What's with all these late 20th century corporate biopics?
I attempt to answer the question
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Hello Sternal Journalists,
I was just doing my classic scroll-instagram-until-you-forget-what-you-went-there-to-look-up and stumbled across a trailer for the BLACKBERRY movie. This is a movie about the creation of the Blackberry, the world’s first smart phone (that’s what the trailer claims—I have not verified, but it sounds right).
It looks funny and interesting and has Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, two guys who in different ways tend to add (for me) interest-pique-factor to a project when they’re involved. It also feels very familiar.
This week, I watched Air, the Ben Affleck-Matt Damon reunion that tells the story of the creation of Nike’s Air Jordan shoe, and one Nike exec’s quest to get Michael Jordan to agree to even do the show with the company’s at-the-time underdog basketball division.
And then over on Apple TV+, you can see the Taron Egerton-starring Tetris, which is, yes, the story of the creation of the literal blockbuster computer and Game Boy game.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Air and I’m excited to watch both Tetris and Blackberry (I mean I literally still have my Game Boy with Tetris sitting above my toilet for when I want to have a really analog bathroom moment—
—but I’m also just a little curious what the hell is going on. Do we care as a society care about these stories, and if so, why? Why is this the moment that folks are hungry for biopics about nerdy, risk-taking, goofily-dressed white male executives of the 80s and 90s?
This is not a bad thing necessarily. Of course, you could argue that that’s an awful lot of white dudes from the past for an industry (film) that purports to be so intentionally trying to be forward-looking and diverse. ← That’s not great.
But I’m just saying that, while I often grimble and grumble about IP and “nobody tells new stories” and all this, I am briefly getting off that soapbox to just head-scratch a bit. More than anything, it’s weird that this cluster of movies exists.
Pausing here to say that, while procrastinating writing this, I navigated over to the New York Times dot com and found THIS ARTICLE:
This gives me two thoughts:
Goddamn it, scooped again by the Barbaro Bandits.
I’m onto something.
It’s—what with having the backing of a major media organization with a house style and writers whose editors are real humans rather than a bastard turducken of narcissism, fear, and imposter syndrome—a better piece than I would write.
But it doesn’t answer the question of why we crave this. That’s it’s foolish to do so, but I’m a fool and I do so, so here we go:
I think it’s Adam McKay’s fault. I think all of this stems from 2015’s The Big Short, the first movie in my recent memory to take something very sleek and sexy (money) and do a biopic about the nerdiest, most in-the-weeds, least sleek and sexy aspects of it, buuuut still shoot it in a sleek and sexy way.1
It’s good formula: take a thing that is culturally massive and show us the meek or otherwise derpy men who were responsible for bringing it into the world. Shoot it with the gravitas of the culturally significant thing, and you will engage the audience on a cinematic level while playing the juxtaposition of the derpiness adds a layer of comedy.
If I had to blame anyone else, it would be Elizabeth Holmes. These Nostalgic Product Biopics come on the heels of the multi-year scam season that brought us shows about the failures of Tesla, WeWork, Anna Delvey’s whole thing, and of course Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos.
Perhaps this wave of content is a response to Hollywood having sucked dry all of the corporate intrigue of today2 and realizing they need to start looking to the past.
In summation, it’s very, very weird that in the same year, fictionalized accounts of the respective creations of a famous shoe, a famous phone, and a famous computer game are not just hitting big and small screens, but with clear hopes of being big commercial successes.
It’s perhaps a result of the podcastification of the world having everyone really interested in getting into the nitty-gritty on a topic, and someone like Adam McKay figuring out the way to do that in a way that is still interesting to sit through in a movie theater. It also might have something to do with us as a movie-watching populace getting bored of Theranos-esque stories about companies built around nothing, and craving stories about companies which—ethical or not, necessary or no—were at least building themselves around specific object that were not only tactile in the theoretical sense, but were tactile in our own lives. These are things that many of us have actually touched.
Again, I’m not saying this is bad. I’m certainly not saying it’s good. But I do hope that this is a trend for a year and not many years. To paraphrase something I heard (I think?) Juelz Santana say on (I think?) Drink Champs, “You can be the hot thing forever; you can only be the hot new thing once.”
Every character in every one of these movies knows the maybe Juelz Santana maybe Drinks Champs rule well. Air Jordans and Tetris have both kind of been hot things forever3, but what they are now pails in comparison to the thrill of them being the hot new things.
But there’s space for a lot of games and a lot shoes in the world. Movie theaters only have so many screens. So, industry insiders and creatives who might be planning your next project, let’s not let this one be the hot thing forever. Find that hot new thing.
Speaking of which, here are some hot new things I’m enjoying:
Recommendations
The Data Delusion. Article. In this New Yorker piece, Jill Lepore sketches out a quick history of how we interact with data, from the 1700’s first printing of the Encyclopedia Brittanica to AI. It is whimsical. She is great.
Mazel Tron. Song. I discovered BLP Kosher on TikTok and love him even though I’m not sure if I should. This song with Baby Tron is my favorite.
“Vince Staples Shocking Facts About Ray J.” YouTube Video. If you like Vince Staples, Tyler the Creator, Peter Rosenberg, or Ray J, you will enjoy this 2 minute video.
Articles of Interest. Podcast. It’s back and I’m not tired of telling you all how Avery Trufelman is the greatest podcaster of our generation.
That’s all!
Much love!
Julian
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P.P.S. I didn’t use Chat GPT at all for this one. Kinda tired of it for now. More on that later!
Social Network probably did this first, but I don’t think it played up the discordance quite as much, and I don’t think it brought about a wave the way Big Short did.
Of course, there will be some FTX-SBF biopic soon enough if the genre doesn’t totally lose steam.
Blackberries, as we know, have a slightly different legacy