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>>HOST: It's a distinct pleasure to have this panel here today.
I know that many of us grew up with this movie. I guess those of us who are over the hill,
like myself did, I don't know. Maybe a lot of you, I guess these days, didn't.
It was a key movie of the generation, especially for those of us who later got
into computers. So it's a distinct pleasure to have both this
panel and this showing, and without further adieu, all of you, I assume,
maybe not all of you. Hopefully all of you know Craig Silverstein,
our number one Google employee.
[applause]
He never got the spinney hat. Actually he didn't even get a paycheck for
a long, long time. It wasn't until we hired somebody today that
could get paychecks. He is number one not just in terms of time,
but in terms of our number one culture czar. He also scored a perfect 1600
on the SAT. This was back when the SAT was hard.
[laughter]
On retrospect having learned he is a fan of this movie, I don't know, maybe he
just got into the ETS computers. So I don't know if that is a result entirely
earned, but we'll have to find out. In any case, on that note, Craig is the host
of this panel and introduce our distinguished panel members.
So, welcome. [applause]
>>SILVERSTEIN: Thanks Sergey. I just want to start by saying that I had
nothing to do with organizing this. So I appreciate everyone who's thanked me
for coming up with the idea and putting it on, but actually--the idea wasn't
mine--I think it was Mr. Parks--came up with the idea and the planning happened
as if by magic. I think Ann Hyatt was the one who is responsible--Ann
are you around? Ann was the one who is responsible for making
this all happen. [applause] As far as I can tell, my major qualification
for moderating this panel is not only did I see the movie, but I also read
the novelization of War Games. Which makes me uniquely qualified perhaps
for this panel. Luckily the panelists with me are much better
qualified than I am. So we should have a good discussion.
Walter Parkes. He is a motion picture producer; he's a writer,
a former studio head. I'm not any of those things.
For the last fourteen years he's been associated with DreamWorks, where he ran
from an inception in 1994 until 2005. He was nominated for the Academy Award three
times as a producer and a screenwriter. He's done movies like The Kite
Runner, Sweeney Todd, which won the Golden Globe, it's a good movie.
Other films executive produced by Mr. Parkes include, Men in Black, and the
other Men in Black, Gladiator, Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, The Ring,
The Terminal, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Road to
Perdition, A.I., Deep Impact, Twister, The Legend of Zorro and Amistad.
[applause] Not only that, he is a member of The Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Writers Guild of America and
the Global Business Network. He is also the president of Yale's University
Council, which advises President of Yale about academic effects.
So, welcome. Lawrence Lasker, the screenwriter and producer who entered file as
the writer of WarGames. So this is a nostalgic movie, I guess for
that reason. He is the son of actress Jane Greer and producer
Edward Lasker. Lasker and Walter Parkes were nominated for
the Academy Award in screenwriting in 1983 for WarGames.
He and Parkes were later also nominated for Best Picture of the Year in 1990 for
Awakenings, but we won't be talking about that one.
So welcome. [applause]
Peter Schwartz, cofounder and Chairman of Global Business Network, which is a
partner of the Monitor Group. It's a company based in San Francisco that
works to help companies, governments, and non-profits think strategically about
the future to make better decisions today.
Peter has written many books on a wide variety of future oriented topics.
His most famous books anyone know? The Art of the Long View from 1991, which
is considered by many to be the seminal publication on scenario planning,
and is used as a textbook by many business schools. He also co-wrote The Long
Boom in 1999, which is a look at the future characterized by global openness,
prosperity, and discovery. He consulted on several movies and one of
them was Minority Report, another one was Deep Impact, another one was Sneakers
which is a movie which all three of you have been involved in and another one,
which we have a sign for as well, another one was WarGames, which is why he
is here today. [applause]
So welcome. So that's all of us.
I will start directing with questions--the questions from the audience--I don't
think we have any of them listed, I can assume here.
I have to say the questions, I feel like some of them are not entirely original
here on this--we'll see if we can do it right. How about a nice game of chess?
[laughter]
Did anyone bring a chess board? So I guess the answer to that question is
no. So we'll do--let me talk a little about the
movie--WarGames, 1983. It's a suspense film.
It was written by Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, directed by John Badham.
It starred Matthew Broderick in his second film role.
Anyone know what his first film role was? Project X, no it wasn't that.
That was also their movie. There is also Ally Sheedy's first movie, I
believe. She went on to star in many more.
It also starred Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Barry Corbin.
It did quite well at the box office. It cost twelve million dollars, which today
would pay for catering, but then paid for a full movie.
And it grossed over seventy-four million, which today would pay for a full
movie, but then with a healthy profit. It played for five months which is, I guess,
another sign that it was made a long time ago when they showed movies for
a long time in the theaters. The NORAD set part of the movie costs one
million dollars, well it was the most expensive movie set up until that time.
So when you are watching the movie pay special attention to it because a lot of
love and care went into it. The most interesting part I think wasn't really
the fancy sets, or all of that, it was kind of the way that it introduced
technology and the internet, I think in particular unto the world. I had a computer
in '83. I think a lot of people did, but I definitely
didn't have a modem. I didn't know about this world of things you
could dial into and kind of be interconnected, I guess it was the internet
at that time. The ARPANET mostly, the military stuff.
What inspired you to write a movie about this--what kinds of things were you
thinking about?
>>LASKER: The original idea was to--I was inspired by a film about Stephen Hawking.
It struck me that he might discover the unified field theory and not be able to
explain it to anyone, as you'd be paralyzed. So he needed a successor--I was thinking of
whom that'd be, like a kid who could sort of understand him.
And a kid who is a juvenile delinquent his problem is that he is too smart and
nobody knows that. That's when Walter and I started talking about
getting these two characters together, a juvenile delinquent kid who gets
in trouble somehow and is brought into the world of genius' and science and
this was 1979. I don't think either one of us knew that computers
could hook up over the phones--that was a revelation.
So we decided instead of writing a movie that's based on what we can imagine and
other movies and books, we wanted to actually do research into the real world
and see what was going on and how these two characters could find each other.
>>PARKES: I was going to say, what's interesting, Larry's right, is it's remembered for
its tech content and maybe it's the most important part of it--it taught me a
lesson early on that I've forgotten over and over again, which are stories start
with characters. It actually really did begin as a story that
had nothing necessarily to do with technology. At least we didn't know what technology
we would explore. It was strictly a story of this journey of
a kid from an environment that couldn't understand him, to find a father
figure. It's just extraordinary, if you have something
like that, a basic human story at the bottom of it, how much easier it is to
create the superstructure which the film is.
We've had other experiences both together and separately, where you are
approaching the technology as in and of itself and it becomes a very difficult
and at times self defeating process. I think the movie works primarily because
it started from a character point of view and then Larry was a journalist and I
did some documentary film making. We both had a pension toward research.
Which is how we--
>> LASKER: Yes, let's find the real story instead of trying to make it up.
It's usually much more interesting than what you can imagine.
>>PARKES
Which is what brought us to Mr. Schwartz.
>>LASKER: I remember I--called the Stanford Research Institute and I talked to the public
information officer. I told him basically--we want to come up there--we
wanted to find--what's going on with the world--it's about a kid and a dying
scientist--that's about all I told him.
He said, "Are you coming up next week?" I said, "Yes."
He said, "All right, I'll have some meetings set up for you."
We showed up and he sent us first to some people, they told us why we had come
and they told us what questions to ask them. It was like, so easy, our work was done for
us. And then they would send us on, okay, now
you have to go speak to these people. On the second day I liked Peter Schwartz and
your futurists group. You were the one who said--take a look at
video games--Atari--look at what the military is doing--how they're piggybacking
onto video games for war gaming and training.
Maybe that's where your two characters can hook up.
>>SCHWARTZ
And for me, what was, I was at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970's, but
hanging around the hole the computer culture that was just beginning to emerge,
and it was literally a culture. That's what really set--I think--the character
in the story aside, but it was also what was going on then.
There are enough people in the room who are old enough to remember what that
emerging culture was like in the '70s. The Xerox Park, the Stanford--the Stanford
Music Group, the AI Group, the SRI, the Human Augmentation Lab, and there were
maybe a hundred, two hundred people in the Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View
area who hung out at places like The People's Computer Company and a few other
places where you could buy computer parts and assemble stuff.
You couldn't buy a PC; there wasn't anything around like that around.
You wanted a computer, you built it. That's what I did and a whole bunch of friends
did. What we were doing with it--we were on the
ARPANET--my first experience of working remotely was using the ARPANET writing scenarios
for the governor of Washington in 1973.
When we were stilled called the ARPANET and I had a TI Silent 700 terminal about
this big, portable terminal that carried along with a little acoustic coupler in
it and a little thermal--thermal printer coming up the back.
Well, that's what we did and so when Walter and Larry came in I said, there's
this whole culture out there with these kids who are inventing a new world and
are creating new capabilities and the thing that binds them all together are
games. That is what we play online.
We were playing things like Star Trader, Space War, my colleague Stuart Brand
wrote about something called Space War and how that bound all the computer kids
together. So there was this culture and that was really, I think, part of what
was captured best in WarGames.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So that's interesting, so you're saying you came and you didn't really know
what technology would be important.
You came to talk to some people. You got this idea about video games, network
computers, and so forth and you're like, that sounds great we'll go with that.
So how did that play out as you were writing the movie and then directing it and
so forth? Did you depend a lot on consultants to figure out what to do or did
you kind of make stuff up?
>>LASKER: Well, we found some hackers to sort of help guide us through that world.
We had some great consultants. Willis Ware of the RAND Corporation and he's
a wonderful guy because a lot of people you find these technical experts and
they spend all of their time telling you why you can't do something.
And Willis Ware who had worked with Johnniac and had actually worked on
designing the NORAD computer system. So he knew what the real thing was.
And he would say, "Well what do you need? What do you need to make it work?"
And we'd tell him we need in the story and then he would say, "Okay, there's an
open line in Sunnyvale. They say that it's hard wired and it's dedicated,
it never is. Someone always has to get in from home.
There'll be an open line. That will work."
And then hackers would, I remember calling up and saying, "Well how would you
find--?" Let's say he's looking for a video game company
in the whole Sunnyvale region. He'll say he can program his computer to dial
every single number and note when he finds a modem tone.
That's called war dialing.
>>SILVERSTEIN: After WarGames--it did not exist before this movie, did it?
>>LASKER: No.
>>SCHWARTZ: No. Almost none of this existed.
It's important to recognize that nothing you saw on screen had been seen on
screen before. None of the technology.
None of the idea of a dial-up access. The idea of a kid with a computer.
The idea of game. None of that had ever been seen on screen
before.
>>PARKES: Larry makes a good point which is connected to the first thing we were saying,
because we basically had a character idea, all of our research was always done
in a context. It was a context that where we thought we
wanted the story to go, so as opposed to saying how does it work?
It would tend to be, as he says, well, how would these two characters connect?
How would someone connect to a--from outside into a computer system.
It's extraordinary the extent to which those creative minds could connect to the
process that we were trying to accomplish.
>>LASKER: Right. You go through a lot of consultants until
you find someone who can be really helpful, but boil down years of experience,
tell him what you need and they come up with the techniques.
>>PARKES: Having said that--the process--it was about three months of pure research I
remember and a good nine months of writing the script itself.
There were many wrong turns. We had a whole draft that was based on breaking
into a space based laser defense system before we realized, A: they didn't
exist yet, it didn't really have the kind of cultural--reference that what we had.
>>LASKER: I guess the other key consultant would be Duncan Wilmore, Colonel Duncan Wilmore
whose job was the Hollywood office of the Air Force.
I remember we went to see him in the Federal Building in LA and he has his feet
up on the desk and he's reading Variety and he's in his full Colonel's outfit
and his job is the liaison. The story was that there were no tours of
NORAD and we really wanted to see Cheyenne Mountain.
So I just kept bugging him and finally, he's just sick of my calls and he goes,
"Look, we have a VIP tour going out next week. I suppose I could piggyback you guys onto
that." Sure that will work.
So we flew to NORAD on the C130 transport and we saw Cheyenne Mountain, the
Crystal Palace which was really disappointing. It was just a kind of a dark little room,
not very sexy. But the buildings are on these big springs
and that was impressive and the door, you'll see in the movie, the door slamming
shut was amazing. That evening they had a sort of dog and pony
show at a restaurant--not a restaurant, but a banquet hall, and General
Hartinger was up on stage. Afterwards we were going back to the bus to
take the VIP tour back to our hotel and General Hartinger comes up and sort of
grabs us by the necks and says, "I understand you boys are writing a movie about
me." We said, "Yes, we are."
He said, "Well come on, let's go have a drink and talk about it."
Then Walter goes, we have to get in the bus to go back to the hotel, and he
goes, "God___, I have fifty thousand men in my command, I think they can get you
back to the hotel and I'm not allowed to drink off base so come on."
So we sat and we talked about it and he loved the idea we were pushing which was
keep human beings in the loop. He goes, "God damn the DOD is coming down
every day trying to get us to get humans out of loop.
I sleep well at night knowing I am in charge." The interesting story about Crystal Palace
in the movie is that of course, if you go there today it looks like the movie,
because what actually happened--I do a lot of consulting with the military and
those sorts of folks and about three or four years ago actually went--one of the
points they make is, you remember seeing the movie WarGames?
Well it was really funky before the movie that showed what it should look like.
Today it looks like the movie. So if you go there, they copied, we copied
it, no--it's the other way around--they copied the movie.
>>SILVERSTIEN: I bet it cost the military more than one million dollars.
>>LASKER: And Duncan Wilmore also then became a consultant and I remember calling him up
like at ten at night and I'm going--Duncan, I'm writing a scene--what would happen
if we thought Russian missiles were about to land on America?
How would you tell? What would you do?
And he said, "Well I guess the Commander could call up various bases and get
them on the line and tell them to just hold tight and see what happens."
I said, "Okay thanks Duncan." If you have good consultants, they do most
of the work for you.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So I want to get back to something you said earlier about how you cherry picked
the technology that you used during--in order to serve the character and to serve
the plot. It's striking that many movies use technology for that reason.
Perhaps overuse it. As a result, you end up with this, I guess,
very cartoonish kind of use of technology in movies.
I would say that most movies are not very well served by the way they depict
technology, computers in particular. I think you guys avoided that trap in working,
also in Sneakers, which I think is popular for the same reason.
Why do you think that most movies get it so bad and what did you guys do
differently?
>>PARKES: The question was asked in the green room before and, it's a very exhausting and
exhaustive process to go and research these things, and to somehow juggle the
information with the needs of making a peppy plot that actually works in ninety,
or a hundred, hundred and ten minutes. It's just that it's a time consuming process
and in some ways, particularly in the last fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years
the system works in the studio--there are enormous stakes on these films coming
to market very quickly and it's just as far as I can tell they're difficult and
there are not that many film makers that have the patience to kind of go and do
that kind of work.
>>LASKER: Where's the script? We're going, do you want it fast or do you
want it good?
>>SCHWARTZ: I worked on a movie with Walter, Minority Report.
A lot of the fun in that movie is the technology but it's also the incredible
energy of the drive to solve this mystery of what's going on here and if you
don't have that at the center of the movie, then all of that technology gets in
the way.
>>PARKES: You know, there might be something else too.
WarGames was made pre-digital technologies. If you were to see how those screens were
filled with images during the making of WarGames.
On every time you saw a missile display, there was actually a projector behind
the screen, fifty, seventy-five, a hundred feet back, all of them synchronized
together so they were projecting on the back so that our cameras would capture
the images in the front. So every time you would do a film, you would
have to roll everything back, put everything in sync, remember the AD would
yell, "Lock and roll" and you'd start over again.
It couldn't be more mechanical and less digital. Honestly at a time of digital technologies
there's an enormous amount of bank for your buck that comes just from the visceral
reaction of the film. Sometimes, that makes it all the more difficult
to stay really disciplined on the story telling aspects of it.
When you have a Peter or something like that, you get everything, but those
instances are few and far between. When you really look at WarGames, you'll see
it's a pretty rudimentary movie from a technological point of view.
We really had to deal with the character issues and the story issues for the
movie to work.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So does that mean that it took you a particularly long time to make the movie,
to write it, to produce it?
>>PARKES: In Hollywood terms it was not a particularly long time.
Now with the twenty-five years of hindsight, it took about a good year to do the
script. Am I right?
>>LASKER: Yes, three months to research it and nine months to write it.
>>PARKES: For an original script, it's not out of whack.
>>SCHWARTZ: I recently found an original copy. Of what was the semi-final script, I think.
>>PARKES: Yes, titled The Genius. We were never good at titles.
Then there were the requisite political battles and budget battles and battles
with directors that kind of seemed to attend any movie in Hollywood.
So it took about another year and a half before it actually went in front of cameras.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So moving beyond some of the technical issues, you talked about the importance
of character, character interaction. Yet as we mentioned earlier--the main characters
were pretty new to movies--was casting difficult?
Was it intentional to try to look for kind of new faces, what issues did you
think about?
>>LASKER: We weren't really involved in the casting.
We had been sort of removed as writers by the first director who then got fired
in the second week of production. Then John Badham came on to direct and he
brought us back into the project. He called us up and said, "I'm looking at
a script here that going to be about three hours long and it looks like everyone's
had a hand in it including Willie the gate guard.
Do you have a version of the script that you would like me to read?"
I said, "Yes, we have a second draft that no one--we've finished the second draft
which we were in the middle of when we were fired by the first director because
basically he has told him you've got to make it your movie, get rid of these
putzes." They had the world blowing up and he didn't
get the script and so Badham said, "Well send it over to me."
So I did and that was the second draft. They never bothered to read it.
We did finish the second draft even though we had been fired.
It was amazing that Walter called me up and we were like so depressed.
He called me up and said, "You know, that scene we were working on, if we did
this, it would work." And I'd go, "Oh, Walter, the baby is dead.
You're like picking up its arms, it's so pathetic." He kind of said, "Yes, but you know if we
do this--." He said, "Let's finish the script anyway;
we're still producers of record."
>>PARKES: They can't stop you from writing. They cannot read it.
>>LASKER: So we finished the second draft and we sent it in and they never read it.
Badham was the first person to associate it to the movie.
He read it and he was reading the escape scene from the infirmary in the NORAD.
That was in our second draft and they had some just God awful Smokey and the
Bandit kind of scene where the FBI has escorted him, taking him somewhere and
it's in a Howard Johnson's and the FBI agent has to take the boy in to take a
leak, and so then a sheriff wanders in to the bathroom and he sees this man in a
suit with a boy with the pants are on the floor and he says, "You fixing to lope
the boys mule?" So Badham, I call him up on Sunday to see
how he was liking our second draft and he was reading that scene and he said, "This
is pretty clever, this escape." I said, "Good, I'm glad you liked it."
He goes, "But you know they've already built the set for that scene in the
Howard Johnson's." And I said, "Yes."
He said, "I guess we'll have to tear down the set anyway whether we shoot there
or not." And I go, "Yes, there ya go."
>>PARKES: To answer your question though about casting, John Badham who directed the movie
was a much more kind of--straightforward or more commercial director than Marty
Brest was. I think his choices, although actually, as
I think about it, Matthew was cast by Marty. Probably the David Lightman we had
imagined was a punkier kid. I think it was not a bad thing that a more
accessible kid that felt slightly more middle class became David Lightman.
That's a good example of why it's good for writers to write and directors to direct.
There are different values that are brought to the process by different people.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So you may not have been involved in the casting, but the initial pitch to MGM
presumably that was something that you guys did.
>>PARKES: The initial pitch to the movie? Yes.
>>SILVERSTIEN: What kinds of issues did you find there?
Did they focus on one aspect or another that surprised you?
>>PARKES: Well, what was interesting is we really were nobodies and we hadn't written
a script or made a movie or anything and it
was an example of the voraciousness of Hollywood's appetite.
All we had with our pitch was this suggestion of this journey of this kid from
one environment that doesn't understand it to become the successor to this
diamond super genius. We said we need a lot of money to go research
some cool stuff. Quite honestly based on that--we had a lot
of interest. We were able to make a fairly substantial
deal. Just because they thought, well gee--for whatever
reason the producers involved at that time felt that maybe we were on the
cusp of some kind of cultural change vis a vie technology.
In fact, I think there had been a Time magazine recently that showed new
technological things on the cover. We'd show it to them, you see, this is what's
happening in the world.
>>LASKER: Also, we'd gone into the producer's office and we of course didn't meet with
him, we met with his assistant. She said, "Well you know it sounds like a
nice idea but, next week is Thanksgiving so why don't you come back in
a couple of weeks. He doesn't want to do anything before Thanksgiving."
So on the way out, I had been a script reader--you write two and half pages to
describe the script and tell them why they don't have to read the script.
Even if you submit a treatment, twenty pages, the script writer writes two and a
half pages because they're just too busy. So I had the two and a half pages that we
had written on what the journey of this kid was and the dying scientist, and
the world and blah, blah, blah. So on the way out, I just slipped it onto
the producer's desk and we got a call the next morning saying, "Get your butts in
here. He wants to talk to you."
>>SILVERSTEIN: That's a good tip for people. So I guess we're getting pretty close to the
half hour cutoff time. Oh maybe a few more minutes.
I will ask one final question, but to get everything in it's going to be a seven
part question. Part one.
This is about thinking a bit further how this movie has had its impact over the
years and there are a couple of different aspects I guess that are interesting.
One is to think about the movie in its own terms.
This is a Cold War era movie, has its view of technology, and is really just a
morning, just the--start up of the computer revolution--ideas on how that might be
used or misused? Twenty-five years later what do you think
are kind of the predictions of the issues you made.
Do you think that the movie is an alarmist to conservative kind of just right in
what its saying?
>>SCHWARTZ: Yes, it has one of the great lines that have proven to be very, very prophetic;
the only last line the only winning movie is not the play.
About mutually assured destruction and about what was going to happen with the end of the
Cold War. It never, in fact, never reached thermonuclear
war and it was the recognition on both sides ultimately, that the only winning
move was not the play. I think that was one of the key nubs that,
I don't want to say contributed to the end of the Cold War, that would be an
enormous overstatement, but it anticipated in many ways the kind of tension
and it's resolution in a very benign way.
>>LASKER: Apparently Reagan quoted that line. I hadn't heard that before.
Scott Brown said that Reagan used it in a speech.
>>PARKES: Yes, I got something from some of the guys writing a paper about it and said
that Scott Brown, I was asked a similar question recently in terms of was it a
customary tale? This came very clearly to me just during our
tour of Google when we were shown kind of the first server, which was a very
extraordinary thing to see over here. I actually think that one of the things that
fueled Larry and me when we got into this. Yes, it was interesting and all
that, but there was a kind of a spirit of young people who had this really
different attitude about technology. Which was, oh, I'll fix that.
Oh, there's information, I'll go get that. There was this kind of breaking down of the
kind of separation, the kind of the wall of the expert, a kind of democratization
about--access to information. There was like, I think very much at the heart
of what kind of turned us on about David Lightman as a character.
It's the part of the movie that I think is most relevant right now.
That was really--fuel in the engine from our point of view.
>>SILVERSTEIN: So if you were to write the movie today as opposed to twenty-five years
ago, would you keep that part of the theme?
Do you think it is still appropriate today, or would you concentrate on
something--some different kinds of issues?
>>SCHWARTZ: Well, if you'd look around this room it would be--any one of you would have
been David Lightman.
>>PARKES: I think David Lightman would be here.
I think Josh would get out and find him and it would turn into a Colossus
project.
>>SCHWARTZ: We were talking about this earlier, how many of you have seen Colossus: The Forbin
Project? All right, the rest of you--that's another
computer movie you have to see. Rent it.
>>SILVERSTEIN: It doesn't have as happy of an ending, does it?
>>SCHWARTZ: No, no, well, it depends on your point of view.
You can't give away the ending though.
>>SILVERSTEIN: It has a maybe happy ending. So, you mentioned, as I guess this will be
the last question, a very important one I think, you mentioned Reagan used this
line from the movie; it was about the Cold War.
Did people in the Soviet Union see this movie and what did they think of it?
>>LASKER: I don't remember hearing anything bad from behind the iron curtain.
>>SCHWARTZ: The only one, I haven't seen the Soviet Union, but Hungary--I have family in
Budapest, I'm Hungarian, and they're in the computer science business.
My cousin who is in computer science is head of the networking lab at the
Academy of Sciences saw it about after two years after it came out in the west,
and he'd heard I was involved, and he was incredibly enthusiastic.
Again, this was 1985, the Berlin Wall hadn't fallen.
Communism was beginning to crumble at the edges.
He said this is our future. We can see the world coming apart in this
movie. He is a very serious Hungarian scientist and
all; this is what
will become of us here.
>>SILVERSTEIN: Great. Well, Mr. Parkes, Mr. Lasker, Mr. Schwartz,
thank you very much for your time. [applause]
>>SILVERSTEIN: The most important part of tonight's event is yet to win this computer
which was not actually in WarGames at all.
But it is an original TRS 80 Model 1, known affectionately to those who used it as the
Trash 80 from the same era and there is a person in this audience who is going to go
home with it.
>>AUDIENCE: Does it work?
>>SILVERSTEIN: Does it work? Let's check.
The plus is right here but if you plug it into a wall, I've been told it will in fact
work.
>>AUDIENCE: Where are the drives?
>>SILVERSTEIN: Where are the disk drives? Did someone ask where the disk drives were?
There's a Model 1 TRS 80, there's a cassette player that you plug into the back of it somewhere.
So I think this is still locked. But there's a key.
I don't know if it comes with software. You might have to program it yourself.
The box is officially shoo ken. I'm opening it up.
I'm closing my eyes. Congratulations it actually has no name on
it, but it has a number: 156418. Let me confirm the ticket.
Oh my, they match. Congratulations.