Thread: Programming in Hollywood

Last night I saw a movie titled "How to Make a Monster" in one of the TV stations. It was a movie about making a game in a tight schedule played by the guy who played as Rex in Desperate Housewives and a girl who played in The Faculty. It's pretty decent actually. Although there's some mistakes here and there, the movie itself I think came pretty close to the industry. It showed the competition and working environment of a game developer. And for the mistakes, there's tons of 'em. One mistake that I particularly saw was they interpreted programmers as "Super human". Why the hell did game developers model a 3D? We're not 3D artists. Why the hell did game developers make sound effects and musics? We're not sound engineers. Other mistakes were the wrong technical jargons, the usual "All GUI interface" (even the fail-safe boot is in GUI) thing that was common in Hollywood's movie about computers. All in all, the movie was pretty entertaining. And there's a moral of the story too.

And I came to wonder, when will Hollywood portray progammers as they really are? Never I suppose.

>And I came to wonder, when will Hollywood portray progammers as they really are?
About the same time that a single bullet stops blowing up vehicles. Programming is simply too boring to the layman for an accurate movie to sell.

I always remember at this point "Hackers" - what it will show if instead of the nice graphical and fully mythical hackers attack on the Corporation network it was shown as it goes in the real life? Will somebody see this film?

I always thought the movie "Antitrust" gave a fairly good representation of programmers. It has real coding segments in it with real code. It even pokes fun at Microsoft...not under their real name of course...

Rent "Antitrust". Tell me what you think.

http://www.drivl.com/posts/view/494

^^^Link is funny ahluka

I loved antitrust davidP. I remember my tech teacher showing it to me in high school.

i always had doubts about that alien mothership

That's cause you all saw the second version of the movie. If you saw Independence Day on it's premier night then they showed a scene where Steve Jobs morphed into a giant alien and attacked Area 51. Will Smith inevitably defeated him with his hip-hop skills and the world was happy again. The hacking scenes in that movie were actually really well thought out, but after a few showings, Jobs threatened to sue not only because they used his face without his permission but also because they did all the special effects on a PC. That scene was immediately taken out and a new version was shipped to all theaters.

>>It ranks right up there with the joke about the user who uses his cdrom tray as a cupholder, I'm pretty sure I'd heard that joke a thousand times by 1997.

Well, it did happen here. When my friend was an instructor to a bunch of computer-illiterates, one of them used the CD-Rom for a cup holder. And when it closes, the whole drinks poured on to him. And guess what, they are all in the government. And to think that I elected them. It gives me a shiver to think how the country will be better with those guys around. :P