PARK CITY, Utah -- Perhaps the most chilling marketing gimmick this week at the Sundance Film Festival is a logo showing a broken set of spectacles.
The enigmatic spectacles have been popping up on T-shirts, press kits and posters throughout this bustling ski town. During the weekend the context was revealed: They are Bill Gates' glasses, broken soon after his supposed assassination.
The film Nothing So Strange, which premiered at Slamdance on Sunday, imagines Gates' murder and its aftermath. It's a tale of paranoia and police corruption, of conspiracy theorists and grassroots activism. And it comes with a brilliant and ingenious Internet component -- an entire Web universe of memorials to Bill Gates and conspiracy theorist sites.
Director Brian Flemming began working on the film after attending a November conference in Dallas of researchers who study John F. Kennedy's assassination. Flemming began to wonder: What would a contemporary assassination look like? Who would be the target?
"It seemed to me, with the growing divide between the rich and the poor, that the violence might take the form of a class war," Flemming says. "So naturally it seemed that Bill Gates would be a primary target. And then I thought, 'What if this happened right here in my own neighborhood, and the Rampart Division of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) conducted the investigation?'"
Flemming and producer Brian Clark realized that part of the furor around a major assassination would take place on the Web. So they built several sites that extensively detailed the crime and its aftermath. The content is so ambitious and self-enclosed that one wonders: Do the sites exist to promote the film, or vice versa?
"From the very beginning of this project we saw the potential to tell broader stories on the Web then we could ever fit into one feature film," Clark says.
"I still think most of Hollywood doesn't get the Web, which has been relegated to marketing departments along with poster design and television advertisements. (The studios) approach the Web as a way to promote product and end up missing out on the incredible opportunities it provides for storytelling and interacting with fans."
As a pseudo documentary, Nothing So Strange is pitch-perfect, more closely resembling Errol Morris' crime film The Thin Blue Line than a mockumentary like This Is Spinal Tap. Flemming went as far as to send his fictional characters into real-life situations; in one, his lead actor addresses an LAPD commission meeting and is dragged off by two burly cops.
The Web content, too, opts for subtlety over point-blank satire. One Bill Gates memorial site includes the Walt Whitman poem Oh Captain! My Captain! Another has flickering candles and a top-10 list of reasons why the Microsoft founder will be missed.
Some visitors to the sites have wondered about the ethical issues -- is it OK to imagine the assassination of a living, breathing mogul, just for the purposes of a film project? Flemming -- who works on a Macintosh -- saw no problem with knocking off Gates in Nothing So Strange.
"It is shocking to depict the assassination of Bill Gates.... (But) the shock gives way to a story about class, power and the search for truth," he says. "This film does not put Bill Gates' life at risk any more than the movie South Park did.
"In fact, that movie went even farther than we do -- it showed a character killing Gates because he was unhappy with Gates lying about his inferior software. Our film in no way shows Gates doing anything wrong -- he's murdered while giving away money to a charity."
And how is Gates handling his assassination? A Gates' spokesman says, "It's very disappointing that a movie maker would do something like this."
