preview.tinyurl.com/6xw36r -> www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-08/ff_wargames?currentPage=all
It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire"; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan; the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US. In the midst of all this came WarGames, a fizzy little thriller about looming Armageddon. It's a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game -- and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn't have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the "computer company" he's infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game -- Global Thermonuclear War -- is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III. Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing."
How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero -- and maybe even changed American defense policy? In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him -- a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later. Walter Parkes, Screenwriter: WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology. Lawrence Lasker, Screenwriter: We were complete newbies. In 1979, we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers.
Stanford Research Institute, from 1972 to the end of 1981. Walter and Larry came to SRI with a script idea called The Genius. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking. Lasker: For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating -- that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS. Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there. Parkes: Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military -- and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames. Schwartz: There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers.
Xerox PARC, Apple just starting -- it was all happening right there. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military. Screenshot: Courtesy MGM In the summer of 1980, Parkes and Lasker went looking for inspiration for their war room set.
North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center -- 2,000 feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away.
walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me!" Walter says: "Well, we have to get on the bus to go back to our hotel." So we based General Beringer, played by Barry Corbin, on the real commander at Cheyenne Mountain. Parkes: We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. In one version, this kid was connected via computer to someone known as Uncle Ollie, or OLI. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on. David Scott Lewis, Solar-tech entrepreneur and model for David Lightman: Hacking was easy back then. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself?"
He was the famous phone phreak, one of the first telephone hackers. He was called Captain Crunch because he used a toy whistle given away in the cereal to activate a telephone trunk line, enabling him to make unlimited free calls. John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Early hacker and reformed phone phreak: I talked to them about how phone phreaks did it: The use of a dialer scanner program came from me repeatedly dialing up numbers until I found a computer modem. It's called wardialing now because David Lightman used it in the movie to make contact with the Norad computer.
computer-related crimes: Scanning was a common hacking technique. In early '82 , the script grew so ambitious that the filmmakers needed to build the Hollywood version of Norad's Crystal Palace command center. Universal Pictures began to balk at the prospect of shooting a tech-heavy movie its executives didn't fully understand. The project stalled and ended up at United Artists, where director Martin Brest was hired. He began making changes in the script, starting with the key character, Falken. Lasker: I still wish we'd been able to stick with the original dying-astrophysicist character. It was Marty Brest who didn't like the idea of a man in a wheelchair in a war room, because it was too much like Dr. Parkes We always pictured John Lennon, because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking. Lasker: We had communicated with Hawking -- not directly. And through David Geffen, we'd communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role. I was writing the first scene where we meet Hawking -- Falken -- in the movie. I was staring at the cover of the November '80 issue of Esquire, with Lennon on the cover, and describing his face, when a friend of mine -- a bit of a jerk -- called and said, "You're gonna have to find a new Falken." The studio fired him and called in John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever.
For a legion of young WarGames fans, 20-year-old Ally Sheedy was a lust object second only to the Imsai 8080. A quarter century later, Wired caught up with hacker culture's first crush. It was easy for me to do the part where she's asking questions. Sheedy: To be honest, I haven't seen the movie since it came out. Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one's accountable. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who'd like to hit on you ... John Badham, Director Leonard Goldberg, the producer, shows me some footage they'd shot -- it was a scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy going into his bedroom, early in the movie, and he shows her how he can change her grades on his computer. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "What's wrong here?" I stopped the car, found a phone booth, and called Leonard. These kids were treating this as if they're involved in some dark and evil terrorist conspiracy. If I could ...
|
http://csua.com/feed/