Many people wondered if Hollywood was getting desperate when it was announced they were making a movie about Facebook, although that seems to have quietened down now we’ve actually had trailers for David Fincher’s The Social Network. But do we really need a film about Google?
Well, Groundswell Productions and producer John Morris are betting we are, as they’ve teamed up to buy the rights to Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It, which chronicles the rise of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Ph.D students with an idea of how to build a beter search engine into billionaires who created one of the biggest media companies in the world.
They founded Google with a raft of principles behind it, such as their famous, ‘Don’t be evil’, and the film will focus on how they tried to hold onto their idealism while their search engine became a behemoth that is one of the central spines of the web.
Groundswell’s Michael London told Deadline, “It’s about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed them,” London told me. “The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict, don’t be evil. At a certain point in the evolution of a company so big and powerful, there are a million challenges to that mandate. Can you stay true to principles like that as you become as rich and powerful as that company has become? The intention is to be sympathetic to Sergey and Larry, and hopefully the film will be as interesting as the company they created.”
However with Facebook and Google movies in the works, are websites going to be Hollywood’s new fad?