By Garry Maddox
The opening scene of the 2010 hit movie, The Social Network, is a cracking piece of screenwriting.
Nineteen-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) – fast-talking, conceited and obnoxious – is desperately trying to impress his girlfriend at drinks until she has finally had enough.
Movies about tech bros ... clockwise from top right: The Social Network, BlackBerry and Dumb Money.Credit: Composite
“You are probably going to be a very successful computer person,” she says in a zingy slap-down written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. “You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd.
“I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
Zuckerberg goes back to his room and creates a campus website called FaceMash, that eventually evolves into Facebook. The social media site had reached 500 million members by the time director David Fincher turned it into one of the buzziest movies of a year that also included Inception and Black Swan.
It was the start of Hollywood’s fascination with not just the internet and social media apps that have taken over modern life but their brilliant but often strange and nerdy creators.
Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.Credit: Sony
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been the subject of three movies since The Social Network. Justin Long played him in the comedy, iSteve, then Ashton Kutcher in the more serious Jobs, and Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs. Master documentary maker Alex Gibney made Steve Jobs: The Machine In The Machine.
A media website that emerged as a voice for a new kind of underground journalism, WikiLeaks, has also fascinated filmmakers. Alex Williams played founder Julian Assange in Australian director Robert Connolly’s Underground: The Julian Assange Story, and Benedict Cumberbatch did likewise in The Fifth Estate.
Gibney made We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which Assange hated so much he fired off an email of condemnation from the Ecuadorian embassy in London to this writer. “This US filmmaker has lost objectivity and perspective, probably as a result of WikiLeaks decision to not engage with them,” he wrote.
The latest movie going behind the scenes of a tech phenomenon is BlackBerry, an offbeat comic drama from actor-director Matt Johnson about the meteoric rise and fall of the early smartphone. It opens in cinemas next week.
Based on the bestselling book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, it’s a drolly entertaining tale that follows Canadian tech nerds and best friends Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) as their breakthrough smartphone is turned into a status symbol by ruthless salesman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) in the early 2000s.
Once Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007, BlackBerry started to become obsolete.
“People think that Blackberry failed because the iPhone arrived on the scene and to some extent, that’s correct,” co-writer Matthew Miller has said. “But what was far more interesting to us was to dive into the human aspects and try to figure out why they couldn’t anticipate what iPhone would do to their company.”
That ties in with what Fincher said about The Social Network just before its release. He didn’t think audiences would be interested just because they were Facebook users; it was a Shakespearean tale about friendship and betrayal. If Shakespeare had written about tech bros, that is.
Going up ... then down: Jay Baruchel (left) and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry.Credit: Paramount
“Here’s this guy who’s invented this incredible way for everybody to connect, and it’s all about the acrimony surrounding the invention and how no one can stand to be in the same room with each other now,” Fincher said.
Many of these movies contribute to a Hollywood trend that could be summarised as “how famous brands became famous brands”.
Ben Affleck’s Air, which ran in cinemas before streaming on Prime Video this year, is about Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a young Michael Jordan in the 1980s. Jon S. Baird’s Tetris, on Apple TV, is about the Cold War dramas behind the launch of a famous video game that same decade.
The Beanie Bubble, also on Apple TV, is about the Beanie Babies toy obsession that took off in the 1990s. Flamin’ Hot, on Disney+, is a drama about a former Frito-Lay employee who claims to have created the popular American snack, Cheetos.
Taron Egerton, Sofia Lebedeva and Nikita Efremov in Tetris.Credit: Apple
The brilliance of Barbie is that director Greta Gerwig could have made a film about how Ruth Handler invented the iconic doll or sent Barbie and Ken on an adventure in Barbie Land. But she created something much sharper and funnier that included both of these storylines while also being a subversive comedy about feminism that satirises manufacturer Mattel.
Nostalgia for Air Jordans, Tetris and Barbie is part of the appeal for audiences. But there is a perverse joy in seeing Zuckerberg, Jobs and other tech icons skewered for personal flaws at the same time as they are lionised for their life-changing achievements.
There is pleasure in watching the wealthy suffer in the next tech bros movie headed for cinemas. Dumb Money, out in October, is a comic drama directed by Australian Craig Gillespie about how ragtag amateur traders on Reddit banded together two years ago to take down hedge funds that had been betting that video game retailer GameStop’s shares would fall.
Ordinary people got rich, Wall Street insiders lost huge sums. If Shakespeare was writing about tech bros, he would have loved that story.
Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.