Twin Galaxies, the Iowa-based organization founded in 1981 that proclaims itself “the official electronic scoreboard,” and its founder, the calm and collected Walter Day, have come out against their depictions in the film, along with Billy Mitchell and a few other players, most of whom are labeled “Billy’s disciples” by Wiebe and his friend in the film. These various decriers’ points of contention don’t ring the ethics alarm a la criticisms of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but some are valid and even interesting in an Alan Greenspan’s-idea-of fun sort of way.

One omission that does seem a little sketchy: when Wiebe submitted the aforementioned tape that would have made him the world’s number one Donkey Kong player, Billy Mitchell didn’t have the world record. A gamer named Timothy Sczerby had eclipsed Mitchell in the year 2000, but as documented in the film, Mitchell later submitted a tape to reclaim the title from Wiebe. To this conspiratorial charge, Seth laughs and says that Sczerby was left out for brevity’s sake. The next and last argument (for us) goes like this: ‘Why is Billy Mitchell depicted in the film as an alpha male with “a trophy wife” and Steve Wiebe is shown as a family man and all around lovable dude, even though Billy has children of his own that are never shown, including Little Billy, his dad’s video game heir?’

“We didn’t have the access that we had to Steve,” says Seth. “We talked to Billy’s parents, his friends. His kids weren’t very interesting to interview, but we have that. But Billy kept us at arm’s length, whereas Steve was all open doors and nothing to hide. We do show Billy’s daughter, but most of the press saw the screener, and that’s where most of this stuff can be traced back.” And later, “I think Billy Mitchell really wants his asshole fame. It’s amazing. That profound narcissism is key to understanding his character.”

Seth says that approximately 350 hours of raw footage were shot making The King of Kong; a scary but understandable amount given that the film moves across several states including Florida, Washington and Iowa and, at one point, the plot zooms ahead nine months. Simply put: the DVD will not skimp.

“The Kong DVD is going to be awesome. We’re going to show more of Doris [Doris Self, an 80-year-old Q*bert master], and we get into Billy’s rival on Pac-Man, Rick Fothergill, and the nine-dot story, which is totally insane. Rick got to the kill screen on Pac-Man but he screwed up and lost to Billy by nine dots. So, Billy signs all correspondence with Rick with ‘9 dots.’ And the full version of Mr. Awesome is on the DVD,” says Seth. “We have 23 extras and, like, 95-minutes of extra content. We’ll have side-by-side screens of Billy and Steve reaching the kill screen [last level] of Donkey Kong.”

Asked if Mitchell haunts his dreams, Seth laughs and replies, “No, he hasn’t haunted my dreams, but he’s haunted many of my friends’, and so has his hair. No nightmares for me.”

At one point in KoK, Seth cues up Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best” from The Karate Kid. But history should not remember Billy Mitchell as the joystick equivalent of Cobra Kai. For better or worse, with his ‘80s-era bandolier of cold put-downs and his light blowtorching of pseudo-rules, Billy Mitchell has far more in common with Sylvester Stallone in Cobra.

As the director of two major motion pictures currently scheduled for release next year, Four Christmases starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon and The Only Living Boy in New York (we just read the script and it is killer), Seth Lewis Gordon finally merits a Wikipedia entry. Footnote: he introduced the word “chumpatize” to the zeitgeist via Kong.

Growing up in New Hampshire, Seth says he spent his summer days dropping quarters at the same Funspot arcade featured heavily in his film and his nights re-watching Die Hard (“I don’t why, but I watched it obsessively.") and being stunned by Raging Bull. He says films made a large impression as a kid, but it wasn’t until an experience during his undergrad years in college that the bug bit him.

“When I went to college, I needed a break half-way through, so I elected to teach high school in rural Kenya, right near the Uganda border. I had a video camera for the first time—my dad let me use his—and I was there, supposed to teach high school. I was in the middle of majoring in architecture at Yale, and I got a grant from the UN to finish the construction of the school where I was teaching,” says Seth. “But I ended up falling in love with shooting footage of the village and the students. There’s no electricity or running water in the village out there, but the camera made sense to my students. They shot commercials and movie previews with it, they just made shit up. When I got back to Yale I was compelled to edit that into what became the first documentary project I worked on. That’s how I learned to tell a story.”

After attending grad school at Harvard, Gordon worked as a producer and editor on the documentary New York Doll, a well-received effort on the intriguing life of Arthur Kane, once a member of the prototypical glam-punk band the New York Dolls. At somepoint he hopped on an opportunity with a friend to “travel around the world with the Dixie Chicks to shoot frivolous tour footage.” When the country group unexpectedly tsk-tsk’d President Bush during a concert, the snowballing media controversy made for a much larger theatrically-released documentary on the group entitled Shut Up & Sing. A year later, Seth attended the premiere for his own documentary. Actor Vince Vaughn was in attendance.

When Vaughn saw The King of Kong, he dug it so much he passed a script down to Seth called Four Christmases. Seth says he pitched Vaughn his take and now his first feature-feature by the same name is due Christmas ’08. He says Vaughn responded to “the way we told the story and how we didn’t get in the way of the story [in Kong]. He felt the way we rendered the characters felt grounded, and made you identify with them.” He says Christmases won't be a cookie-cutter Christmas release.

“As a fillmmaker, I come up through the independent channels, scraping stuff together and I have a personal passion for the material. I think America has a hunger for real stories, whether that’s documentary or grounded in real emotion. That’s the reason Once was such an unbelievable hit this summer. My personal interest tends toward the darker, realer films. Kong is not a straight-ahead comedy by any means. Four Christmases is about divorce, it’s a comedy about peoples’ parents not being together anymore and having that obligation to be around them during the holidays, how that affects you and how you want to put together a family. The subject matter is obviously very relatable and personal for a lot of people.”

After Christmases, Seth is scheduled to begin work on The Only Living Boy in New York, and says he is “frustrated” by the looming writer’s strike “derailing” casting. The script, by newly minted screenwriter Allen Loeb, has been compared in Hollywood circles to a modern day version The Graduate, and Seth remarks that, “I don’t give those comparisons much credence, and it’d be an honor if they continued, but I hope it doesn’t turn into a contrast. I can’t say I’m drawing on personal experience, but I really understand the ethical dilemma in that film…We have to cast the character of Thomas down to the genetics; the casting ages of his love interests comes down to him.” (ignore suggests, oddly, Jason Schwartzman.) Seth expressed that OLBINY will definitely be an R-rated film.

As for the remake of KoK, after the experience of watching the doc and stumbling down the perplexing rabbit hole that is Internet message boards inhabited by many of the film's “extras," we hope everyone gets a cameo. Because to us at least, the remake practically screams out as a bookend to Kingpin.

“The feature film will be a remake of sorts, but the rumors of it being a sequel only originate from us joking about how that would be the best way to do it,” says Seth. “As it’s being written, it’s intended to be a remake that explores the moments we couldn’t be present. The distinction we’ve made in articulating the tone is less like Dodgeball and more like Little Miss Sunshine. Less caricature more character. Johnny Depp wasn’t particularly a dream cast member for me, but what’s great about Johnny Depp for Billy is the look; Billy is not an ugly guy, he’s got the hair and the eyes. An actor like Tom Cruise would be good too.”

As for the director's plans that are not already posted and gossiped about on IMDB, Seth has one inkling of an idea that is epic...like, James Cameron's Avatar-type epic.

“I’d love, really love, to adapt Super Paper Mario into a movie, a movie that would constantly switch from 2D to 3D. In five years, 3D cinema is going to be really big. [The King of Kong] was screened for Nintendo, but I haven’t had the chance to speak to anyone over there about it. But I definitely want to have that conversation.”

Judging by Seth's disgust over the original Super Mario Bros. movie (he laughs and then admits to never seeing Double Dragon), we wouldn’t put it past him.

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