Not since 'On Golden Pond'... Funspot headed for the big screen

Over the years, the Funspot arcade in Weirs Beach has developed a reputation as a great place to spend a day or evening, entertaining yourself, your family and guests from out of town. It has, at various times, contained an Indian camp facility that welcomed visitors, a children’s “Mother Goose” amusement park, and several slot-car racetracks.

Now it’s considered the largest arcade in America, with over 500 games, a bowling alley, both indoor and outdoor miniature golf courses and a pub restaurant.

In recent years Funspot has gained some addition attention because employee Gary Vincent has assembled the largest collection of classic 1970s and ‘80’s video games in the world in his American Classic Arcade Museum on the third floor. Every spring the museum hosts the International Classic Videogame & Pinball Championship, which attracts “gamers” from all over the world. Not many years ago Billy Mitchell — who is known as the Video Game Player of the Century — set a record by recording a perfect score on a Pac-Man at the tournament.

But nothing that has ever been done at the local family-owned business could ever generate the kind of buzz that Funspot will likely be seeing soon.

On August 17, a documentary film shot principally there will be opening at movie theaters nationwide.

“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” has already been shown at several film festivals around the country and has received very positive reviews, many calling it a “real life Rocky story.” “The King of Kong is about a story of hope and fear… (It) reminds viewers a good movie, like a good video game, does not need to be fancy to be fulfilling,” one critic wrote.

On a website devoted to film devotees, thefilmlot.com, Seth Gordon, the film’s director, says that New Line Cinema has plans to turn the story into a fiction movie.

The trailer for “The King of Kong”, which available on the website thekingofkong.com, explains the idea of the movie. “In 1982, video games ruled… Billy Mitchell was called the Video Game Player of the Century.” (Seen in both old and new movie clips, Mitchell appears as a cool and collected type, his dark handsome good looks augmented with neat shoulder length hair and a coiffured beard and mustache.)

“Billy Mitchell set a record for Donkey Kong that has stood for 20 years,” the trailer continues. “Until now…”

This is when viewers get their first look at “the challenger,” and he couldn’t be more unlike Mitchell.

Steve Wiebe is a middle-school science teacher with a round face and a casual manner. He’s playing his drums and a piano at home — and Donkey Kong in his garage. He seems like the image the “average Joe” who has not distinguished himself in any special way in the world.

“What happens when a loser who needs to win meets a winner who refuses to lose?” the trailer concludes.

In an interview on thefilmlot.com website, Director Gordon talks about what attracted him to the film — and to Funspot itself. He said he was introduced to Wiebe through a friend and found himself drawn to his desire to beat Mitchell’s record at the annual video tournament at Funspot.

“Funspot is one of my favorite places on earth,” Gordon said. “We would go to New Hampshire for family reunions and my folks would leave me in the dark at Funspot. I would play games day after day… So I saw that Wiebe might go to this holy land, as far as I was concerned.

“I don’t connect with the Xbox and the Playstation, I’m terrible at all those things,” he adds. “I love the environment [at Funspot]. I love the community of the place. I love just the games themselves like: Karate Champ or Paperboy or Missile Command — whatever it is, I connect with it.”

What most surprised Gordon as he began working on his film was just how competitive the classic arcade gaming world could be.

“When we originally envisioned this story we imagined a sort of basic head-to-head competition between two gamers,” he said in the interview. “What made it really interesting was seeing the people behind the competitors and the politics behind the scenes. I think that’s where it really started to come to life and got quite a bit more universal. There was this real dichotomy between the two main subjects. They really fell into the good guy (Steve Wiebe) and the bad guy (Billy Mitchell) roles.

“It was also surprising to see the lengths Billy went through to keep tabs on Wiebe. There’s a lot of stuff we couldn’t include that Billy did just because of inter-state telephone rules. We only could use stuff where we had a camera pointing at Billy. All I’m saying is the stuff he did to keep tabs on Steve and control him was far greater than we could actually show,” the director said.

“He is a true puppet master… Billy is such a good gamer that when he’s finished beating the games he moves on to playing games with people and we became part of that,” he concluded.

For instance, what the director had envisioned as the great showdown between the players — at the Funspot competition in 2005 — took a dramatic turn when Mitchell decided at the last minute that he wasn’t going. The documentary crew stayed with him for the weekend anyway and Gordon says that gave the film an even more complete picture of Mitchell’s character.

The climax comes in an unexpected manner later on, he added.

Vincent, who manages Funspot’s classic game section, said no one in the company has yet seen “The King of Kong.” “It was partially filmed here in 2005 but we were not clued into what was being filmed. There were three or four documentary film companies here at that time filming the Classic Arcade tournament. It has hard to keep track of things.”

Like Vincent and the rest of his staff, Funspot owner Bob Lawton is looking forward to seeing the movie.

“Gary is very on top of anything to do with the classic museum and he follows these people (the gamers) all the times. He’s doing a great job with it,” he commented.

In fact, it was Vincent who discovered not long ago that Funspot now has the largest collection of arcade games in America. He said an arcade in Florida had more than 600 but after the owners recently sold out to a national company, the facility began changing.

When Vincent learned that they had removed half their arcade games that clearly made Funspot number one.

And that has led to more notoriety, Lawton said. “I got an e-mail from a publisher with Scholastic Books awhile back and they’re doing a book on the Seven Wonders of the World for Kids. And we’ve been picked for one of those seven wonders.”

Maybe a bio-epic of Lawton and his crew could be down the road. Would ESPN would be interested in a miniseries?