Taglines: When things get odd… The odd get even.
Andy, a successful marketing guy quits his job, because he feels disconnected with the values about work he learned from his father. He gets a new job at a top notch research facility, where he quickly makes a powerful enemy who makes him volunteer for a nearly impossible project: The $99 Personal Computer. He recruits the only available guys at the lab, three sociopaths. Together they really compile a revolutionary PC for $99, but then they become the victims of a venture capitalist and Andy’s old foe from the research lab. Can he and his new friends find a way to overcome the problems?
The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is a 2002 film based on a novel by technology-culture writer Po Bronson. The film stars Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni, Ethan Suplee, Anjul Nigam, Gregory Jbara, Dan Butler, Linda Hart, Shiva Rose and Chandra West.
The film was made by 20th Century Fox at the cost of $17 million and is sometimes shown on HBO. The video and DVD received limited release in New York and Los Angeles. Its domestic gross was just $5,491, making it one of the greatest flops in movie history. Po Bronson played a cameo role in the film as one of many tuba players living in the same building as the main character. The tentative title for this movie during test screenings was “The Big Idea”.
About the Story
Garcia stars as Andy Kasper, a man who gives up his cushy marketing job to do something more fulfilling. He gets himself hired at LaHonda Research Institute where Francis Benoit (Enrico Colantoni) assigns him to design the PC99, a PC to sell for $99. He moves into a run-down apartment building where he meets his lovely artist next-door neighbor Alisa (Rosario Dawson), and puts together a team of unassigned employees: Salman Fard (Anjul Nigam), a short, foreign man with an accent who is hacking into CIA files when Andy meets him; Curtis “Tiny” Russell (Ethan Suplee), a massively obese, anthropophobic man; and Darrell (Jake Busey), a tall, blond, pierced, scary, germophobic, deep-voiced man with personal space issues who regularly refers to himself in the third person.
The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the $99 mark. It is Salman’s idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector.
The last few hundred dollars comes off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a “hypnotizer” code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they’re done. But immediately before he finishes, the whole team (except for Tiny, who is still writing the code) quits LaHonda after being told that there are no more funds for their project, but sign a non-exclusive patent waiver, meaning that LaHonda will share the patent rights to any technology they had developed up to that point.
The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (2002)
Directed by: Mick Jackson
Starring: Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni, Ethan Suplee, Anjul Nigam, Gregory Jbara, Dan Butler, Linda Hart, Shiva Rose, Chandra West
Screenplay by: Jon Favreau, Gary Tieche
Production Design by: William Sandell
Cinematography by: Ronald V. Garcia
Film Editing by: Don Brochu
Costume Design by: Jill M. Ohanneson
Set Decoration by: Robert Gould
Art Direction by: Bruce Crone, Brad Ricker
Music by: Marco Beltrami
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual content.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: June 28, 2002
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