The news, last week, that Yahoo was moving into the old Times Building seemed to signal the final stage in the new world order. The hallowed halls of the Old Guard are being reinvented as techie havens, complete with Ping-Pong tables and beanbags. The buildings might change, but what about the people in them? That’s the question at the heart of “The Internship,” a new movie starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. The pair play middle-aged watch salesmen who, finding themselves obsolete, become interns at Google and, in Hollywood fashion, triumph over a group of twenty-year-olds competing for jobs.
The movie showcases the familiar antics of Vaughn (hyperactive) and Wilson (stoned?), but its real star is, arguably, the Googleplex, Google’s campus, in Mountain View, California. The company gave the filmmakers full access to the facility, which is depicted as a workplace Shangri-la. When Vaughn and Wilson wander onto the campus, the film’s color palette brightens. Free sushi and bagels overflow from campus kitchens. Hoodie-clad employees whiz by on bicycles. Comparisons to “The Wizard of Oz” are not accidental, according to the film’s director, Shawn Levy. “When writing the screenplay, we referred to the arrival in Northern California as entering the Emerald City,” Levy said the other day. “I wanted to nod to the moment where it became Technicolor.”
Levy was at Google’s New York headquarters—a former Port Authority building, on Eighth Avenue—where he, Vaughn, and Wilson were filming a promotional video. Jordan Newman, a Google communications staffer, took Levy on a tour, starting with one of the company’s more than twenty “micro kitchens.” It had a Lego theme, as well as espresso machines and fruit and other snacks—all free. “We think people are most productive when they’re happy and content,” Newman said. Levy added, “In the film, Vince’s character gets seduced by the free-ness—juice bars and sushi and pizza.”
They progressed to a break area, which had a New York City transportation theme. (A sign on the way warned, “Quiet Please! Googlers at Work.”) A teleconference room was decorated like a subway stop, with a tiled sign that read, “Uptown Trains.” Two train cars had little living rooms inside, labelled “Google Rapid Transit.” Newman said, “The idea is let’s give people different environments to work in.”
“I could only fit about sixty-five per cent of the weird facts that I learned about Google into the movie,” Levy said. Details that made it in: a Quidditch game, and conferences taking place on a roving red five-person bicycle. “It’s not a gimmick,” Levy said. “Every time I’d go up there, I’d see someone on it.”
Newman suggested going upstairs—“We can either take the elevator, the stairs, or the ladder.” After stopping by a nap pod, he pointed out a hallway lined with Pac-Man consoles.
A female Google employee peered suspiciously at the visitors, one of whom was taking a photo. She said, with a British accent, “Photographs aren’t allowed here.” Newman explained that it was O.K., because he was on the communications team. “I don’t know what that is,” the Googler told him. “I only know that this is not allowed.”
Up on the fifth floor, Newman and Levy passed through the Water Tower Café and moved on to some meeting rooms that had a meatpacking-district theme, and others, with red velvet chairs, that were named for Broadway theatres.
Nearby, a group of grizzled-looking Googlers were hunched over desks. Levy recognized them as engineers. “They call them the Enge, right?” he whispered, and added that, on the Google campus, “it’s the high-school caste system, reversed. When a pack of the Enge walk through the campus, they’re the rock stars.”
Newman said, “You’re, like, ‘That’s the guy who created JavaScript.’ ”
Levy described an encounter in California: “We’re in the middle of shooting by the beach-volleyball court, and this guy rides up on an elliptical StairMaster bicycle.” The cyclist wore yoga clothes, fuzzy green slippers, and Google glasses, which have a tiny computer monitor above one eye. Levy continued, “Someone goes, ‘Shawn, this is Sergey’ ”—Brin. “I go, ‘Dude—you look like I would imagine a Googler looking. Can I film you?’ ” Brin appears in the movie twice.
The film’s leading men are not the Google Glass type, Levy said. “Owen and Vince are not on Twitter. Owen and Vince have never been on Facebook.” He entered a conference room where Wilson was trying on a plaid shirt, surrounded by a film crew. Wilson confirmed that he doesn’t use technology “a huge amount.”
“You’ve got an iPad,” a production assistant said.
“I do,” Wilson said, hesitantly. “And there’s a new BlackBerry coming out, I guess.”
Vaughn, in the next room, said that “The Internship” shows that even technological dinosaurs have something to offer in the new world order. “Everybody’s coming from their own position,” he said. “There are some skills that some people have, and some skills that other people have.” He asked Levy, “Can we run lines?” ♦
