![\"wiebe\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/wiebe.jpg\")
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Steve Wiebe: one of the greatest heroes in cinema.<\/em><\/p>\n Spoilers ahead. If you haven\u2019t seen <\/i><\/span><\/b>The King of Kong<\/i><\/span><\/a> (what is wrong with you?) see it before reading.<\/i><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n I saw The King of Kong five times in the theater, which is a record for me (I only saw Jurassic Park<\/a> four<\/i> times).\u00a0 I saw it the night it opened at the AMC in Times Square, and the theater was about half full, which is pretty impressive for a limited release documentary. Steve returns to Washington defeated, with his tail between his legs.\u00a0 Being a documentary, it could have ended there.\u00a0 There is no script; the story is literally happening as life happens, unraveling organically and being captured by intelligent filmmakers, hopeful of the next break in the narrative.\u00a0 That break came by way of an unexpected phone call.<\/p>\n The documentary gods smiled and offered a third act to the story, through The Guinness Book of World Records calling and offering the chance to have ten scores featured in their next edition.\u00a0 This would be Steve (and Billy\u2019s) opportunity to compete head to head for the official top score.<\/p>\n The filmmakers traveled back to Washington to find Wiebe happy with his family, yet left empty and drained from his most recent defeat.\u00a0 From behind the camera, we hear the interviewer ask Steve, \u201cWhat if I told you that Guinness is asking Twin Galaxies to submit ten scores for their next edition, and there\u2019s a competition in Florida to see who goes in?\u201d\u00a0 Steve pauses and says, in classic, real life documentary fashion, \u2018\u2019Well then, I gue\u2014I guess I better get practicing\u201d and then BAM<\/i>, Eye of the Tiger blisters on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n And we all cheered.\u00a0 That sprinkling of a hundred or so documentary lovers in Times Square got up and cheered.\u00a0 A black guy yelled \u201cGo get that motherfucka!\u201d\u00a0 It was the best experience I\u2019ve ever had in a movie theater and by the movie\u2019s end I was crying my eyes out.<\/p>\n Moments like these are why people love movies.<\/p>\n Moments like these are earned<\/i>.\u00a0 They\u2019re earned by way of a careful juggling act that pulls together all of the elements of cinema.\u00a0 At the foundation is your story, whether it be a great script, or in this case, a great eye for real life drama.\u00a0 If the story is the foundation or frame, the style must then be built around it.\u00a0 Performance, lighting, color, sound, shot length, camera movement.\u00a0 All of these elements control your dynamic range and your dynamic range dictates your ability to capture and thrill an audience.<\/p>\n In The King of Kong, we really care about Steve.\u00a0 His introduction in the first act is soft.\u00a0 His own piano music eases into his opening sequence and the characters that populate his world are warm and loving.\u00a0 His parents are supportive and his wife is a doll.\u00a0 This works in contrast to Billy\u2019s introduction, which directly precedes Steve\u2019s.\u00a0 Billy\u2019s introduction is jagged and biting.\u00a0 Billy is a larger than life figure and his comments are unbelievable and hilarious.\u00a0 Opening with Billy hooks you in, and arriving at Steve offers a soft cushion to rest on after the power of Billy Mitchell.\u00a0 This same device is used in Star Wars<\/a>, where we first see the large and scary Darth Vader and then arrive at the boyish innocence of Luke Skywalker.<\/p>\n By the midpoint of the movie, we are whole-heartedly rooting for the put upon Steve Wiebe.\u00a0 When that magic moment of him deciding to \u201cget practicing\u201d comes, we are so far on his side that a hundred people stood up and cheered for a guy to get the high score in Donkey Kong.<\/p>\n The way The King of Kong plays out seems as logical and fluid as Star Wars (actually much more so).\u00a0 My point here is that we\u2019re never conscious of its unraveling; we just follow it, happily.\u00a0 That structural invisibility is very much designed.\u00a0 And it\u2019s in that design that we find its inherent transcendence. \u00a0 It\u2019s pretty fucking easy to meander around using \u201cabstract\u201d images to tell \u201catmospheric\u201d \u201cstories\u201d like so many indies.\u00a0 People pick on Hollywood for being too formulaic (and it\u2019s true that 99.9% of Hollywood\u2019s output is trite nothingness) but The King of Kong is far from Hollywood\u2014 it\u2019s about as indie as you can get.\u00a0 And for that matter, so is Rocky<\/a>, Clerks<\/a> and The Blair Witch Project<\/a>, all of which follow the \u2018Hollywood formula\u2019 with more stringency than most Hollywood movies.<\/p>\n Hollywood doesn\u2019t use this formula solely in order to quickly churn out product.\u00a0 It also uses it because it is quite literally the only way to produce advanced narrative art.\u00a0 Movies like The King of Kong utilize that formula because it\u2019s the best way to tell a story.\u00a0 Imagine if The King of Kong was made by an unwieldy, untalented filmmaker like David Gordon Green.\u00a0 Instead of a tight, effective, human story, it would just be b-roll of joysticks with sparse guitar music under it.<\/p>\n The truth is, formulaic cinema is much harder to do well than anything abstract.\u00a0 Without rules, you can do whatever you want, hide behind the guise of art, and call it genius.\u00a0 In contrast, while operating inside a formula, you must work hard to create characters that are so interesting, likable, hatable, etc., that they stack up against the millions of other characters in storytelling history.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a tall order.<\/p>\n The beautiful thing about art is that there are no rules.\u00a0 You can<\/i> do whatever you want, you can film the Empire State Building for eight hours and call it a movie<\/a>, and you can even convince masses of people to believe that your useless abstraction is brilliant.\u00a0 And more power to ya, bud.\u00a0 But, abstraction is the road to bankruptcy, not salvation. \u00a0John Cage\u2019s 4\u201933\u201d is not transcendent.\u00a0 It’s not even anything.\u00a0 David Lynch has made some great movies, but his best movies are Blue Velvet<\/a> and The Straight Story<\/a>, or, the two that most closely follow \u2018the rules\u2019.\u00a0 I like Eraserhead<\/a> as much as the next guy; there is creativity and beauty abound in that thing and it\u2019s infinitely inspiring.\u00a0 But it\u2019ll never hook me, or anyone, as well as a perfect shift between screenplay acts, because our minds are keyed into that structure.\u00a0 And executing that structure well is much more impossible than dripping random splotches of paint all over canvas.\u00a0 What\u2019s more difficult: creating something amazing by meticulously coloring inside the lines, or doing whatever you want out of some half-hearted, misplaced fuck you to the lines themselves?<\/p>\n The late, great Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat<\/a> can\u2019t save cinema, but it can at least help.<\/p>\n This piece was in response to <\/i>this thing<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n Blake Snyder is the guy who wrote Blank Check<\/a>. He was a prolific spec writer who sold an awesome script to Spielberg called Nuclear Family, a movie I wish they wouldve made, about an atomic family of superheroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Steve Wiebe: one of the greatest heroes in cinema.<\/em><\/p>\n Spoilers ahead. If you haven\u2019t seen <\/i><\/span><\/b>The King of Kong<\/i><\/span><\/a> (what is wrong with you?) see it before reading.<\/i><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
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\nWhat begins as an innocent exploration of the subculture of classic arcade gaming emerges as one of the great battles between protagonist and antagonist in all of narrative history.\u00a0 Steve Wiebe, the archetypical \u2018aw shucks\u2019 Luke Skywalker, is pitted against the most villainous Darth Vader in Billy Mitchell.\u00a0 But, by the movies\u2019 midpoint, the conflict seems to have been resolved, and with an anticlimactic whimper:\u00a0 Steve, who had just found his Donkey Kong high score corruptly and unjustly invalidated, pits himself against the Empire of Twin Galaxies and attempts a public proving of his Donkey Kong supremacy\u2014but when Billy slyly submits his own score via video tape, a score that is accepted without scrutiny, all appears to be lost.<\/p>\n![\"Blake_Snyder\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Blake_Snyder.gif\")
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\nR.I.P. 1957-2009<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n