High above the haze of Palo Alto, two men are plotting revenge.
Like most of the characters in the independent film I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley, Rob and Troy aren't luddites. They just want to send a message to invaders who have turned the farmland into geekville: Get lost.
A morality play on the evils of greed, overdevelopment, and plain old rudeness, the film tells the story from the point of view of Rob Logan, a guy in his twenties who appreciates the simple things in life. Rob has a college degree and a computer, but he isn't obsessed with cyberspace.
After spending the last seven years working on ranches in Colorado, Rob comes home to find Silicon Valley changed for the worse. It's not just that the Valley is a sprawling, overpriced mess, but technophiles are invading the last pockets of the region's rural areas.
"There's a pit over the hill that needs to be cleaned up," says Troy, an avenging programmer who befriends Rob.
Fancy turkey burgers are now being served at Rob's old haunts, and the roads are choked with men in splashy cycling outfits who ride expensive bikes and yell at him to "Share the road!"
"I don't care what they know about the information superhighway," Rob tells a date as they're stuck behind a pack of bicyclists. "They don't know shit about a real highway."
Rob's father has died, and he needs to sell the family home. (Asking price: $2.5 million.) In between showings of the house to a succession of insufferable high-tech yuppies, he searches for his high school sweetheart and runs into some old friends.
But what's really got Rob preoccupied are the option-hungry, laptop-toting nerds that have invaded his turf.
"Whatever happened to the Hells Angels?" Rob asks the barkeep at a local watering hole.
"They got old," the bartender replies.
Shot in 16 days for under $100,000, the movie is the first feature-length film by Jason Ward. Since its debut, I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley has collected awards at small film festivals around the country, including a bronze medal at Philadelphia's Philafilm.
Ward, 30, wrote and directed the movie and is talking to distributors, with hopes to screen it on the West Coast shortly.
"The script is feelings I had taken to an extreme, which I think is a good way to write," he said.
Ward also cast himself as Jean Paul, an old friend of Rob's.
Ward finished the script in 1997, and some of the references are dated. For example, when Rob finds a new romantic interest in Avy, a product manager at a software company, she's busy working on push technology.
Jack Pilkington, who lives in the Portola Valley section of Silicon Valley and has a bit part in the movie, remembers what the area was like when it was covered with apricot and cherry trees.
Today he grows apples and until recently, worked the last prune orchard in all of Santa Clara County. He said it's true that Valley millionaires are buying up huge swaths of land, but at least they’re forking over lots of cash for it.
"They're paying me a ton of money," he said.
Dan White, a reporter at the Santa Cruz Sentinel said many locals are less pleased with the technology invasion.
"The reason why there is a certain amount of resentment directed at Silicon Valley is that the (housing) prices are going through the roof," White said. "There are a lot of people who are shut out from the dot-com riches."
White said even "small, wimpy houses" are going for $500,000, preventing people like him from buying real estate.
The movie was shot in the Santa Cruz Mountains west of Silicon Valley, which Ward said somewhat resembles what the entire Santa Clara Valley used to look like.
Some scenes were shot in Ward's current home of La Honda, where Ken Kesey threw some pretty good parties back in the '60s.
Besides the awards, Ward said the movie is getting a lot of reaction from people who used to live in Silicon Valley, but moved out because they got "pressed out" by the rising costs.
Ward is already at work on his next project, a comedy called You Make the Call.
Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish/A Critical Romp Through The Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech hasn't seen the movie yet, though she'd welcome anything that tried to capture the "poofed up, arrogant, self-important attitude" of some Valley types.
Borsook said she and her friends frequently lament the "lost California pastoral" that Ward is trying to capture in his film.
"The ruination has been so fast."
