January 1999

The Genius of the System



Obsessed with the characters, psychologies, and technologies of the '40s, L.A.-based indie-film executive producer Scott King turns to directing with Treasure Island. Staffed by an all-star lineup of indie directors, the film perversely melds historical drama with sexually-charged surrealism. Alex Nohe and Peter Bowen investigate the creative time travel involved in making King's film.

The title of Scott King's historical thriller, Treasure Island, debuting in the Dramatic Competition of the Sundance Film Festival, will probably evoke for most the pirate fantasy of Robert Louis Stevenson's boyhood classic. In fact, it refers to the World War II naval base located in the San Francisco bay where the film takes place. But this easy confusion between fiction and fact, between the imagined and the real, alludes to the strange ways in which this fact-based WW II period piece melds into a psychosexual drama of surreal proportions.

King was originally sparked by reading Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was, a historical account of the counter-espionage case in which British intelligence duped the Nazis by dressing up a corpse with false documents and dumping him off the coast of Spain. Because of this simple ruse, the Nazis routed troops out of Sicily just before the Allied invasion. Not interested in recreating the actual event - which had already been adapted to film in 1956 by Ronald Neame - King moved the story to San Francisco, focusing instead on the intelligence agents assigned to create the corpse's identity.

"I was really interested in the ways that these two seemingly scientific guys were trying to create this fictional person, and how in the process they ended up revealing more about themselves."

Indeed rather than researching the particulars of Naval intelligence, King focused on the rise of popular psychology, especially on the ways that Freud's theories of pathology and the unconscious were slowly creeping into the public imagination at this time. In the film, the two naval officers use these crude psychological concepts to construct the imaginary psyche of their corpse by writing a series of personal letters to and from him. But as with analytic transference, the deeper the two delve into creating this persona, the more they reveal about themselves.

And as the film's narrative turns inward, its historical veneer of realism gives way to a more interior and surreal landscape. Their fantasies, thoughts and fears become cinematic hallucinations for all to perceive. Accordingly, the film, for King, "is much more surrealism than realism or noir;' a point that becomes clearer when King lists science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick as one of his primary influences. Indeed while he shot the officers' workroom in "a pure classical style with no shadows;' the fantasies were projected into a shadowy, defused imagination.

"I wanted chiaroscuro lighting of things like people getting blowjobs" explains King, adding how at one point these images were read as pornographic by the film lab which then quickly attempted to kick the film out.

What these hallucinations illustrate are the particular psychosexual dynamics of the two officers: one, who has multiple, paradoxical heterosexual relationships, the other who can only have sex in a three way with his wife and another man. While some may be quick to label the latter character a "closet homosexual;' King says that such labels would be unfathomable to these characters: "We now live in a period in which everyone knows everything about themselves - or they think they do. In the '40s, it's believable that people knew nothing of themselves." In fact, King cites an array of historical evidence to make his point; he recalls the case of Alan Turning, the gay mathematician who broke the German code, to an episode where Eisenhower's military secretary outed himself.

Mostly seriously, King suggests that all fictions are to some extent autobiographical. Just as the creation of this fake corpse reveals the officers' psychologies, so too, as King confesses, "the characters are only parts of my own past selves." And vice-versa - King himself can be read as a reflection of his film. He drives a '30s Buick and wears vintage clothes from the '40s. In fact, King jokes that "the only way that you could do this sort of period piece is if you collect all the stuff." Again for both economic and stylistic reasons, King, who used a Mitchell BNCR camera to shoot the film, sought out technologies of the past. The camera, by virtue of its sheer I 75-pound bulk, makes the contemporary penchant for camera movement a formidable task. As King complains, "Just because you can move the camera, doesn't mean you should. You need to justify it. I like the idea of having to discipline yourself. People think, if this is a boring scene, have the camera move. But that does not make the scene more interesting."

This aesthetic pragmatism was also applied to film in general. Having executive produced Star Maps, Shotgun Freeway, and Olympia, King used his previous position as, in his words, "the money guy" to reconvene a host of independent film directors as his crew. As such, Dante Harper (The Delicate Art of the Rifle) acted as the sound recorder and designer, Jonathan Sanford (The Big Charade) worked as the camera operator, Abe Levy (13) became the first assistant director, and Phillip Glau (Circus Redickuless) served as gaffer, and finally Bob Byington (Olympia) stepped up as "script girl." Says producer Adrienne Gruben, "I wanted Scott to have the comfort and understanding of people who had gone through this before, who had unique dreams they needed to bring to the screen. Plus they were all out of work."

Indeed King's mode of production once again harks back to the '40s and the studio system where the "money guy" was also in creative control. Deflating the auteur theory's privileging of the director as the creative center of every film, King embraces a more collective authorship, not unlike that espoused by his crew member, Dante Harper, who created his film with the Cambrai Liberation Collective.

While King never sought to direct before, he felt the necessity to control the process in this film because the images were so particular and personal. But citing Thomas Schatz's incisive history, The Genius of the System, King decries the autonomy of the director and yearns for a more collective, less self-aware cinema, a time not unlike the period he portrays in his own film fantasy, Treasure Island.