Amy R. Harms wrote:
>How about a screenplay about Linux? I am thinking a drama. The dramatic struggle of a lone penguin against a Goliath-type enemy, with a MS logo on its chest.
>
The idea started out as a biopic about a young Mexican boy we called
"Miguel," who gets turned on to free software by an old Unix guru, "La
Mancha," in college and goes on to write a Linux GUI and then founds a
company in Boston. He becomes a multi-millionaire when his Boston
company, "Ximian," gets bought by a company we can call "Novell."
But this soon morphed into a fictional screenplay called "La Machina"
("The Device") about a poor Mayan boy from down in Tabasco (S. Mexican
province) who used programmable gate arrays 10 years further along in
development than they are today, to create a "No operating system"
handheld computer that could be made by village-scale workshops anywhere
in the world, localized for any culture/language.
A consortium of American computer companies headed by Guillermo
Ventanas, whose "Puertas" operating system dominates the market place,
decides fictional Miguel shouldn't be allowed to carry out his plans,
since it would ruing the computer hardware and software business as we
know it today.
The fictional version has a *physical device* instead of just software,
a beautiful on again/off again girlfriend, a friendly druglord and his
son, a Segway chase through Mexico City, and a shootout at the
druglord's rural lair between his loyal local partisans and gringo
mercenaries getting paid by Ventanas.
This was outlined and the first treatment written last year when I was
in Veracruz for a week. The full shooting script is almost finished now
(I'm a consultant, not the final writer, since it's in Spanish) and
production hopefully will start in spring.
There is more than high tech here. A healthy dose of Mayan mythology,
plus an underlying "campesinos vs. colonialists" theme, give "La
Machina" appeal beyond the geek crowd. The producer/director, Jorge
Cosio, is treating this as a pop-market potboiler, not as anything
reverential, even though he thinks Miguel de Icaza is a great guy...
So there! :)
- Robin
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