Geographically Hollywood is hundreds of miles away from Silicon Valley, but it seems like the two are getting closer and closer in metaphorical ways.
The latest example of this is The Internship, the new buddy movie starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that’s set to premiere this upcoming summer. In it, Vaughn and Wilson play middle-aged laid off salesmen who somehow nab internships at Google. Bespectacled genius 20-somethings are their bosses, they don’t exactly fit in, and of course hilarity ensues.
It’s no surprise that the somewhat wacky world of today’s tech industry is attractive story fodder to showbiz types: The Social Network showed just how compelling these stories can be on the big screen. And what it’s like to work at companies such as Facebook and Google have held special allure to the mainstream for years now (as I say in my disclosure form, my spouse works at Google — and every holiday season he fields questions about Google’s free food and other widely-reported job perks from even my most unplugged family members.)
But what is a bit surprising is the degree to which it seems Google participated in the making of The Internship. The cast is said to have had access to Google’s Mountain View headquarters as they were preparing to make the movie, and Google itself has put out an enthusiastic statement of support that says: “We’re excited that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson chose the Google campus as a backdrop for their first film together since Wedding Crashers.” Yesterday, Google’s homepage (a notoriously sparse space that typically only gives occasional links to its own new products or big charity causes) even included a prominent link to a Google+ Hangout with Vaughn and Wilson that was apparently part of the movie’s promotional push.
It’s a far cry from, say, Facebook’s response to The Social Network, which was mostly silence punctuated by occasional flat-out rejections. They are two very different types of movies, of course, but it is interesting to see a company play along so much here.
Anyway. The trailer just hit the web today, and it’s embedded above.
