5/31/2023 0 Comments Never read the comments gif![]() ![]() I thought the employees were always willfully ignorant, but it’s clear it was a cultlike attraction. Critics have said you were not hard enough on them about their abuse of WeWork employees - offering low wages in exchange for a sham shot at the dream - and then running away with all the gains. We simply tried to make them as interesting as possible - because the real people are so fascinating and flawed and strange and human and relatable and alien all at once. ![]() What were you trying to do by making them such ridiculous and even abusive characters but also persuading the audience to root for their crazy ventures?Įisenberg: Dramatically, you want the audience invested in your main characters. In particular, the portrayal of Rebekah and Adam Neumann by Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto managed to be both devastating and also sympathetic, although I doubt either real person would think so. So it wasn’t a creative decision as much as a reflection of reality. Without her, we think he’d still be doing that. This was a guy hustling the kinds of harebrained products you’d see on late-night infomercials before he met her (onesies with kneepads for babies, collapsible women’s heels). Rebekah gave him the words - the high-minded philosophy - to package his sales pitch. This wasn’t exaggeration or just something sweet to say about his wife. The more we researched and talked to former employees and childhood friends and associates, the more we realized he was right. Tell me why you took this approach?Ĭrevello: Adam Neumann always says - in interviews, in his commencement address at his alma mater - that there would be no WeWork without his wife, Rebekah, and he would be nowhere without her. Of all the series the tech gods brought to Earth for our streaming pleasure, your depiction of the WeWork debacle as a love story was quite novel and, really, exactly right. Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, the showrunners for “WeCrashed,” now on Apple TV+, passed along their thoughts on the hit series detailing the rise and near complete collapse of WeWork. According to his obituary page, “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind and good man.”īasic, I guess. Wilhite, the technologist, also led what appears to be a very fine analog life. And what’s wrong with some brief momentary distraction as we stand on the precipice of whatever Web3 will turn out to be? Maybe a GIF is just a little thing, but the little things matter. “They are wrong.” (Please do not miss his perfect Webby acceptance speech, which only allows five words, via GIF.) “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” he said. It’s “jif,” just like the peanut butter, with a soft “G” and not “gif” with a hard one like in “gift.” But don’t take my word for it: Wilhite himself explained this to an audience at the Webby Awards and to The Times. ![]() While we’re at it, you’re probably pronouncing it wrong. The first GIF Wilhite created was of an airplane, and it, well, took off from there. GIFs were a necessary creation at a time when internet speeds were outpaced by molasses and there was a need to figure out a way to efficiently move better-quality graphics in color. Like when the first refrains of a favorite song from high school come on the radio, seeing that gyrating baby whooshes me right back to when I really liked technology in the most hopeful of ways. Universal emotions connecting people across long distances in one of the purest of ways.Īm I making too much of it? Not a bit. The GIF embodied that by delivering a simple emotion to make us laugh or scoff or snort. on the Las Vegas Strip, deadening and deafening with menacing spirits lurking on the edges, barely perceptible.īack when Wilhite and his fellow computer engineers labored at the early internet service CompuServe in the 1980s, they were guided by a simpler goal of making digital a delight for the masses and not just a geeky sideshow. These days, spend too long online and it starts to feel like 3 a.m. GIFs call to mind what seems a simpler time online, before the immediacy and noise and flashing and rancor of the internet took hold. For him, the ghostly infant born before he was and whirling to an Ooga Chaka beat was not all that, even though it was everything for his mom. Perhaps I should have expected as much since he’s grown up with the internet. Wilhite has said it was a favorite of his.Īccording to my son, Dancing Baby is “basic” and is akin to looking at hieroglyphics. Just ask my 16-year-old, who I subjected to a demonstration of the famous GIF after learning of the untimely death of Stephen Wilhite, credited with creating the graphical format, after succumbing to complications from Covid at just 74. How can one explain to a member of Gen Z the wide-eyed wonder so many of us experienced at first sight of the Dancing Baby wiggling its way across 1990s computer screens?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |