From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

The King of Kong is a great documentary about so many great American

topics. Competition, hierarchy, the individual versus the system. Its director, Seth Gordon,

sitting right across me. Thanks so much for being you said. Thank you for having me.

First of all, tell the audience specifically what the movie is about before we get into the

much bigger things. Well, the King of Kong is a documentary about two grown men that think of the best in the world at Donkey Kong and their lifelong rivalry as it unfolded towards a crescendo around the inclusion of the Donkey Kong record in the Guinness Book of World Records 2007.

Now, part of this too is that these two characters, Steve Weeby and Billy Mitchell,

are such different guys because Steve is sort of the classic loner almost in his way.

I mean, even in his house, he seems like he's by himself.

And as we learn in the film, he has sort of extraordinary hand-eye coordination,

which makes him kind kind of natural musician.

But his curiosity about the world makes him a great science teacher, although the kids in this class say he's weird, but clearly they love being in the class.

And Billy is such a showman who really seems to fossilize in 1982. He still has the hair of a member of Berlin or something like that.

And they both became champions at Donkey Kong through two wildly different ways, didn't they?

Yeah.

Billy Mitchell, who's one of the leads in the film, one of the characters we follow.

Yeah, the protagonist.

It's hard to say character because he's a real guys, right?

But he's a character.

He is a character.

In 1982, Life Magazine gathered the greatest gamers in the world at that time.

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