boyajian@akov68.DEC (Jerry Boyajian) (06/02/84)
I got the following message the other day as it made the rounds of the DEC
Engineering Net. I've stripped off all of the mail headers, but otherwise left
it intact. Read and enjoy. I have a hard time believing it's serious, but when
it comes to Hollywood, who knows?
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From a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal.....
HOW THE TV SOAPERS TURN SILICON VALLEY INTO A PEYTON PLACE
ABC PILOT PROJECT USES SEX AND INTRIGUE, AND VIOLA! HERE IS 'DALLAS ON A CHIP'
By Carrie Dolan
The voluptuous vice president of a semiconductor company bolts into her
boss's office, steaming. She knows he has double-crossed her, thwarting
her efforts to acquire a robot-making company so that he can follow a more
ruthless plan of his own--a plot to steal a competitor's research on
artificial intelligence.
But she's a shrewd as she is shapely, and she threatens to blow the whistle
unless he cuts her in for more cash. Her boss makes a threat of his own:
If she doesn't keep quiet, he will reveal the scandalous secret about her
and the young president of a nearby personal-computer company.
And so life goes in this Northern California community, a hotbed of
technology and lust. This is "Midas Valley," where young wizards spin
silicon into gold. It's a place of fast computers, fast cars and fast
women, and all of them heat up at the touch of an engineer's hand. In
short, this is television.
ABC-TV is spending between $2 million and $3 million to produce this
two-hour high tech soap opera, titled "Midas Valley" but known to wags as
"Dallas on a chip." If the pilot is a success, the show may be a fall TV
series. The story fictionally depicts Silicon Valley, the loosely defined
area about an hour's drive south of San Francisco, which does have its own
sort of glamour. New technologies, new companies, and new fortunes are
created there, and far faster than in, say, Cleveland.
But many people who actually make it in Silicon Valley seem to be
terminally addicted to their devices and more interested in massaging their
data than they are in one another. Their casual conversation can too often
drift off toward wafer-scale integration and true PC-DOS compatibility.
Some call this single-minded devotion to work. Some call it dull.
PRETTIED UP
Such commonplace workaholic traits, however, aren't found in Midas Valley.
The TV techies are models of virility, with plenty of time for play and
playmates galore. They don't tend to speak in jargon. "There are no nerds
in Hollywood's eyes," says Joseph O'Kane, a member of the San Jose, Calif.,
Chamber of Commerce, who saw an early version of the script.
Take, for example, Josh Landau, the fictive young millionaire president of
Lantern Computers, described by the script with some enthusiam: "Josh is
more than rich. He's a fabulous-looking, warm, wry, strong, decent,
farsighted, hardheaded, adventuresome hell-of-a-guy, with a deep sure sense
of himself. And he's unclaimed. Eligible. Boy, is he eligible!"
The multifaceted man is played by James Read, a well-developed package of
suntan, straight teeth, and charm, who recently played Sen. Edward Kennedy
in another yet-to-be-aired TV show. Mr. Read's character and a boyhood
chum founded a personal-computer company in a garage and built it into a
huge, successful concern. Theirs isn't unlike the saga of Steven P. Jobs
and Stephen Woxniak, two young friends who founded Apple Computer Inc.,
from a garage in 1976.
But Mr. Read says he didn't model his character after any actual
entrepreneur. And, for the record, Mt Wozniak is married and has a young
son, and Mr. Jobs is unmarried.
A MEETING OF THE MINDS
In a scene that takes place at a country club full of aesthetically
pleasing people, Josh's attention is diverted from mircoprocessors to the
microtennis-dress of a brilliant, beautiful female doctor (whom he first
met as he stepped out of the shower at a friend's home). Her speciality,
as luck has it, is chip implantation surgery. While waiting for a tennis
court, she explains her struggle to repair diseased brains with integrated
circuits. Alas, she alread is engaged to a semiconductor man.
Research and development of new technologies in Midas Valley has been
considerably less painful than in Silicon Valley. "We made it up, all the
way down the line," says executive producer Clyde Phillips. "Most of these
things exist, but we've just stretched it a little, or made it more
exticing." Lantern Computers, for instance, is patrolled by robot security
guards. Employees enter secured areas of the building only after
submitting to eyeball identification by a retina scanner.
But props on the sets include brand-name products, provided in come cases
by companies eager to get their gizmos plugged on the screen. Certain
items regardless of their state-of-the-art inner beauty, were rejected
"because they didn't look modern, or tomorrow enough," Mr. Phillips says.
For instance, International Business Machine Corp.'s personal computer was
adjuged to ordinary looking to make a guest appearance on the show.
In any case, the show concentrates more on libidos than on light-emitting
diodes. "Technology is just an added attraction," says the amicable Mr.
Phillips, who once taught poetry at college. "I don't even know what these
guys make. I know they make semiconductors, but what's a semiconductor?"
Cast members hsare a similar, jovial lack of expertise. Actor George
Grizzard, who plays the conniving semiconductor boss, says he "cried in the
fifth grade when we hit fractions." But recently he made a sincere effort
to increase his technical sophistication by picking up some brochures at an
IBM store in Beverly Hills. Stephen Elliot, who protrays a
down-on-his-luck robotics maker, jokes that the "only RAMs I know about are
the ones in L.A."
although the television project has been in development for about a year,
the producers haven't yet had time to visit the real Silicon Valley,
located about an hour's plane ride and several life styles from the Los
Angeles area, where the pilot was filmed. Producer Robert Lewis, a
27-year-old from New Jersey, who conceived the show's premise, asks, "What
if we went to Silicon Valley and it didn't look like Silicon Valley?
People have an image of how it looks. We need buildings that say
'high-tech' on film. Maybe some places are more convincing than the real
thing. Of course, I don't know, since I haven't been there."
The true Silicon Valley has some snazzy buildings, but many young companies
are in rumble homes. Rapidly expanding technology-concerns grab whatever
warehouse space they can get. There aren't any skyscrapers, and most
companies favor functional buildings that tend to look alike.
The headquarters of Lantern Computers, on the other hand, is what Mr. Lewis
calls "an incredible, high-tech looking, monolithic building," which
actually houses the Southern California offices of an insurance company.
Shanna Reed, the actress who plays the semiconductor siren, is one of the
few crew members who went to Silicon Valley to tour facilities of
technology companies. "They all work in little cubicles up there," she
says. "Our offices have to have closed doors. You can't carry on
espionage and affairs in a cubicle."
Her character, who the script says "dresses to get arrested and is build to
get away with murder," has a lavish, spacious office, a rarity at Silicon
Valley companies. Then, too, she is a female executive, which isn't very
common in Silicon Valley, either.
A scout for the show did contact certain Silicon Valley companies earlier
this year about the possibility of on-site filming. Hewlett-Packard Co.,
based in Palo Alto, Calif., declined the offer, because, a spokesman says,
"We were fearful the show might be somewhat unrealistic. We thought it
might be a Hollywood version of life in the Valley." Still, the fact that
on the show actor Robert Stack, who plays a pillar of the computer
community, has a Hewlett-Packard touchscreen computer in the bedroom of his
mansion is all right with Hewlett-Packard. "After all," the company
spokesman says, "the HP 150 is for touching."
As word of the "Midas Valley" pilot tricked through Silicon Valley, the set
was swamped with calls from real tech types, offering to lend credibility
to the cast by joining it. All the offers were politely spurned.
The networks will decide this spring whether the tangles affairs of
computer engineers will appeal to a mass TV audience. "Midas Valley" is
one of dozens of competing pilots, and usually only about one in four makes
it to television. But Robert Morgan, a Burbank-bases publicist working for
the Midas show, says he thinks it has a good chance. "Everybody wants to
know what's going on with computers, and what's going on in Silicone
Valley." (Mr. Morgan periodically refers to the place as "Silicone"
Valley, a mix-up that he jests might stem from a job he once had doing
public relations for Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.)
Still, winning a spot in the fall line-up won't be easy. "Midas Valley"
faces competition from such promising entries as "The Sheriff and the
Astronaut," the story of a lovely astronaut who helps her boyfriend solve
crimes in a rural Southern town during breaks in her NASA training.
--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC Maynard, MA)
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