With ‘The Social Network’ Facebook movie premiering in less than six weeks, producers are already looking for the next big nerd film… and the story of Google may be it. According to Deadline New York,
“The founders of Facebook aren’t the only game-changing geeks poised to have their story told on a movie screen. Michael London’s Groundswell Productions has teamed with producer John Morris to acquire movie rights to the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know it. They will use the book as the blueprint for a feature film that tells the story of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the fast rise of the juggernaut web business that made them billionaires.”
London’s Groundswell Productions says
“It’s about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed them. The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict, don’t be evil. At a certain point in the evolution of a company so big and powerful, there are a million challenges to that mandate. Can you stay true to principles like that as you become as rich and powerful as that company has become? The intention is to be sympathetic to Sergey and Larry, and hopefully the film will be as interesting as the company they created.”
Unlike the upcoming film based on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his drunken college buddies wrangling over bits and pieces of the poular social app, Google would be focused more on two nerds attempts to show the world that,
“You can make money without doing evil” and “You can be serious without a suit.”
Google grew from a start up search tool into the world’s biggest portal, and is generally considered ‘the best place in the world to work’ . A movie about Google would be more difficult to market (vicious infighting plays better onscreen than two friends actually making something work) but as a commenter said…:
“paging Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, et. al.
Lots of product placement opportunities in films about Google.”
According to the New York Times, the author of the book the supposed Google adapatation would be from isn’t even sure he wats to negotiate for movie rights:
Ken Auletta, the author of this absorbing, shaggy, name-droppy book, doesn’t seem to like either of them much — he says that Page has a “Kermit the Frog” voice, which isn’t nice, while Brin comes off as a swaggering, efficiency-obsessed overachiever who, at Stanford, aced tests, picked locks, “borrowed” computer equipment from the loading dock and once renumbered all the rooms in the computer science building. “Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers,” Auletta writes — but “cold” seems oddly wrong. Auletta’s own chilliness may be traceable in part to Brin’s and Page’s reluctance to be interviewed. “After months of my kicking at the door, they opened it,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “Google’s founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitize books,” he observes, “but don’t have much interest in reading them.”
Tags: Facebook, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin