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New Film: Enemy at the Bill Gates
By Jason Silverman
2:00 a.m. Jan. 15, 2002 PST
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.
See also:
Digital's No Longer Sundance News
Animators Overrun Sundance Online
Indie Filmmaker's Push for 'More'
Lights, Camera, Hollywood Tech
Discover more Net Culture
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 an
d 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 Micr
osoft 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 mur
dered 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.
Related Wired Links:
Digital's No Longer Sundance News
Jan. 10, 2002
Animators Overrun Sundance Online
Dec. 20, 2001
Indie Filmmaker's Push for 'More'
Sep. 20, 2001
Lost Films Found on the Road
June 13, 2001
Online Film Firms Look Offline
June 7, 2001
Laid Off? See a Dot-umentary
April 18, 2001
Some Body Shot Somewhere in Time
Jan. 29, 2001
Indie Films You Can Buy Into
Jan. 24, 2001
Director's Teen 'Chain' Gang
Jan. 22, 2001
Sundances With Films
Jan. 19, 2001
Pushing the Bounds of Net Film
Jan. 19, 2001
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