. Unfortunately, the movie I'm working on now is contemporary, so that's the sad reality. I'm sorry.

dOc:: Somewhere down the line.

King: We actually did talk about doing a movie called Young Hitler, in 1920s Vienna, because that's another thing to push people's buttons. But I just couldn't get it together. Of course, it would be a slapstick comedy to make it that much more.... But then there's Springtime for Hitler [The Producers] which they're remaking, so I just decided against that. And you have to be able to walk into a room and say, "There's a chance you could make some money on this." If you walk into the room and say, "You're never going to make a penny. Give me all your money," you're just not going to get a check. It's just not going to happen. With a movie like Young Hitler, that's really unlikely. That's my theory, anyway.

dOc:: Good luck in the future. We'll be looking forward to seeing your next project.

King: Thank you. I hope to have one!