Yeah, Corey, I guess that's what I was getting at before also with regard to any direct quotes of players that are taken from the movie. It seems painfully obvious to me that the editing involved was rather extreme. There are literally dozens of examples, just like that example you gave from Walter, where the exact words that were chosen just seem to be a bit off. Like, no one would talk that way if they were just spouting off a one-liner. I think a lot of people interpret the "awkward" sounding dialog to mean that many of the scenes were "scripted" and it was just poor acting. Although this may be true in a few cases, I tend to believe that most of the time it was just that the player (or Walter in this case) was in the middle of telling a rather long story, where all of the details were explained thoroughly, and the filmmakers went back and combed through all of that footage, found a half-sentence snippet that "sort of" fit with their story if they spliced it into a scene just right, and that's what they did, cutting out the whole rest of the story in the process.
I think if we watch the movie to be entertained, it's really a fun movie to watch, and you can let your brain just sort of "fix" these dialog oddities by just following along with the story and filling in the blanks subconsciously. But, once people try to start taking things straight out of the movie at face-value as if they are the complete fact of the situation, I think you run into a real problem as a huge amount of what was said was taken so far out of context that the words become almost meaningless.
About that quote from Steve -- of course I won't be able to find it now, but in one of these crazy threads, just within the last couple of days, somebody explained that when Steve was saying that comment about looking up the score in the TG database, he was referring to a period in his life that was taking place about 5 years prior to when he was being filmed saying it. So, the filming of that scene was going on somewhere around 2004 and so he was talking about looking up the score somewhere in the ballpark of 1999 or 2000. Tim's score was achieved in 2000, but was not verified until nearly a year later, sometime in 2001 (which has always been a very common occurance within TG unfortunately).
About that, make sure you don't take what Walter says as gospel. I remember reading all of those posts of his about KOK and setting the facts straight many years ago, and while there are a lot of interesting details in those posts, some of the details are also a bit murky. I think that Walter is genuinely a nice guy but his memory for details can be foggy and a lot of the details during that era were not handled by him directly, but were instead handled by members of his staff such as Robert and so there are times where he is actually just misinformed. He also seems to have made some terrible decisions along the way with respect to how he ran his company that I personally don't think he intended any harm, but which ended up pissing a lot of people off.
Anyways, the detail where he claims that Steve was the recognized champion from 2003 - 2006 just does not seem accurate to me. The 2006 date, I believe, was when TG finally got around to verifying Billy's Funspot tape that was put into and then immediately yanked from the database 7 or 8 months previously.
However, if there's ANYTHING that the movie does a decent job of portraying, it's how difficult a time Steve had at getting his scores to become verified and stick in the TG database. I'm fairly certain he was not the recognized champion from 2003 - 2006 since all of those scores that he submitted were quickly taken down and/or rejected for one reason or another.
Again, that timeline that's been linked a couple of times here:
http://superbunker.com/resources/dkt/... seems to do a decent job of showing which scores were known by TG staff and which ones were actually verified (and would show up on the public website as being the champion). You can see that Steve had a whole bunch of scores submitted during this time period but none of them actually stuck and the database reverted back to showing Tim as the champion after Steve's 2003 score was reclassified. Interestingly, despite this, that timeline above does show a version of the TG database from March, 2005 with Steve's score on top. I'm not sure what that's about. But Steve did get the record back later in 2005 at Funspot and held it for a few months until they finally verified Billy's tape in 2006.
Well, I guess the point is that there appears to be plenty of time where Tim was the verified champion of the game right up until a timeframe very shortly before the movie began filming. For everyone to try to tell Tim that THE reason he was passed over to be in KOK was because nobody knew that he was the champion and that he should have taken more action after his score was beaten really seems quite wrong on both counts to me. It should have been plainly obvious to the producers of KOK that Tim was relavent to the timeline of "recent" events. The producers clearly went to great lengths to edit the story such that Tim's score would not exist to their movie audience, constantly referring back to the 874,000 score as if it was the current WR score, taking bits and pieces of player dialog and using it to their advantage, etc.
However, once again, none of this means that the producers were "wrong" to make these decisions or that Tim is owed any money for any reason. But, we shouldn't exactly be going around and "blaming" Tim for his misfortune either.