Click Here to return to articles menu
....................................................................................................................................

A High-Tech Tale of Love and Betrayal

iHollywood's choice for Silicon Valley 's very own movie nomination at next year's Oscars

Michael Stroud
03.02.05

Since it's Oscar season, here's my own treatment for a movie about unrequited love. It's a tale of how one man's passion, commitment and money are spurned by a series of heartless mistresses, but how he ultimately finds redemption in the arms of an old, forgotten love.

The story begins with our balding but still handsome hero impulsively buying a Yamaha RX-V430 5.1 surround-sound receiver for $299 from Good Guys, assured by the friendly salesman that hooking it up to his Dish satellite system and 10-year-old Zenith TV will be a snap. Upon arriving home, our hero is utterly unable to decipher the user's guide and the dozens of black knobs on the back of the unit. He can't even hook up his speakers, let alone his satellite system. Too late, he reads the epinions.com review of the unit that gives it 1 star out of 5, calls it "needlessly complicated" and concludes: "There has to be something better than this." Sober minds would consider this an omen.

But our protagonist is blind and determined to "go digital". He decides that he will dedicate his old Dell Dimension computer, equipped with a Turtle Beach sound card and bitchin' Harman Kardon speakers, to digital music. The PC is full of viruses, though, so the nice Dell help desk person in Bangalore suggests that he simply reload Windows and other key programs and start afresh with a clean hard drive. Alas, when the computer is reloaded, the Turtle Beach sound card doesn't respond to its drivers, and three hours of earnest help from Bangalore can't get any sound from the computer.

So the hero ditches his Dimension for a Dell Inspiron laptop, equipped with 802.11g WiFi. He dreams of happily streaming his favorite Internet music stations anywhere in the house – free from the restrictions of his ratty Ethernet cord. He switches on his Dell wireless router (attached to the ratty Ethernet cord), gets a strong Internet signal – but can't surf a single site. After a one-hour call to Bangalore , a one-hour call to the nice Comcast help people in Nova Scotia , and jiggering his cable modems, switches, routers and laptop, he's surfin'! Unfortunately, he can only surf in the family room, so he buys another wireless router from Dell for the rest of the house, and no amount of foreign help can get that one to work.

"To hell with wireless LANs!" our hero cries. "I'm getting an iPod!" So he buys a 15 gig model with an armstrap, car adaptor and other cool accessories and synchs it up to his Inspiron. Problem solved! He quickly deposits his entire CD collection on the device and downloads "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" and an audiobook from iTunes .

The experience is so great that he decides to buy his 10-year-old daughter an iBook, and transfer all his music to her new Apple laptop. It's simply a matter of hooking that iPod up to the iBook, synching the two devices and…presto…all the music on his iPod AND the iBook are gone! He's nonplussed, but he's a fool for love, and patiently reloads every CD onto the iBook and synchs once again. This time the iPod freezes and refuses to do anything, no matter how many times it's rebooted.

Driven beyond sanity, abandoned even by Apple, the hero has a blinding moment of clarity. He dashes into his daughter's bedroom and snatches her Walkman. With trembling fingers, he inserts a CD for Mahler's Third Symphony and claps on the cheap Phillips headphones. High-fidelity music floods his ears. He suddenly knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he can listen to Mahler any time he wants, instantly, in any room, in any car, anyplace in the world. He knows his CD will never vanish. He knows his Walkman will never need to be rebooted. He has found his true love: a simple, elegant piece of consumer electronics that's sold 300 million units worldwide – a faithful friend he heartlessly abandoned long ago for younger, more beguiling mistresses. The End. (Based on a True Story).

So there you have my killer movie treatment. I have no doubt that consumers everywhere will understand the message. But will technology companies?

return to top