| Unless you can sell their stories in the time proven 127 minute, 2 peaks setup and market them to a major studio, I doubt it will get any traction. The only other option would be that the people who care about it fund it, but even though that pool might seem large inside of the tech microcosmos, it's comparitively small, and you'll have a low budget movie that has trouble being shown in theaters. Engelbart could actually make a movie character, given his obsession with improving the human intellect through computers. It's questionable though whether you can work his life into a movie script that has popular apeal whilst respecting the work he has done. Borlaugs work could be worked into a movie as well, but it suffers from the same problems that making a movie about Engelbart has. It's tough creating an accurate portrayal of his life whilst having a dramatic story arch in there. That's part of the reason why the Social Network has such strange set of priorities. I doubt that the court case and the unrequited love story were integral parts in Facebook becomming Facebook, but they fit the story, and the love story likely beat the film over the 2 demographics line. So in any case, we're the best you can do is either a small film that represents their life accurately (with all the nitpicking that will come with it), or a huge film that twists their lives into 127 minutes screentime and will likely irritate the very people that asked for it. Because if Universal went out and made a biopic about Dennis Richie, there'd be a 1809 Comment thread discussing how they didn't put enough focus on his work in kernel design. Were better off without a big movie about any of them, however much that may hurt. What really confuses me is why there isn't a major movie about Richard Feynman. His life is a movie script. Worked on nuclear missles, had his wife, and longtime love interest die of tuberculosis (granted, there is a movie about that part), and so much other stuff that would just fit perfectly. But I digress. |