History Film / PiratesOfSiliconValley

* HollywoodNerd: Gates is definitely portrayed as one, but [[YouShouldKnowThisAlready comes out on top at the end.]]

* GlorifiedSpermDonor: [[spoiler:Jobs with his daughter Lisa. He claims to be sterile and unable to get anyone pregnant, denying that he is the father. He seems to regret distancing himself after awhile though, with one scene showing him interacting with Lisa with a bit of a somber mood, and the speculation that the Apple Lisa was named after her.]]
* GranolaGirl: Steve Jobs' girlfriend Arlene.

* GreyAndGrayMorality: Both Gates and Jobs are presented warts and all. The more socially awkward Gates is single minded about his company and success, often deceptive in reaching his goals. The handsome and charismatic is vocally idealistic, but this also becomes part of the cultlike atmosphere at Apple.

* FreudianExcuse: Created in a made-up scene where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs meet for the first time. Bill Gates introduces himself, and offers his hand, but Steve Jobs is so pumped up from a presentation he just gave that he ignores him and walks away.

* BreakingTheFourthWall: During a pivotal meeting between Bill Gates and IBM, the scene freezes and Steve Ballmer gets up and directly addresses the audiences to deliver an exposition.
-->"This is amazing. Not just amazing, it's historic. It should be taught in all the history books. Hung and framed in the National Gallery or something, because this is the instant of creation of one of the greatest fortunes in the history of the world. I mean, Bill Gates is the richest guy in the world because of what started in this room. And you wanna know what else? It wasn't exactly smoke and mirrors, but ''we didn't have anything!'' I mean, ''not a damn thing!'' Here we were, this two-bit little outfit, telling IBM we had the answer to their problems. The DOS? The Disk Operating System? To make all those zillion IBM computers compute? We didn't remotely own anything like what Bill was selling them."

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: A subtle example -- Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC employee who was ordered by company execs (over her strong objections) to give Jobs and company a demo of the Smalltalk system, is named only "Xerox project manager" in the credits. (Why her name wasn't used is unknown, but in real life Goldberg was almost as significant to Smalltalk as its creators, Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls, having written the standard book on Smalltalk-80 and later running a company that marketed Smalltalk when Xerox wouldn't.)

* GlorifiedSpermDonor: [[spoiler: Jobs with his daughter Lisa. He claims to be sterile and unable to get anyone pregnant, denying that he is the father. He seems to regret distancing himself after awhile though, with one scene showing him interacting with Lisa with a bit of a somber mood, and the speculation that the Apple Lisa was named after her.]]

** Xerox never considering their early version of [=GUI=] (Graphical User Interface) to be all that important (the product using it didn't sell well); Adele Goldberg and the rest of PARC did, though, and the film shows a scene of a furious Goldberg trying and failing to convince a (rather LargeHam) Xerox exec to give PARC and Smalltalk more funding and a commercial outlet. Both Jobs and Gates go racing to get their own version of [=GUI=]s - Mac and Windows - out as fast as possible, seeing the value in the home-based market for such a user-friendly operating tool. This is what Gates is yelling about at the end when Jobs confronts him about Microsoft getting Windows out ahead of his Mac release.
* {{Jerkass}}: Both Jobs and Gates, though Jobs' jerkassery is shown more prominently in the film (to the point that one Apple employee almost throttles him for his verbal abuse). Gates' is much more subtle, but just as low-blowing.

--> '''Gates:''' Get real, will you? You and I are both like guys that had this rich neighbor - Xerox - that left the door open all the time. And you go sneaking in to steal the TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. '''''I GOT THE LOOT, STEVE!''''' And ''you're'' yelling? That's not ''fair''? "I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.

* PrideBeforeAFall: Jobs and his company. At the end of the movie, he [[spoiler: has his friend walk out on him and his company, is eventually fired (although he eventually comes back between then and the final scene), and has to rely on his ''main competitor'' in order to stay afloat.]] Before this, he owned the hottest company in Silicon Valley, with only the sky as the limit.
* ProudToBeAGeek
* ShownTheirWork: Despite a research workload that avoided official statements or interviews from either Apple or Microsoft, the film manages to capture most of the events it covers accurately (albeit with occasional goofs). Even the real Steve Wozniak was impressed by the producers' accuracy and said as much in an interview:
--> The personalities and incidents are accurate in the sense that they all occurred but they are often with the wrong parties (Bill Fernandez, Apple employee #4, was with me and the computer that burned up in 1970) and at the wrong dates (when John Sculley joined, he had to redirect attention from the Apple III, not the Mac, to the Apple II) and places (Homebrew Computer Club was at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) ... the personalities were very accurately portrayed.

* YoungerThanTheyLook: Given Steve Ballmer being almost completely bald by 1980 in the movie, it's hard to believe that (1) he was only 24 at the time, and (2) he is actually younger than Bill Gates.

The film made its debut on television on June 20, 1999 on [[Creator/TurnerNetworkTelevision TNT]] and was later released on VHS and DVD.

* BookEnds: Sort of. The movie begins with the 1984 Macintosh commercial with the Big Brother screen, and ends with Bill Gates on a massive video screen, just like the commercial at a Stevenote. The movie even lampshades it.

Compare ''Film/{{Jobs}},'' another film about the early days of Steve Jobs & Apple.

* {{Documentary}}: The movie will cut away to have either the actual people the movie was based on, or the actors themselves give exposition on a scene.

* HeyItsThatVoice: Apparently, [[Creator/JohnDiMaggio Bender]] went to Harvard with Bill Gates

* HeyItsThatVoice: Apparently, [[Creator/JohnDiMaggio Bender]] went to Harvard with Bill Gates

* SpiritualSuccessor: ''Film/TheSocialNetwork'' could be considered one for the new millennium, being about another real life InsufferableGenius who revolutionized computers.

* AManIsNotAVirgin: Jobs seems to be pulling something like this with a interviewee when he asks him if he was a virgin (he wasn't), but the movie was probably misinterpreting an actual (although possibly apocryphal) event. While Jobs supposedly did inquire about a man's sex life during an interview, he was probably also referring to "Code Virgins", people who had never seen copyrighted IBM code before while working for them. While it is legal to reverse-engineer code, copying code is not, and a fast-talking IBM lawyer could argue that the latter was the case if a former IBM employee worked for Apple and made a product similar to an IBM one.
** Played straight in Gates segments, where Ballmer is portrayed as a younger DirtyOldMan and is regularly giving Gates flak for focusing on business over interacting with females.

''Pirates of Silicon Valley'' is a 1999 made-for-TV docudrama. Based off of the book ''Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer'' by Paul Freiberger, it documents the creation and rise of Apple Computers (later Apple Inc.) and Microsoft through the lives of each company's co-founder, Creator/SteveJobs and Bill Gates. The story is told InMediasRes and narrated by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (when focusing on Jobs and Apple) and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer (when focusing on Gates and Microsoft). NoahWyle stars as Steve Jobs, AnthonyMichaelHall as Bill Gates, and JohnDiMaggio appears as Steve Ballmer.

The film made its debut on television on June 20, 1999 on [[TurnerNetworkTelevision TNT]] and was later released on VHS and DVD.

'''''Pirates of Silicon Valley''''' is a 1999 made-for-TV docudrama. Based off of the book ''Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer'' by Paul Freiberger, it documents the creation and rise of Apple Computers (later Apple Inc.) and Microsoft through the lives of each company's co-founder, Creator/SteveJobs and Bill Gates. The story is told InMediasRes and narrated by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (when focusing on Jobs and Apple) and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer (when focusing on Gates and Microsoft). NoahWyle stars as Steve Jobs, AnthonyMichaelHall as Bill Gates, and JohnDiMaggio appears as Steve Ballmer.

'''''Pirates of Silicon Valley''''' is a 1999 made-for-TV docudrama. Based off of the book ''Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer'' by Paul Freiberger, it documents the creation and rise of Apple Computers (later Apple Inc.) and Microsoft through the lives of each company's co-founder, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The story is told InMediasRes and narrated by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (when focusing on Jobs and Apple) and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer (when focusing on Gates and Microsoft). NoahWyle stars as Steve Jobs, AnthonyMichaelHall as Bill Gates, and JohnDiMaggio appears as Steve Ballmer.

''Pirates of Silicon Valley'' is a 1999 made-for-TV docudrama. Based off of the book ''Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer'' by Paul Freiberger, it documents the creation and rise of Apple Computers (later Apple Inc.) and Microsoft through the lives of each company's co-founder, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The story is told InMediasRes and narrated by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (when focusing on Jobs and Apple) and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer (when focusing on Gates and Microsoft). NoahWyle stars as Steve Jobs, AnthonyMichaelHall as Bill Gates, and JohnDiMaggio appears as Steve Ballmer.

** Xerox never considering their early version of [=GUI=] (Graphical User Interface) to be all that important (the product using it didn't sell well). Both Jobs and Gates go racing to get their own version of [=GUI=]s - Mac and Windows - out as fast as possible, seeing the value in the home-based market for such a user-friendly operating tool. This is what Gates is yelling about at the end when Jobs confronts him about Microsoft getting Windows out ahead of his Mac release.

* SpiritualSuccessor: ''TheSocialNetwork'' could be considered one for the new millennium, being about another real life InsufferableGenius who revolutionized computers.

--> '''Gates:''' Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. '''''I GOT THE LOOT, STEVE!''''' And ''you're'' yellin'? "That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.

* AManIsNotAVirgin: Jobs seems to be pulling something like this with a interviewee when he asks him if he was a virgin (he wasn't), but the movie was probably misinterpreting an actual (although possibly apocryphal) event. While Jobs supposedly did inquire about a man's sex life during an interview, he was probably also referring to "Code Virgins", people who had never seen copyrighted IBM code before while working for them. While it is legal to reverse-engineer code, copying code is not, and a fast-talking IBM lawyer could argue that this was the case if a former IBM employee worked for Apple and made a product similar to an IBM one.

* AManIsNotAVirgin: Jobs seems to be pulling something like this with a interviewee when he asks him if he was a virgin (he wasn't), but the movie was probably misinterpreting an actual event. While Jobs supposedly did inquire about a man's sex life during an interview, he was probably also referring to "Code Virgins", people who had never seen copyrighted IBM code before while working for them. While it is legal to reverse-engineer code, copying code is not, and a fast-talking IBM lawyer could argue that this was the case if a former IBM employee worked for Apple and made a product similar to an IBM one.

* FourthWallPsych: The movie begins with Steve Jobs talking about changing the world. It seems like he's talking to the viewer about the film, but then the camera zooms out to reveal he's talking to RidleyScott, the director of Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl commercial.