King Street

“King Street” is about self-knowledge (or lack thereof). After an improbable convergence of two lives, a young unhoused person sees her own troubled ethos reflected in the actions of her ostensibly stable host.


The script was inspired by an incident in which I was driving away from Seattle's King Street station and suddenly heard someone pounding on the back of my pickup cab. We were both pretty shaken, and probably for this reason, our brief conversation had an unforgettable energy. So the “King Street” script began as a thought experiment: What if an episode like this lasted hours, rather than minutes? Would shock give way to empathy or insight, or would aversion and repression hold sway?


I had the good fortune to pursue this project with a bright and curious bunch of collaborators, and to our minds, the older character Jason (adeptly portrayed by Bruce Christopherson) has his own compelling issues. But as we dug into principle photography it was Sam, the unwitting stowaway (played superbly by Tasha Newell) who captured our attention, and in a feature-length version of this same story, Sam would probably reappear.


But the beauty of a short-form movie resides in its expressive economy, with meaning dripping through the layers of sound, image, and text, and we think "King Street" taps this potential.