Robert Redford’s 1992 thriller-comedy Sneakers is lightly draped in San Francisco imagery, but it wouldn’t have worked if the action had been set anywhere else.
The plot is rooted in technology, the action is carried by the radicals, hackers, and oddballs who once characterized the Bay Area’s tech community, and it’s startlingly prescient about how Silicon Valley disrupted the flow of capital and shifted the market to the attention-based economy we all find ourselves in today.
Fresh off the success of Field of Dreams (1989), director Phil Alden Robinson co-wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes, who’d scored a hit a decade earlier with WarGames (1983), a different cautionary tale about hackers inadvertently opening a digital Pandora’s box. To ensure authenticity, the production hired Leonard Adleman, a San Francisco computer scientist best known for being the “A” in the RSA encryption algorithm. (According to several sources, he took the gig so his wife could meet Redford, still incandescent at 56.)
Sneakers opens in the ‘60s with younger versions of Martin Brice (Redford) and Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) hacking into the US Treasury to redistribute funds to worthy causes like the Black Panthers. When Martin pops out for pizza, Cosmo gets busted, sending Martin underground.
Decades later, he’s leading Bishop & Associates, a penetration-testing team that finds security holes for corporate customers. A tight set piece shows the crew hacking, phishing, and phreaking their way into a FiDi bank and out again with a suitcase of cash. It’s a living, but, as a cashier handing Martin his check notes, “not a very good one.”
But for Bay Area hackers in the days before “the Digital Revolution [was] whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon,” per Wired’s 1993 launch manifesto, money wasn’t the point.
Not yet anyway.
Working out of shabby offices above Oakland’s Fox Theater, the team is composed of conspiracy theorist Dan Aykroyd, 19-year-old tech whiz River Phoenix, fired CIA operative Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn playing Whistler, a blind man who can hack any telecom system.
The plot of Sneakers is set in motion after NSA agents blackmail Martin into stealing a black box from a Palo Alto think tank. If he refuses, they’ll turn him into the FBI. To round out the heist crew, he enlists ex-girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell), a piano teacher who also understands discrete mathematics.
San Francisco would have been a natural hiding place for Martin; Radicals who became fugitives often laid low (and resurfaced) in the Bay Area. It’s unclear why the writers thought managing a squad of elite hackers would keep him off the radar, but the movie has a much bigger flaw: the notion that a Golden God like Robert Redford could evade capture by shaving his mustache.
Unlike other thrillers, the MacGuffin in Sneakers deeply matters: in a midpoint reveal, we learn that the stolen device unlocks nearly every encrypted system in the world. For the ragtag crew, it’s a moral hazard moment: the tech is so powerful, no one can be trusted with it. In reality, a black box that works like a quantum computer would be the Holy Grail of cryptography and computing — would 2025 tech bros think twice before exploiting it?
Most principal photography was shot near LA, but San Francisco is suggested through cultural moments like Martin’s encounter with a homeless man, or hacking a computer dating service to manipulate a socially maladroit tech worker.
When Robinson deigns to show us the city, it’s a narrative device. After the villains kidnap Martin and frame him for murder, he’s dumped out of a car at Lombard & Hyde, Alcatraz looming in the background. Afterwards, Whistler helps Martin retrace his captors’ route via audio cues across one of the Bay’s four bridges, a puzzle only possible in this region.
Using the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island as a backdrop, Redford and Poitier hand off the black box at Hills Bros. Plaza (345 Spear St.), now a Google office. In 1992, those views were newly exposed after the demolition of the Embarcadero’s quake-damaged freeway. Today, that shot would include Waterbar, along with the Cupid’s Span sculpture built in 2002. (Sharp-eyed local film fans will recognize the orange Karmann Ghia they arrive in as the same car driven by Mike Myers in So I Married An Axe Murderer.)
Sneakers captures a transitional moment in the Bay Area: a few years after its release, tech became a zero-sum Gold Rush with companies like Google (launched in 1998) starting out liberal before pivoting to libertarian after valuations soared. No longer a creative outlet or a form of self-expression, hacking became a way to mint credibility with capitalists.
The movie anticipates and dramatizes this shift with a climactic showdown between Martin and Cosmo, who used his technical acumen to buy his way out of prison. Now, he wants the black box so he can mete out justice because “the world doesn’t run on weapons anymore… it’s about who controls the information.”
Marty, on the other hand, embodies retreat and self-preservation. Burned by youthful activism, his 1960s ideals are refracted through ’90s Information Age anxiety: “If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.”
I won’t spoil the ending, but everything Cosmo warns about has come true: Palantir, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have us pinned to cardboard like butterflies.
Even if the attention economy was inevitable, Sneakers’ fantasy liberal resolution is a cotton-candy palate cleanser that wouldn’t fly today in a studio film. Protean data-gatherers like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t villains — they’re job creators.
Still, Sneakers feels like a remarkably San Francisco story: in a city built for reinvention and dissent, a crew of misfits confronts the surveillance state. And wins.
Only in the movies.
