THE KING OF KONG Will Sing Some Songs

Seth Gordon has been muttering about a dramatic adaptation of his friggin’ fantastic documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters almost since its 2007 release. His forays into feature directing - Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief, Baywatch - have always irritated me, like pit-stops on Gordon’s road to dramatising the film that put him on the map. 
 
Looks like we’ll be waiting even longer for the King of Kong movie, but for an unexpected reason: speaking to IGN at a junket for Baywatch, Gordon revealed the documentary is destined for a stage musical adaptation first. “Scripts have been written,” he said, and songwriting is underway, with “fifteen or so” tracks set to fill the programme. One of them is “Museum Of Your Heart,” by Twin Cities founder and scorekeeper Walter Day.
 
Gordon said the story is particularly suited to stage, explaining that “there's such a melodrama, and so many of the characters are actually musicians, and the music of the games, too, is a thing.” That’s a vague way to put it, but there’s no denying that The King of Kong - a bitter conflict between two competitive Donkey Kong players (reigning champion and hot sauce magnate Billy Mitchell versus underdog family man Steve Wiebe) - could easily be expanded to an operatic scale. Think of the duets! The countermelodies! The barrel-based dance numbers!
 
As far as a traditional movie goes, Gordon says he’d want to make the film from the point of view of Mitchell, the documentary’s love-to-hate-him villain. “He believed in his version [of the story], very much,” Gordon told IGN, “so [I’d] try to see what that'd be like." It’d certainly be an intriguing challenge to make Mitchell, essentially a human-shaped bag of hubris held together with an American flag necktie, into a compelling and sympathetic protagonist.
 
Any Billy Mitchell fans in the house?