Getting into Google: films v docs

The film The Internship is about a couple of non-techie guys blagging their way into Google as summer interns. They're hoping to land proper jobs which, according to the premise of the film, should by rights go to people younger and smarter than them.

Like the movie’s fictional heroes, its producers persuaded Google to let them in, to use Google’s landscaped grounds as a location, its staff as extras and to show Google-copyright names throughout the film - all for free.

Journalists and documentary-makers - who cause much less disruption than a full-blown film crew - find getting into Google hard work, to say the least. So why did Google say yes to the film-makers?

Well, a quick glance at the proposed script would have shown them that they would come out of it smelling of roses. One character, an attractive female staff member confides, “I actually believe that what we do here makes people’s lives a little better.” And the interns are bowled over by the free food, playground-like atmosphere and manicured lawns. To them, it’s “the Garden of Eden”.

The real Google co-founder Sergey Brin has an in-joke moment when, in the closing seconds of the film, he wanders past the triumphant interns, finally accepted by Google, and mutters “congratulations guys”. Nothing can top the casual blessing of a tech superstar like Brin. Roll credits.

For Hollywood, Silicon Valley is now the place where dreams come true. Many decades ago there was Broadway (“You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!” 42nd Street, 1933). Then there was Hollywood itself (“Don't settle for the little dream. Go on to the big one,” A Star is Born, 1954). In the 1980s there was space (“I think you're going to make it, man. I think you're going to be an astronaut,” The Right Stuff, 1983) and Wall Street (Wall Street, 1987, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990).

Now there’s Silicon Valley. In The Social Network (2010), Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg exchanges student life for fame and fortune (“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars”).

The Internship follows, with even more reverence for the tech world. Now ordinary workers, as well as billionaire company founders, get the Hollywood treatment. Everyone at Google is smart, hard-working and dedicated to making “people’s lives a little better”, it seems.

And there’s more Silicon Valley myth-making in the pipeline: Ashton Kutcher stars in a forthcoming biopic, Jobs. Kutcher has already described the Apple co-founder as “the Leonardo da Vinci of his generation”.

But it’s still surprising to find Google giving access to the film. After all, more people probably use Google in 10 minutes than will ever see it. They hardly need the publicity.

Google's other co-founder Larry Page said in a speech that he wanted Google to take part because “computer science has a marketing problem... we're the nerdy curmudgeons.” But while the film throws in a couple of references to the value placed on diversity at Google, this is emphatically not a film which challenges stereotypes.

You won’t appreciate its humour if you happen to be old or fat, for instance. And there’s a seemingly endless sequence in a lap-dancing club to which our heroes lead a team-building exercise, forcing one of the nerds to admit afterwards that it was truly “the best night of my life”.

Benjy Weinberger, who worked at the company for eight years, complains about the film’s “lazy pandering to every imaginable Silicon Valley stereotype”.

Google was reportedly allowed to comment on matters concerning its own portrayal: so a comic moment when one of its self-driving cars crashed is said to have been removed at the company’s request.

Product placement is well-established in films, but The Internship takes it to a new level. Instead of the product being placed in the film, the film has been placed in the product.

In the end, I don’t believe Google’s decision to agree to take part was made after adding up the pluses and minuses of script points. Instead, I can imagine the sheer audacity of the request appealing to Google execs: ‘we know you don’t let many crews in to do interviews but how about letting us make a whole film on your campus?’

It’s the kind of ambitious thinking that wins respect at Google. Sometimes an idea gets beyond impracticality into a zone where it’s worth doing almost because it seems a bit silly. (A network of Google blimps to provide wi-fi to the world? Why not?) There are several references in the film to “Googliness”, the off-the-wall, almost megalomaniac quality the company looks for in its staff and its projects. Maybe the film idea was deemed to have it.

If Google wanted to leave viewers with a positive impression of its Googley culture, The Internship certainly delivers. To be fair, the ‘Garden of Eden’ idea is not entirely fanciful: Google has topped Fortune magazine’s ‘100 best companies to work for’ for four straight years. This year, Fortune notes that its staff enjoyed 100,000 hours of subsidised massage, not to mention the legendary free canteens.

And yet there’s no denying that this is a heavily sugar-coated view of the business. Google is a uniquely powerful company, wrestling with governments, courts and regulators to be allowed to provide its free services in exchange for collecting data from its users. There’s no hint of any of that here. As for the users, in the real world, unlike in the film, there is no “Google helpline” where you can call in for a chat about problems you’re having with the software.

OK, it’s a comedy and doesn’t have to be strictly accurate. But I can’t help wondering whether in the end the Google execs responsible may be feeling they associated themselves with a project that leaves a bad taste in its audience’s mouth. It feels like a two-hour infomercial, and a tacky one at that. Or, as Salon put it, a mix of “the dumbest and most formulaic kind of Hollywood dude comedy with the most smug and self-congratulatory grade of information-economy arrogance”. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a collective critical rating of just 36%.

The Dissolve’s review goes to the heart of the question of access: “There are bad movies, and then there are movies whose success would bode ill for cinema’s future. The Internshipis the latter.” Indeed, if companies can easily burnish their image with feel-good movies, cinema audiences would be the losers. Andrew O’Hehir in Salon isn’t worried: “Mercifully, this movie is so dreadful that it probably won’t pave the way for a zany comedy about BP’s corporate response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”

That kind of reaction suggests The Internship won’t be the start of a trend. As a documentary-maker, I’d like to hope the pendulum will swing away from Hollywood and back in our direction. Maybe our minimalist crews and serious attempts at factual accuracy might look like a good thing to a big company - even if it does have to relinquish editorial control.

For a flavour of what Google is like on the inside, try this video it has posted of a regular internal meeting about modifying the search algorithm. Of course, if something had gone horribly wrong, no doubt it wouldn’t have been made public, but the tone of the conversation feels pretty authentic.

In a second post, I have written about my own experiences of getting filming access to Google as it grew from start-up to tech giant.