Issue date: July 14, 1999
By MARION SOFTKY
Filmmaker Scott King, son of Woodsider Suzi King and her late husband, Dennis, likes challenges. He also likes to disturb his viewers.
"If I make people feel uncomfortable, I feel I've succeeded," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
It appears Mr. King has succeeded. His fourth film, "Treasure Island," earned a special award in last fall's Sundance Film Festival for "distinctive vision." Recently it earned notice in the New York Times as one of the most original features in the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
Last month it showed at the San Francisco Film Festival.
"Treasure Island is a mock 1940s spy drama in which two American code breakers construct a false identity and devise military misinformation to be planted on a dead soldier's body," wrote Stephen Holden in the Times. "The stylish black-and-white film turns into an eerie ghost story exploring oppressive racial and sexual stereotypes in wartime America with deadpan humor."
Mr. King, who grew up in Woodside and attended Crystal Springs Uplands School and then the Thacher School in Ojai, has been making films in Southern California for five years through his company, King Pictures. He served as writer, director and cinematographer for "Treasure Island," his most ambitious film to date.
Mr. King said he wanted to come up with a new kind of movie, more like movies made in France 45 years ago. "It was very ambitions. I don't know if I succeeded," he acknowledged. "It's very graphic. A number of my mom's friends would be horrified."
In the film, the two code-breakers begin to crack the dark codes that control their own lives as they compose letters to create a new life for the corpse. The resulting film, almost surreal at times, follows them as their secrets emerge in disturbingly vivid images.
"Treasure Island" is not for everybody. Mr. King said, "About 40 percent of people really hate the movie; the rest really love it."
Mr. King is arranging individual shows of "Treasure Island" while he tries to find a distributor. Meanwhile, he's taking time out to write a mystery novel.
A dropout from the University of Southern California's School of Film and Television, Mr. King admits he is learning his trade as he goes along. He added, "You learn as you go for the rest of your life."
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