This week Snowden is released, continuing a popular trend in Hollywood films that focuses specifically on the people who make the Information Age a media firestorm. Edward Snowden is perhaps the most popular one, Citizenfour made him a household name, Snowden (starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is bound to make him a legacy. Depicting icons of the Information Age has become a popular way to explore topics of the modern world. In The Social Network (2010), David Fincher made a film of lost human connection in a digitally connected world. The Fifth Estate (2013) sought to de-mythologize one of the Information Age’s most controversial personalities. Steve Jobs (2015) explored three timeframes of a man’s life to highlight both a personal growth and digital evolution. These are five stories of the Information Age that Hollywood has still yet to tell.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page
WHO ARE THEY?: They founded the search engine you’re probably using right now (hint: it’s Google).
WHY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT THEM?: Like The Social Network (2010) and like Steve Jobs (2015), the story of how “Google” became a household name is a classic “rags-to-riches” (so-to-speak) narrative, replete with stories of humble beginnings, head offices located in a household garage, idealistic visionaries and a decade of personal/business friendships.
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim
WHO ARE THEY?: Founders of a multimedia platform you probably consume more than television.
WHY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT THEM?: The story of the three former PayPal employees, ultimately becoming founders of YouTube, spans more than ten years and, surpassing the programming gunk and litigious prattling that went behind YouTube’s creation, their story is ultimately becomes an engaging study on society’s collective desire to broadcast themselves to the world.
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Bill Gates
WHO IS HE?: Only the wealthiest man in the world. Oh, and he’s also a founder of Microsoft.
WHY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT HIM?: Why not? There’s three dramatic interpretations of Steve Jobs made only to show how much of a megalomaniac he was. Bill Gates, however, seems more deeply ingrained to the information age. His role in the conception of the modern computer is nothing short of essential. It starts at age 13 when he first saw a computer, moving to when he was banned by his school for hacking into them, only to then be hired by the same people to debug the very computers he hacked into. Then in University, he spent more time selling computers than as student. We all know where the story ends, but it’s a surprise Hollywood hasn’t tackled this project yet.
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Mark Klein
WHO IS HE?: He is a whistleblower responsible for exposing the NSA stealing our private information (on a mass scale). This happened almost a decade before Edward Snowden did it.
WHY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT HIM?: There’s something eerily cinematic (think The Insider or JFK) about an every man, working as a technician for AT&T, discovering something deeply sinister happening under his (and the public’s) nose. Even eerier was that the amassing of “private” information, not only from AT&T customers but people around the globe, was all happening inside a single room (“641A”), where it had access to internet traffic on a global scale.
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Chelsea Manning
WHO IS SHE?: Formerly known as Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning is an army intelligence analyst who uncovered and released thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.
WHY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT HER?: The story of Chelsea Manning is an ongoing one. It starts with a young Manning joining the military as an intelligence analyst and, upon leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, it ends with her current arrest (and subsequent hunger strike). Perhaps even more interesting is the story of Adrian Lamo, a threat analyst Manning confided in, who ultimately fingered her to the government—he was promptly labelled a “Benedict Arnold” by the media who supported Manning.
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