Since the Deep Horizon platform exploded in April, there’s been no shortage of helping hands offering technology that might help clean up the oil seeping into the Gulf. The problem is that BP doesn’t seem to want a leg up.

The story is the same from Hollywood to Houston to The Hague; from a lone inventor to movie icons to European governments; from free offers to those that tie up resources—thanks but no thanks.

“I've gone down every path I could to get to BP,” Houston inventor Stephen Dvorak said in an interview with Culturemap Houston. “It's like Alice in Wonderland, there's 50 doors and they all lead back to the same website, same phone hotline.”

Dvorak invented a device he calls the SQUID (for Super Quick Underwater Incident Device) that would allow oil to rise through a flexible shroud to the surface where it could be collected. Although he’s reached out to various state and federal officials, including the Coast Guard, he can’t seem to get any love for his idea.

It’s not so strange, perhaps, that a little-known inventor with an unpatented technology can’t get the ear of a frenzied oil company scurrying to fix a very big mess. But the Dutch government, with tried and tested technology in hand, got much the same treatment.

Within three days of the platform explosion, BP was approached by makers of a sweeping arm system that removes oil from seawater, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor. When no reply was forthcoming, the Dutch government used political connections to make the Coast Guard aware of the technology, according to the article. More than a month later, six of the systems—which skim oil and water from the ocean’s surface into a tank where they’re separated—are on their way to the Gulf on loan from the Netherlands. The system can collect about 20,000 gallons of oil every three days, making a month’s delay significant.

“With this amount of oil, you should try to remove it as soon as possible,” Wierd Koops, who helped invent the system, told the CS Monitor. “Nature will do the rest.”

Where inventors and diplomats have struggled, Hollywood has made a bit of headway. BP agreed to test six experimental “Ocean Therapy” units developed by Waterworld actor Kevin Costner and his brother Dan, who is a scientist. The machine, which spins the oil from the water, has been licensed by the Department of Energy since 1993, according to a New York Daily News report.

“It's like a big vacuum cleaner,” Costner's business partner, John Houghtaling told the News. “The machines are basically sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water."

Costner’s Ocean Therapy machines, which come in varying sizes, clean all but one percent of the oil from the water, according to the Los Angeles Times. The largest could clean more than 200,000 gallons of water a day, Houghtaling said. As of late May, BP hadn’t agreed to actually use Costner’s machines, just test them. One reason BP might be wary of technologies like the Dutch system and Ocean Therapy are Environmental Protection Agency regulations that limit returning oiled water to its source, according to the CS Monitor.

Other technologies have also been spurned. A drive to create environmentally sound booms from hair and used nylons, for instance, was rebuffed as infeasible even though they’ve been used in other cleanup efforts, such as the 2007 Cosco Busan spill off the coast of San Francisco. And to prove BP isn’t star struck, James Cameron told the Daily Mail that he was “graciously turned away” after offering the company use of his fleet of submarines and the deepwater filming expertise he gained filming projects such as Titanic and The Abyss. Perhaps the Coast Guard will take him up on the offer.

“The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation,” the Mail quotes him as saying. “Because if you're not monitoring it independently, you're asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene.”