http://news.excite.com/news/r/000511/15/net-virus-entertainment
By Ian Simpson
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The "Love Bug" computer virus that swept the
globe last week shows that the Hollywood
dream machine is way behind the headlines.
Critics and science fiction writers said the malicious program
underscored that even as the movie world gathered at the
Cannes Film Festival in France, the U.S. motion picture industry had
an out-of-date stereotype of hackers and cyber
whizzes.
Science fiction writing is far more imaginative in probing the brave
new world of computers and the Internet, they added.
"I don't think Hollywood is smart enough to imagine that kind of
scenario," said Richard Natale, a writer on film who
contributes frequently to The Los Angeles Times.
>From "WarGames" in 1983 to last year's cyber action film "The Matrix"
and countless movies in between, Hollywood's hackers or computer
hotshots are almost always geeky American white guys dwelling in
suburbs.
But with the real-life Love Virus, the suspected hackers were a trio
of Filipinos in their twenties, living in a downscale Manila
neighborhood, who swiped passwords for a Web surfing safari.
Their transmission of a parasitic virus with the seductive headline
"ILOVEYOU" hit tens of millions of computers round the world,
including some in the British Parliament and the U.S. Pentagon.
The bill for the damage? An estimated $7 billion, and counting.
"It's just the stuff of legends. I can't wait for them to start
selling T-shirts," said Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer and
author of the nonfiction "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on
the Electronic Frontier."
"It's the least likely setting for a virus outbreak I've ever seen,"
Sterling said from his home in Austin, Texas.
Writers and critics said the "Love Bug" showed Hollywood was stuck in
the past. Studios, scriptwriters and directors have been clueless
about the world outside developed countries racing to embrace
computers and the Web, they added.
A.O. Scott, a movie critic at The New York Times, said U.S. movie
makers had set up "kind of an obsolete image" of the computer whiz as
a middle-class white American male.
"This Love Bug may show how universal and democratic the Internet and
facility with computers has become," he said.
Hollywood has had trouble making interesting movies about computers
and the Internet, Scott and other critics said. People sitting at
computer screens or tapping on keyboards itself lacks drama or easy
prospects for storytelling.
"Hollywood has not really figured out how to make interesting movies
about the whole range of technical phenomena," Scott said.
Hollywood could turn to science fiction writing for inspiration about
the wired world.
Such writers as Sterling ("Islands in the Net"), William Gibson
("Neuromancer," "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive"), Michael
Swanwick ("Vacuum Flowers") and John Varley ("Press Enter") have
written novels and short stories about worlds where humans are
increasingly enmeshed with computers.
In particular, Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace," has explored
violent future worlds of all-powerful corporations, technology run
wild and rebellious computer-savvy youth in a subgenre called
"cyberpunk."
TriStar Pictures released his short story "Johnny Mnemonic" as a film
starring Keanu Reeves in 1995. The tale of a courier carrying a
valuable secret stored on a memory chip implanted in his head, the
movie was a critical bomb and only a modest commercial success.
"Most of these surprising news headlines that shock everybody else
generally don't shock science fiction readers, because we're saying,
'We told you so,"' said Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog Science
Fiction and Fact magazine.
*-------------------------------------------------*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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Received on Fri May 12 03:03 CDT 2000