A Millennium Bug's Life
FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY
WITH SOME FOLKS ALREADY PREPARING for global disaster as the millennium nears, Hollywood wants to cash in on those fears. So get ready for Y2K: The Movie, a fall Warner Brothers Studios production whose plot centers on the Year 2000 computer bug. It will star Chris O'Donnell (Robin in Batman Forever) as a hunky Manhattan hacker who finds a potentially lethal version of bug-infested Y2K code on the hard drive of a ''master computer'' controlled by evil forces out to destroy the world.
International Y2K crisis managers, however, are less than thrilled with this thriller. Meeting at the U.N. last month to devise ways to soothe public panic, they began drafting a formal resolution urging Hollywood studios to cool it on bug-disaster films next year. Explains Carlos Jarque, Mexico's official Y2K manager: ''The high rate of computer illiteracy around the world is fertile ground for people with apocalyptic scenarios.''
But Stu Zicherman, who wrote the Y2K screenplay, says ''Y2K is the greatest ticking clock ever, one of the few deadlines in the history of the world that you cannot push back.'' Or, apparently, resist: 1999 also brings 20th Century Fox Film's Entrapment, starring Sean Connery--and a global computer blackout on Jan. 1, 2000.
By Marcia Stepanek
EDITED BY ROBERT McNATT
businessweek.com |
