Oh that's easy with a character piece, you start out at a low point (eg walking in to find FDA inspectors turning the place over) flash back to story of the meteoric rise during which you get to know the character (but not too well) and then end at a crossroads so the audience leaves speculating about what she would do and what they'd do if it were them.
It's a perfect role for Jennifer Lawrence since she can subvert her own stereotype. The woman's a genius.
The reasoning, is that it's fresh in the media and minds of media consumers. In a year or two most of the public that happened to hear about Theranos - almost exclusively due to the scandal - will entirely have forgotten that it ever existed in the first place. Consumer memory for this sort of thing is extremely short, unless you're talking Enron scale events (which Theranos is not, financially it's a disaster the scale of Webvan).
How is it crass? Are we supposed to have a period of mourning for the fraud that Holmes unleashed on the world with potentially life threatening implications?
Money. Hollywood is running out of ideas and they've rebooted/re-imagined/re-released/sequelized/etc everything.
So while we are debating whether to watch ghostbusters or independence day ( and whether our choices make us sexist or not), they'll be busy with this silly movie/non-story.
It's amazing how the media took a non-story and made it into a story and now they are going to make a movie out of a non-story they turned into a story.
This is akin to a firefighter arsonist setting fires all over town so that he can have more work or a greedy doctor intentionally giving his patients poison so that he'll be able to drum up more business.
It's circular and incestuous and wrong on so many levels. Like a snake swallowing its own tail.
When Hollywood trots out an endless procession of superhero sequels dumbed down for a global audience you can complain about greed and lament that they've run out of ideas.
When Hollywood mythologizes a real story that has captured the public imagination and is emblematic of our era, it's Hollywood at it's finest. It's Hollywood doing exactly what it ought to be doing but rarely does.
> When Hollywood mythologizes a real story that has captured the public imagination and is emblematic of our era, it's Hollywood at it's finest. It's Hollywood doing exactly what it ought to be doing but rarely does.
The problem is that Hollywood sometimes "mythologizes" a real story in the vernacular, non-academic sense of the quoted term: It adopts a false narrative, often in the form of a conspiracy theory, which then gets embedded in our collective cultural memory for a long time. (Examples: Amadeus; Zero Dark Thirty; Oliver Stone's JFK [0].)
Another version is when Hollywood creates a false narrative, or sub-narratives, in the name of "making a catchier story line" and with the excuse of "artistic license," which unjustly damage the reputations of real people. (Examples: Spotlight and All the President's Men. [1] [2].)
Hollywood didn't do that to Amadeus; Peter Shaffer did. It was a very successful play (and even further from a historical document) before it became a period movie.
JFK is another odd example; the movie was notorious as a departure from the historical record, and cemented Stone's reputation as a conspiracy enthusiast. Very shortly after the film was released, that reputation became part of the marketing for the movie!
I don't have a problem with that. A generation from now we'll have the Theranos movie, and no one will be too uptight about the specifics of what happened- that's a job for journalists and historians, they're a different breed of storyteller than what you conventionally find in Hollywood, with different goals. It's more important to get the tone right than the details.
I mean, the biggest movie made about the vietnam war was 'Apocalypse Now'. It was made up. None of that actually happened, but it set the tone for how the war is remembered for millions who were never actually there. As factual accounts get passed through the generations they become myths, and myths are what they are because they're worth remembering.
And with regards to Holmes reputation, well, from where she's at now, there's nowhere to go but up. As for all her investors: they deserve what they've got coming.
> with regards to Holmes reputation, well, from where she's at now, there's nowhere to go but up
It's not impossible to imagine a telling of this story that's actually sympathetic to Holmes: a very smart young woman has an idea, the idea leads to a ton of money and hype being dropped on her head, and by the time she realizes the idea won't work she's been strapped into a rocket that's going to launch regardless. A story of being trapped inside a prison of one's own creation.
(I'm not saying this angle necessarily fits the facts, but movies are stories first, and this would be one way to turn Theranos into an audience-engaging story.)
> A generation from now we'll have the Theranos movie, and no one will be too uptight about the specifics of what happened .... It's more important to get the tone right than the details.
That strikes me as a very Stalinist take on things. I would paraphrase it as the movie director's saying: It doesn't matter how many actual, real, flesh-and-blood people I hurt; what matters is that I advance what I imagine to be the greater long-term good. (Or, classically: The ends justify the means.)
The article ends with "fall from grace of cinematic proportions" but honestly, what a dull topic. A bunch of people building some equipment, filing (or failing to file) paperwork, a few business deals without due diligence and Henry Kissinger.
Unless they add some guns and car chases (not joking here, just hyperbole) it's hard to see how they could make any more than a 90-minute snoozefest. Dramatic music won't be enough.
Well, great stories happen to those who can tell them; I'm sure there's interesting POV to be explored if they dig deep. That said, considering the average Hollywood film, I wouldn't bet on it.
I've always found it odd how the media puts so much emphasis on the founder prior to success or public release of the actual product. I can't help but think if Holmes were a different demographic (i.e. an Asian or Black man), they wouldn't be making a movie about this.
You find it odd that the media would focus so much on the person who has had the most singular and direct influence over a controversial company's decisionmaking?
As an Asian, yeah, sure, I'll definitely agree that Asians don't get much media/movie treatment. Not sure I see your point. Who do you want the media to focus on in the Theranos case?
Perhaps if Holmes weren't a photogeneic young white woman, she wouldn't have received the same attention from VC and immensely influential U.S. political players, which would also reduce the amount of media attention she ultimately got. Hard to separate the variables from this equation.
Gender likely didn't help with VC/political players -- that was primarily family connections from Holmes dad. The media hype probably got a boost from gender.
Maybe, though she's already not the stereotypical rich white young male founder. She does check 2/3...
I still think the story of the rather epic rise and fall of a company that promised so much, achieved an insanely high valuation, then turned out to be essentially a fraud makes for a pretty good plot. I'm guessing if someone were to make the movie at all, the ethnicity or gender of the founder wouldn't really overshadow the sheer weirdness of the story.
Well, the entire point of this story is how unwarranted hype can cause disaster, which seems like you should like it then? I'm not exactly sure what point you're making with the minority mentions though. Do you mean there would not have been the disaster-inducing hype in the first place if the founder wasn't a well-connected white person?
Given how much movies often cost it seems like you could indeed fund a really really really dysfunctional team to build a very bad idea as a startup, watch the fireworks, and make a movie from it.
Indeed. It seems like we're waiting less and less time between a news story and a movie about it. I suspect if we waited longer, the tone of the movies would be different, with the additional perspective of anything that has yet to be announced or go public.
Why do you say that? While we may not know the ultimate fate of the Edison machines or the company, there is already a compelling story that can be told, one that most are unaware of the details.
Doing it soon when the company is still in natural news cycles helps build interest for the movie. My only worry with something so soon is real world repercussions if Hollywood decides to play too fast and loose with the facts.
It has been a well established medical fact that the blood from a pinpick does not provide a representative blood sample for most medical tests, yet you are worried about Hollywood playing too fast and loose with the facts? Maybe you should be more worried about Silicon Valley selling the hype and ripping off investors.
People who believe in science fiction should be working in Hollywood, not Silicon Valley. The problem is they make more money in SV.
Do we know how they will portray this? Is this going to be the story of start up that didn't execute properly or be a story about how women struggle in the tech industry? I really don't expect J.L. to play someone who loses
Glad I saw this on HN, I saw the news that Jlaw was playing Holmes elsewhere and I just assumed they were doing a gender swap on Sherlock as well and thought it was odd, but figured I'd still see it.
I hope John Woo directs it, so we could have a few slo-mo moments with Doves flying overhead while a greorian chant plays in the background (that's just the opening).
"bullet time" style where the drop starts (and you can see an out of focus Holmes in the background turning to look over her shoulder as an FDA inspector arrives with a bunch of FBI agents and a search warrant, then the blood drop freezes mid drop, the entire scene rotates around and now you can see the face of a young Holmes in a Stanford laboratory class watching the drop hit the "glass collector thingie". Pull back to a wide shot and start from the beginning of her journey.
Are you fucking kidding me? To me this just further confirms that none of this has anything to do with science and health. It's all about $$$. I am not talking about Elizabeth Holmes either.
