In 1993, writer/cinematographer/director Scott King found a beat up 1950s paperback called The Man Who Never Was. It tells the true story of two British agents who procure a dead body, dress it up as an officer, chain a briefcase full of phony invasion plans to its wrist and drop it in the Mediterranean. The Germans found the body and proclaimed the intelligence in the briefcase to be “beyond reproach.” Adolf Hitler himself gave the order to move the troops according to the plans found in the briefcase.
While this may have been the most successful counterintelligence campaign of any war, that’s not the part of the story that interested Mr King. For as the two men executed their plan, they created a complete identity for their body, one so detailed that it included movie tickets, bank passbooks, and, finally, letters, both to and from the dead man.
“I was fascinated by the way these normal guys would unknowingly write these very poignant and emotional letters,” says King, “and by the way that the letters, without the writers meaning to, revealed things about themselves that the book only glosses over.”
Mr King spent the next five years mostly on research (while admittedly doing other things), stealing liberally from everything he could find: a 1910 two-volume Psychologis Sexualis, a 1943 Slang Thesaurus, biographies of minor historical figures, ration magazines, 1970s self-help books. Mr King: “I wanted to invent an entire fake novel that the film would be based on, giving the characters and the story a depth that myself and the actors could refer to. For instance, I knew that Samuel (Nick Offerman) was a mathematician and, in an early draft, wrote a scene where he calculated exact change at a grocery store. The scene was pretty boring but the idea of his character rebelling against his bookish self-image in a kind of hyper masculine way did wind up in the movie, even though it wasn’t explicitly in the script.” After the years of noodling, the script itself only took a few months to write.
When it came time to actually shoot the film, producer Adrienne Gruben sought out people who had made their own films. Script supervisor Robert Byington had previously directed Shameless and Olympia, the latter which opened the 1998 South by Southwest Festival in Austin and closed the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival. Gaffer Philip Glau was the director of Circus Redickuless, a feature documentary about a punk rock circus which has also toured the festival route. Sound man Dante Harper directed The Delicate Art of the Rifle, which was honoured with Best Film at Chicago’s Underground Film Festival. First assistant director Abe Levy was the director of a film called Max 13, while camera operator Jonathan Sanford’s first film, The Big Charade, played a number of festivals, including South by Southwest.
Shortly after principal photography, producer Gruben told IndieWire, “I’ve noticed on films with first time directors that the crew sits around saying, ‘If I were making a movie, I’d do it this way.’ I didn’t want the crew against the director; I wanted some padding, so they’d all have some empathy for Scott in this situation. I hired people who I thought had matching personalities. I hired a bunch of diplomats, basically, who had training in certain departments.”
Today, King would tell any first-time film-maker that the only way that they will ever make a halfway decent film is to surround themselves with talented people who really know what they are doing. “As a hopeless control freak, I was amazed at how people who believed in the project were able to stand up and do such an great job that I was unable to hate them for doing so. When it’s all over, there’s a tendency to forget what kind of cooperation it takes to make a film; I’m happy to be the spokesman of Treasure Island, but now that I’ve gone through the actual experience of making it, I have to admit I’m not the author.”
For the look of the film, the team wanted to create a glimpse into the ’40s that we had only suspected before. “A lot of people remember this day as a Life magazine photo,” says Mr King, “especially the one that depicts the sailor kissing a strange woman in the middle of a celebratory street. In reality, the last day of the war turned the country into Dallas when the Cowboys win: a near riot condition, where looting, rapes, random beatings and murder were not uncommon. I was hoping in the film to show what happens underneath the kiss in the photograph.”
In order to shift today’s perspective of the 1940s, King wanted the film to look exactly like one that might have been made at the time. Shooting in black and white with a 1936 Mitchell camera and using old fashioned processing techniques, the cast and crew strived to create the feeling that, despite all beliefs to the contrary, people lived their lives pretty much the way they do now.
This attention to the look of the film continues off the set, where King and his production designer, Nathan Marsak, are obsessed with the period depicted in Treasure Island. in their day-to-day lives, they are surrounded by rotary phones and pneumatic tubes, interwar cars and chalk-stripe suits. As producer Gruben puts it. “Their preoccupation with detail and obsession with historical correctness bears no relation to anything ‘retro’, they don’t go swing dancing, they build dirigibles.” This attention to visual perfection creates a real environment where it’s possible, if only for one second, to see that people living 50 years ago swore, did the wrong thing, lived their lives with no hope of ever knowing themselves, and, yes, had sex.
Shooting wrapped in July of 1998, and as the crew finished up the editing, sound and music in November, the film was accepted into the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This turned out to be an overwhelming experience for everyone involved. Film-maker King: “There are people who go to this festival expecting to see something they can market, commercial movies on a slightly lower budget. Treasure Island was not that kind of film and it made some people very, very angry. But I think a number of folks were happily surprised to be exposed to something, well, provocative. I didn’t enjoy being so vocally criticized, but when you know you’re getting to people, one way or another, it has to feel a little like a success.”
Despite the festival’s reputation for million-dollar napkin deals, Treasure Island was not the kind of film that distributors, even the smaller ones, were looking for. “We had a lot of a distributors who went out of their way to say how much they liked it”, said producer Adrienne Gruben. “I mean, they could have just run away and hid, so I don’t think they were lying. I think it’s the kind of film that works well for people who’ve seen a lot of movies, but there was an unspoken understanding that them liking it and the film making them a ton of money were two totally different things.”
After winning a Special Jury prize at Sundance, an award for outstanding artistic achievement at Outfest in Los Angeles, and a IFP Independent Spirit nomination for best first feature (under $500,000)1, Treasure Island continued to screen at more festivals around the country, still unable to secure any kind of distribution deal. After finding theatres in New York and San Francisco who were willing to take a chance on a film without any money behind it, All Day Entertainment head David Kalat happened in on a screening in New York’s Cinema Village. Kalat, who has made a reputation for himself releasing lost classic films like Fritz Lang’s The Eyes of Dr Mabuse and ’70s cult masterpiece Ganja & Hess, has a great affinity for unseen films. “Even though the film takes place in 1945”, says Mr Kalat, “Treasure Island is the first contemporary film I’ve even wanted to put out [on DVD]. It’s not a film for everybody, but for the right audience, it really has the potential to disturb and enlighten.”
Scott King’s 25th anniversary, 4K restoration of Treasure Island premieres at Weird Weekend on Saturday 26/10, with post-screening Q&A. Tickets available here.
- It was bested in this category by The Blair Witch Project ↩︎