In anticipation of three new limited series aboutcontroversial startup CEOs(Showtime’s“Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber”on Sunday, Feb. 27; Hulu’s“The Dropout”on Thursday, March 3; and Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed” on March 18), we recommend streaming the following movies and shows about tech visionaries.
In the interest of further research, let’s start with documentaries related to the new shows.
发明者:血液在硅谷”
The best resources on Theranos founderElizabeth Holmes’real-life journey are John Carreyrou’s 2018 book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” and The Chronicle’scoverage of her trial. This 2019 HBO documentary is a close third.
Interviews with former employees, archival video of Holmes and a fascinating facsimile of the inner workings of the company’s faulty “Edison” blood-analysis device offer a fuller picture than most accounts of the Theranos experience. This doc paints Holmes as less evil mastermind than overly reliant on the first part of the “fake it till you make it” ethos.
Watch it:Available to stream onHBO Maxand other major platforms.
‘WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn’
“WeCrashed,” the podcast precursor to the forthcoming AppleTV+ limited series, is great for the broad strokes of WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann’s story. This 2021 Hulu documentary surpasses that podcast simply because the visual element is so key to Neumann.
“Once you choose to enter a WeWork, you choose to be part of something more ‘we’ than me,” Neumann once told the New York Times, grossly overstating the emotional pull of coworking spaces with foosball tables. But Neumann’s pronouncements do not seem as grandiose when you see him spout them in this doc’s archival footage. You get the appeal.
The 6-foot-5 Neumann takes up a lot of space, and his abundant charisma and childlike joy fill what’s left. When a former WeWork employee says in the doc that she had to be out of his presence to think clearly, it makes sense.
The spell wears off when we see footage of WeWork company retreats — alcohol- and hype-soaked events that look like what would happen if someone yelled “Fyre” at a NXIVM volleyball game.
Watch it:Available to stream onHulu.
‘The Social Network’
甚至在Facebook目前的争议之前,马克Zuckerberg did not inspire the Bill Gates- or Steve Jobs-level adulation his success seemed to warrant. That’s partly because this 2010 Oscar-winning box office hit — written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher and released early in Zuckerberg’s rise — painted the Facebook co-founder (played by Jesse Eisenberg) as petty and insecure. The movie also presents Zuckerberg as witheringly funny, but that was not the takeaway.
The movie tracks Facebook’s origins at Harvard and early legal battles. Filled with intrigue and directed by Fincher with a razor precision that pierces Sorkin’s more flowery instincts, “Social Network” should have won the best picture Oscar in 2011 over “The King’s Speech.” It’s the more indelible film: It forever colored views of not just Zuckerberg but also Eisenberg, who’s still hard to picture without a hoodie; and it launched Andrew Garfield, who played Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and is currently up for a best lead actor Oscar for “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” into movie stardom.
Watch it:Available to stream onNetflixand other major platforms.
‘Steve Jobs’
Screenwriter Sorkin’s 2015 tech world follow-up screams “You think my dialogue is stagy? I’llshowyou stagy.” Directed by Danny Boyle, and shot at Cupertino’s Flint Center and San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House and Davies Symphony Hall, this is a literal backstage drama.
It centers on three key product launches during Apple co-founder Jobs’ storied career — the Macintosh computer, NeXT computer and iMac — and goes heavy on walk-and-talk Sorkin scenes with Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, the CEO’s marketing chief and conscience.
It all works, because Fassbender, although naturally grimmer than Jobs, sells the tech giant’s perfectionism and ability to command a room, and either possesses, or can mimic, high intelligence. You can see him, as Jobs, thinking two steps ahead of everyone else. Winslet plays Jobs’ right-hand woman as an eye roller rather than long sufferer: Joanna clearly believes in Jobs, despite his dismissive, callous behavior toward others.
Jobs comes off worse here than Zuckerberg did in “Social Network,” yet this film, released four years after Jobs’ death, only enhanced his legend as the exacting genius who inspired legions of hopeful tech founders to adopt his my-way-or-the-280 attitude.
Watch it:Available to stream onNetflixand other major platforms.
‘Ex Machina’
This superb 2014 sci-fi — but not all that fi — film about a megalomaniac tech CEO (a magnificently sleazy Oscar Isaac) working on a sentient robot (played by Alicia Vikander and a lot of computer-generated imagery) offers a reminder that whatever misdeeds real-life tech CEOs commit, itcould be worse. And maybe easily, since the AI technology and data mining that fuel the onscreen experiments here seem within reach.
Vikander’s curious and pleading expressions give the robot a sense of humanity the inventor could not foresee. But this is Isaac’s film. His tech-bro Colonel Kurtz ambles around his pristine, forest-nestled midcentury modern lair in sloppy sweats, with a beer in hand, marbles mostly lost but self-satisfied gleam intact.
Watch it:Available to stream onShowtimeand other major platforms.
‘Halt and Catch Fire’
Set in Texas and Silicon Valley (but mostly shot in Atlanta), this 2014-17 AMC series follows four tech entrepreneurs (the uniformly excellent Lee Pace, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy and Kerry Bishé, who’s also in “Super Pumped”) from the 1980s personal computing revolution through 1990s startup web communities and search engines.
The series’ rise-fall-and-rise-again narrative is repetitive, but not to the degree it was on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” The four characters’ complex interpersonal relationships held “Halt and Catch Fire” together, with Pace and Davis particularly good as prototypical tech visionaries who lack the time or emotional equipment for a romantic relationship but try one, anyway. The final season’s focus on the female characters’ friendship was unexpected — and delightful in its emphasis on creativity and entrepreneurship as their primary bond.
Watch it:Available to stream onAMC+and other major platforms.
‘Inventing Anna’
Within this stretched-out Shonda Rhimes Netflix limited series about real-life pretend heiress Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner) lies a more compact and intriguing story line with Anna’s boyfriend Chase (Saamer Usmani), a fictional tech entrepreneur reportedly based on a real Delvey beau.
Usmani bucks the arch Shondaland-branded acting style favored by his castmates for a more authentic approach, or at least authentic to tech entrepreneurs. Chase’s striver energy and sincere belief in a fanciful idea — an app that analyzes dreams — both track, and his little lies seem benign in the context of Anna’s long con.
Watch it:Available to stream onNetflix.