Review: The Real Revolutionaries (2009)

[Steve Rhodes]

THE REAL REVOLUTIONARIES
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2010 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ***

I'm writing to you from the Valley of Heart's Delight.  You may know it 
better as Germanium Valley, or you might if the famous scientists and 
inventors chronicled in THE REAL REVOLUTIONARIES had not found out that 
silicon, not germanium, is a much more effective, albeit harder to work 
with, substance for building integrated circuits.

A fascinating documentary, THE REAL REVOLUTIONARIES, by director Paul 
Crowder and writer Mark Monroe, tells the story of the Fairchild 8, the team 
that took the transistor and from it developed the revolutionary chips that 
have fundamentally transformed the world.

The best known of these ground-breaking engineers known as the Fairchild 8 
are Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce.  William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner 
for the invention of the transistor, was the genius who recruited the best 
and the brightest in 1957 to join him in his new lab.  A mercurial and 
controlling guy and a guy most people believed was one of the smartest men 
ever, Shockley subjected his employees to psychological tests, IQ tests and 
even lie detector tests.

Eventually out of frustration with him, the above mentioned eight men, 
called the Traitorous 8 by Shockley, left to join Fairchild Electronics. 
Later these guys would split up and spawn a host of Silicon Valley 
companies, which were sometimes nicknamed the Fairchildren.  Noyce and 
Moore, for example, went on to form this small company you might have heard 
of -- Intel, which made microprocessors a widely used part of our everyday 
lives in everything from cars to coffee makers.

The documentary works best as an intriguing history lesson, teaching us 
things most of us, even those of us, like me, with a background in Computer 
Science, have probably never heard before.  But the film is not without its 
needless distractions.  In an attempt to make itself more accessible, I 
suppose, the film is edited into what feels like microsecond segments, 
complete with way too cutesy animated graphics and a blaring sound track. 
Also, the script becomes obsessed with Shockley's obsession with racial 
genetics, which sidetracks the narrative.

The movie is at its best when it's teaching us -- "Technology 101: 
Everything is about the switch" -- or it's naturally humorous.  The best 
line in the movie comes from an interview with New York Times columnist 
Thomas Friedman.  Speaking about the differences in the respect and awe for 
technology's superstars in Japan vs. the United States, he says, "In Japan, 
Bill Gates is Brittany Spears.  Unfortunately in the United States, Brittany 
Spears is Brittany Spears."

Pointing out how far we've come in such a relatively short amount of time, 
the movie reminds us that it wasn't that long ago that we lived in a world 
without electronics.  Today, we live in a time in which the exponential 
growth in technology predicted by Gordon Moore still holds true.  His rule 
of thumb, which we now refer to as "Moore's Law," is that circuit density 
(think complexity or power) doubles every 18 months (or every 2 years, 
depending on which version of the prediction you've heard).  This is why, 
the film's authors argue, that the real revolutionaries weren't the counter 
culture hippies of the 1960s, but the Fairchild 8 nerds with their pocket 
protectors and slide rules.  They are the ones who truly revolutionized our 
world forever and for the better.

THE REAL REVOLUTIONARIES runs 1:29.

The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival 
(www.Cinequest.org), which runs February 23 through March 7, 2010.

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