On Tuesday The Hollywood Reporter brought news that Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino is fast-tracking a movie about the boardroom chicanery that led to Sam Altman’s brief ouster as CEO of OpenAI, a time referred to by your most annoying friend as “the blip,” an event already depicted in a play called Doomers.
Tentatively titled Artificial, the script to this movie-shaped piece of marketing was written by Harvard and SNL alum Simon Rich, presumably because having AI render it would be too on the nose. Andrew Garfield is reportedly being considered for the role of Altman, who has the look, to quote Palo Alto author Malcolm Harris, “of a guy who told the king he’s going to turn the straw into gold by tomorrow.”
Oh, and the punchline? The studio attached is MGM, now a division of Amazon. This is a tech fable brought to you by a tech company to be delivered via a tech platform.
Let me make this AI Overview-level clear: This is a very bad idea for a movie and it should not be made. Full stop.
I don’t want to take away jobs from writers, filmmakers, actors, and below the line workers (that’s ChatGPT’s job), but this thing should die in turnaround and never stream the light of day.
That some of the best talent in Hollywood are devoting even a few minutes to a story about a person who has shown nothing but disdain for the work they do, has amassed billions of investor dollars to hasten their obsolescence, is cowardly, foolish, and wrong. Whatever critique of artificial intelligence or its chief straw-spinner that makes it into Artificial after the studio’s notes soften, blur, and Ghiblify it, this movie-like content unit will only burnish the reputation of Altman, a person who does not remotely deserve the star treatment in this or any timeline.
This is not to say that a talented director can’t make a film about a divisive, world-destroying figure: Christopher Nolan did it in 2023 with Oppenheimer. But even the most talented director cannot make a film about a divisive, world-destroying figure who lacks self-awareness, ambivalence, and humanity. Oppenheimer won seven Oscars precisely because it was about a genius — the original disruptive, government-funded “move fast, break things” tech founder — who was riven by guilt and brought low by his own high-handedness.
Guadanigno is a playful sensualist interested in characters unhinged by their passions. Why would he spend even a second of his celluloid output on someone as seemingly bloodless as the OpenAI founder?
That Guadagnino has chosen this to be his next project — filming is reportedly set to start in San Francisco and Italy this summer — is especially infuriating. Throughout his career, the Italian filmmaker has created some of the most passionate, sensual, life-affirming scenes ever committed to film. I’m thinking about the scene in I Am Love (2009) when a plate of perfectly-prepared shrimp sends Tilda Swinton into full body rapture. The way Swinton’s eyes sparkle and her lips part in delight is almost too intimate to watch. Guadagnino topped this in Call Me By Your Name (2017), in which Timothée Chalamet revels in the luscious pulp of a peach before the scene devolves into the Millennial version of the liver scene in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Guadanigno is a playful sensualist interested in characters unhinged by passion. Why would he spend even a second of his celluloid output on someone as seemingly bloodless as the OpenAI founder? Altman is a person, after all, who described the experience of having his first child as being “neurochemically hacked,” just about the coldest description of parenthood outside of an Edward St. Aubyn novel. This is not a person who would bliss out over a plate of shrimp. This is a guy who can’t even bring himself to say “thank you” when served a beautiful espresso at Cafe Zoetrope in that ridiculous $3 million OpenAI promo of him and Jony Ive.
Who is an OpenAI movie even for? Since the 2010 release of Davis Fincher’s The Social Network, the genre has both proliferated and declined. There was Jobs (2013) and Steve Jobs (2015); there was Super Pumped (2020), a limited series about Uber founder Travis Kalanick; there was The Dropout (2022), a series about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes; there was BlackBerry (2023). There’s a project about Elon Musk in the works from Darren Aronofsky and A24 with the incredibly unimaginative title of Elon, presumably because the title The Worst Person in the World was already taken.
The only people served by these movies are the subjects: Even if these movies air doubts about these founders, their products, or the unethical ways they brought them to market, the very fact that a studio is committing time and money to telling these stories lionizes them out of proportion.
Having Hollywood stars play them — Michael Fassbender expertly filling out Steve Jobs’s turtleneck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt pushing his likability to its very limits as Travis Kalanick — is like an implied endorsement. How bad can Sam Altman and his job-destroy, energy-sucking, very bad art-creating service be if he’s embodied by Andrew Garfield, an actor so lovable my colleague Joshua Bote describes him as “one of the best guys we’ve got”?
The best guy should not be playing one of the worst.
The one thing that gives me hope for Artificial is the presence of writer Simon Rich. Rich is a limber, witty writer. At 40, Rich still has the air of a wunderkind and has managed to transcend his early nepo-baby reputation. He’s a well-reviewed and well-liked writer and collaborator who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He’s also on record as having reservations about AI. During the Writers Guild strike in 2023, he wrote an opinion piece for Time that was largely critical of AI-generated writing. (He did, however, disclose that he had a friend at the company.)
What makes me think Rich could possibly maybe turn in a script that gets beneath the humanoid wrapper enclosing Altman is Man Seeking Woman, the absurdist, sketch-comedy-ish series he created for FX in 2015.
Ostensibly a send up of contemporary dating, Man Seeking Woman was also a dissection of the toxicity inside even the blandest “nice guy.” Its star, Jay Baruchel, seemed to be channeling a puppy with oversized ears as he endured Charlie Brown-like humiliations like going on a date with a literal troll or seeing an ex who left him for Hitler. Over the course of the series, the audience begins to realize, actually, this sad sack is kind of an asshole, a pretty nuanced take.
If Rich can manage the same balancing act with his depiction of Altman, Artificial might be more than another expensive OpenAI promo reel. But let’s not risk that. We should skip this ‘blip’ entirely.
