With a little help from his friends

On the Santa Clarita set of "King of California," Michael Douglas is hanging by his neck from a rope attached to a dusty attic chandelier. He struggles, choking, kicking and rotating slowly, until his energy is spent. By the time Evan Rachel Wood enters the room, he is still, the dust settling in the slanted afternoon light, the chandelier clinking a requiem that is only slightly premature.

Due in L.A. and New York theaters Friday and expanding on Sept. 28, the $10-million dramedy from first-time writer-director Mike Cahill stars Douglas as a bipolar jazz musician who tries to convince his 16-year-old daughter, Miranda, played by Wood, that there is Spanish gold buried beneath a suburban Costco. The two embark on a quixotic adventure with the aid of an old journal, a geodetic survey map, a compass and an astrolabe.

Cahill, who spent years living in Ojai as a novelist, reached the end of his own rope several times while trying to get "King of California" off the ground. He wrote a draft of the script a decade ago, but it wasn't until he did a revision and showed it to Alexander Payne, whom he first befriend- ed at UCLA film school in the late 1980s, that the real work began.

"It's the type of script that if Mike Cahill were to have, God forbid, a terrible accident, I would have wanted to direct," says Payne, who welcomed Cahill to the "Sideways" preproduction meetings and set. "I gave it to Michael London because I was making 'Sideways' with him at the time, and I said, 'You should produce this.' He said, 'Why don't you produce it with me?' And I've never forgiven him. I was actually the schmuck producer on set sometimes, sitting by the monitor with my cellphone. I mean, I felt like an idiot. And it's a job I hope never to have again!"

Despite the team behind "Sideways" attached as producers, it took three years to secure financing for the offbeat and challenging film. At least two deals fell apart, one because Cahill didn't want to substitute Albuquerque for Southern California. "It just doesn't look like California. Nothing does," says the San Francisco-born Cahill, who collects California artifacts and reads extensively about the state's history.