How do you make prime-time cultural heroes out of guys who spent their teen years socketing chips into circuit boards? If you're Martyn Burke, writer and director of Pirates of Silicon Valley (see "Clash of the Titans," Wired 7.02, page 48), TNT's 90-minute history of the birth pangs of Apple and Microsoft, you spend less time on all-night debugging sessions and more on drag races, acid trips, and facedowns with dolts who dared to stand in the way of young geniuses making their "dent in the universe."
Anthony Michael Hall - who is to geeks as Joe Pesci is to gangsters - nicely underplays Bill Gates, his eyes oozing cagey anomie. ER's Noah Wyle nails Steve Jobs' body language, and the resemblance is uncanny. There's an awful lot of hindsight in the dialogue, as when dimwitted IBM brass blurt, "The profits are in the computers themselves, not this software stuff." Or when Jobs sprints through clouds of tear gas in Berkeley with Steve Wozniak (played by Joey Slotnick), shouting, "These guys think they're revolutionaries. They're not revolutionaries - we are!"
Of course, all that inspired tinkering in the garage did change the world more than the Yippies' attempted levitation of the Pentagon. There's a fizzy ebullience in seeing the Jolly Roger flapping over Apple headquarters and shaven-headed extras finding their places for the filming of the "1984" Super Bowl spot.
Scenes that try to keep things zippy, however - such as set pieces of Gates crooning "My Way" or busting Travolta moves on roller skates to impress babes in a disco - strain credulity. And while Burke groks Shakespearean resonances in Jobs' progress from callow geek to dethroned king, too often his character is made to utter fortune-cookie Jobs-isms. Burke relies on Jobs' tantrums, and his refusal to acknowledge his daughter Lisa, to outline his hero's tragic dimensions, but we never see below the surface. Hamlet with no inner life is just another slacker, and clunkers like "It's like art, science, and religion, all rolled into one" could only be spoken in the one place more surreal than Silicon Valley: Television Land.
Pirates of Silicon Valley: airs June 20-27. TNT: tnt.turner.com.
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