Antitrust (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antitrust
Film poster
Directed by	Peter Howitt
Produced by	Keith Addis, David Nicksay
Written by	Howard Franklin
Starring	Ryan Phillippe, Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani, Tim Robbins, Douglas McFerran, Richard Roundtree, Tygh Runyan, Yee Jee Tso
Music by	Don Davis
Cinematography	John Bailey
Editing by	Zach Staenberg
Release date(s)	2001
Running time	108 min
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

Antitrust is a 2001 film directed by Peter Howitt and written by Howard Franklin. The cast included Ryan Phillippe, Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani, Tim Robbins, Douglas McFerran, Richard Roundtree, Tygh Runyan, and Yee Jee Tso. Outside the United States, this film is titled Conspiracy.com.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film is a thriller portraying young idealistic programmers working at startup companies and a large corporation (NURV) which offers money, a playful working environment and creative opportunities to talented programmers if they are willing to work for them. The charismatic CEO of NURV seems at first to be good natured, but eventually the hero of the story starts to unravel the terrible hidden truth of NURV's operation. The film concludes with the collapse of NURV and the arrest of NURV CEO Gary Winston.

[edit] Trivia

Several Dandy Warhols songs appear in this movie.
Tim Robbins' CEO character appears to be based on Microsoft founder Bill Gates, while at the same time exhibiting some of the trademark characteristics of Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Then-Sun CEO Scott McNealy makes a cameo appearance.
Miguel de Icaza makes a cameo appearance. Behind the scenes, Miguel assisted in designing the computer screenshots (in GNOME) used in the movie.
The director Peter Howitt makes a cameo appearance as a homeless man.
Phillippe and Cook's characters are shown pumping their own gasoline at the John's Landing Chevron. The movie's story takes place in Portland, Oregon, and it is illegal for customers to pump their own gasoline in the state of Oregon. The pump island is marked for Mini Serve and the pump itself is even labelled "NO SELF SERVICE".
After the movie's release, savvy netizens tried to look up NURV's "website". Apparently, pranksters had created redirect websites so when people typed in www.nurv.(org/com/net), they were redirected to Microsoft's website. Also, some WHOIS lookups of these websites referred to Microsoft's address of its head office in Redmond, Washington.
One of the characters was also called Redmond, near the end of the movie, alluding to Microsoft's head office.
Parts of the movie depicting the Nurv campus were filmed at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The DVD release of the film contains several scenes cut from the final print in a Deleted Scenes feature. One of these scenes, a sex scene between two characters in the film, only appears in the Region 2 and Region 4 editions of the DVD, having been cut from the film to maintain a PG-13 rating and the sequence is not included on the current Region 1 DVD edition.
When the main character is in the nursery and executes a command to display all programmers currently under surveillance, one of the monitors shows a person wearing a red hat. Considering the fact that the monitors are black and white, this is probably an allusion to Red Hat Linux, a commercially-supported version of the Linux operating system.