This avenue is no 'Wall Street'

If you looked carefully among the buzz-makers and deal-seekers at the Sundance Film Festival this year, you might have spotted an unlikely first-timer -- Michael Douglas -- in their midst. It's not uncommon to see Hollywood stars making their way through the Park City, Utah, crowds, but even so, the thought of Gordon Gekko rubbing elbows with the likes of Parker Posey sets the mind reeling.

Douglas made his belated Sundance debut to promote "King of California," a modestly budgeted two-hander in which he plays Charlie, a bipolar jazz musician who believes he has discovered a map to a long-lost cache of Spanish gold. This wide-eyed dreamer seems a far cry from the button-down establishment men Douglas has played in decades past, but he says the departure is not as great as it might appear.

Leaning back, Douglas points out that his earliest films, both as a producer and an actor, were made outside the system. " 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' was independently made," he says. Both "China Syndrome" and "Romancing the Stone" were negative pickups (in which the studios buy a film for a set sum and don't cover production costs along the way), he adds. "So I come from an independent history and background, as opposed to what people think."

Even so, Douglas admits that "King of California," which opens in New York and L.A. on Friday and more widely on Sept. 28, took him into uncharted territory. He'd worked on small-scale productions before but, he says laughing, "not this small-scale." The roughly $10-million shoot was a brisk 32 days, including five nights after hours in a Costco.

Douglas has to reach back to his days on "The Streets of San Francisco" to find a point of reference for the production's brisk pace. But the lessons of his days in television came back soon enough and the momentum of a brief shooting schedule provided its own kind of inspiration. "This kind of short schedule makes you trust your first instincts," he says. "You're not looking in the playback monitor and all that. You just go, and you're happy you had the experience."

At first, Douglas was wary of trusting his performance to first-time director Mike Cahill, not so much because of his inexperience but because Cahill was working from his own script. "You're more worried, whether it's a first-time director or a 10-time director, about writer-directors," he says. "I was worried [he] just has his vision of what he wanted and would not be open. Mike's been pretty open that he didn't envision me in this role. I don't know if I was his first choice, but I got the picture made, so all of a sudden I looked more palatable."