Hardware

There’s a reason they’re called motion pictures – or, more colloquially and to the point, moving pictures. Which brings to mind the question: How entertaining, much less cinematically challenging can depictions of keyboarding, mouse-clicking, and cutting-and-pasting – not to mention talking-head conferences in boardrooms, design studios, and engineers’ cubicles – be?

The initial ads for “Jobs,” the recent biopic of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, starring “That ‘70s Show’s” quintessential slacker, Ashton Kutcher, rocked out with blaring classic rock anthems, while every snippet of dialogue ended with an exclamation point: “He’s trying to start a war with IBM!” – promising an experience more exciting than it really is.

Real-life Steve Jobs and Ashton Kutcher...or is it
Ashton Kutcher and Steve Jobs...or who cares?

Later television spots for the film were toned down but still featured inspiring lines like, “We’ve got to risk everything!” and: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels…”

The 1999 TV movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” starring Noah Wyle (best known as Dr. John Carter on eleven seasons of “ER”) as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall (“National Lampoon’s Vacation’s” original Rusty Griswold and costar of teen-angst auteur John Hughes’ “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”) as Bill Gates, was an acclaimed, understated drama, and it succeeded because it was suited for the medium of the small screen.

Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates, Noah Wyle as rival Steve Jobs

In 1995, filmmakers attempted to pump big-screen excitement into the cyberpunk thriller “Hackers,” about a nerd-herd of “high schoolers” – including then-23-year-old Jonny Lee Miller (currently portraying Sherlock Holmes opposite Lucy Liu’s Dr. Watson on the TV series “Elementary”), 20-year-old Angelina Jolie, and 25-year-old Matthew Lillard (best known for his roles as Stu in “Scream” and as Shaggy in the live-action “Scooby-Doo” comedies) – who mouse-whip themselves into a corporate extortion conspiracy.

Laurence Mason, Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard in "Hackers"

A U.S.-British co-production directed by Iain Softley (who would go on to direct the provocative 2001 speculative-extraterrestrial drama “K-PAX,” starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges) and featuring Fisher Stevens (“Short Circuit”), Lorraine Bracco (“The Sopranos”), and Penn Jillette, “Hackers,” according to one online grinch, represented a new genre derisively dubbed “hacksploitation.”

Sandra Bullock appears as bored as audiences in 1995's "The Net."

Also in 1995, Sandra Bullock starred in “The Net,” directed by Irwin Winkler, who is better known as a producer (“Raging Bull,” “The Right Stuff,” “Goodfellas”) than as a director (“Guilty by Suspicion,” “Home of the Brave”). Costarring Jason Northam and Dennis Miller, the cyber-thriller was summed up by Roger Ebert as “an assembly of Hitchcock situations in search of a story.”

Apparently, 1995 was a big year for hacksploitation as Keanu Reeves, the poor man’s Tom Cruise, starred in “Johnny Mnemonic” (above) as a global high-tech courier with a cybernetic data storage system surgically implanted in his brain who makes his living transporting digital information too sensitive to risk transmission over computer networks. Once you get past that inane premise on which to drape a flimsy thriller of a plot – based on a novel by the so-called “father of cyberpunk fiction,” William Gibson, and directed by painter-sculptor-music video director Robert Longo – you’re left with what Roger Ebert deemed “one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn’t deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.” He noted “it has the nerve to pose as a futuristic fable when in fact all of its parts were bought off the shelf at the Used Movie Store.”

Director Phil Alden Robinson (a filmmaker revered by sons everywhere for cranking out the best it’s-OK-for-guys-to-cry drama ever made, “Field of Dreams”) contributed to the hacksploitation phenomenon of 1995 with “Sneakers,” an almost-all-star caper flick about an elite team of corporate espionage experts recruited by a government agency to steal a code-breaking program that can access any secret computer file worldwide.

Mary McDonnell, Sidney Poitier, David Straithairn, Dan Aykroyd,
River Phoenix, and Robert Redford in 1995's "Sneakers"

Roger Ebert compared star Robert Redford’s team of high-tech commandos to “yet another version of the World War II platoon that always had one of everything…the black guy (Sidney Poitier), the fat guy (Dan Aykroyd), the blind guy (David Strathairn), the woman (Mary McDonnell), and the Kid (River Phoenix).”

Much like the necessary evil of automobiles in our lives as mentioned in an earlier moviehouse outing, computers have become a necessary evil in every aspect of daily existence. And like every previous love-hate relationship with modern technology, computers have stirred writers, artists, and filmmakers to suggest ghosts in the machines that threaten our humanity. There are beasties in computers, on the internet, in video games, on the television, in the radio, on the telephone.

More than a dozen years before regularly scheduled network programming on television started in the U.S. in 1948, Bela Lugosi, the screen’s original “Dracula,” portrayed a killer twin brother in 1935’s “Murder by Television.” The producers borrowed TV equipment from Los Angeles researchers who were working on experimental television. The equipment itself was worth $75,000, more than twice the film’s budget.

And you thought disgruntled postal workers were dangerous…In “Murder by Phone,” a disgruntled phone company employee devises a method to kill victims who answer their telephones, causing ears, eyes, noses, and mouths to spew blood before being finished off with a bolt of electricity. Richard Chamberlain and John Houseman try to solve the crimes in this 1982 Canadian production also known as “Hell’s Bells.”

1982 also saw the release of Steven Spielberg’s production of “Poltergeist” – credited to director Tobe Hooper but brazenly stamped with unmistakably Spielberg-like trademarks – in which pissed-off spirits in an unmoved graveyard haunt a witless suburban family and abduct their precocious daughter through the television screen.

Craig T. Nelson, Heather O'Rourke, and JoBeth Williams
in Steven Spielberg's - er, Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist"

Speaking of television, in 1983’s “Videodrome,” directed by David Cronenberg, the reliably unsettling James Woods portrayed a pirate-TV programmer who discovers an untraceable, S&M transmission that induces hallucinatory aftereffects – thanks to grotesque special effects by Rick Baker – as part of what Creature Features author John Stanley dubbed “a plot by the Moral Majority to cleanse the nation.”

“Pulse,” a 2006 remake of an earlier Japanese horror film, depicts ghostly creatures who emerge from computers to drive users to commit suicide or to reduce them to piles of soot and ash. Meanwhile, in “Stay Alive” (also from 2006), hardcore video gamers die gruesome deaths duplicating their digital characters in a sinister game based on history’s 17^th-century “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Bathory.

Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing in fabulist Jules Verne’s fiction predicting computers. Although the other “Father of Science Fiction,” H.G. Wells, alluded to a second world war, atomic bombs, lasers, genetic engineering, and the moon landing, he, as well, never suggested the imminent technology of computers.

However, more than one hundred years before the 19^th-century birth of Jules Verne, acerbic political satirist Jonathan Swift described what has been regarded as the first depiction in literature of a device that resembles a computer in his 1726 masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels.

The storm-tossed adventurer finds himself in Balnibarbi, a nation ruled over by a tyrannical king on a flying island called Laputa. Visiting the country’s capital city of Lagado, Gulliver tours the Academy of Projectors, which houses The Engine, an information-generated machine that produces permutations of word sets.

Two hundred twenty years later, on February 15, 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was unveiled at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (above). It took 200,000 man hours to build and weighed 30 tons. Housed in a 180-square-foot room, ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and required continual replacement of defective tubes. Requiring 130 kilowatts of power, ENIAC was used at the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army in Aberdeen, Maryland.

CBS news correspondent Charles Collingwood
takes UNIVAC 1 for a test spin.

The first electronic computer for commercial use was the UNIVAC I, designed by Dr. John W. Munchly and J. Preston Eckert Jr. (the same pair who had developed ENIAC), manufactured by the Remington Rand Corporation in Philadelphia and demonstrated at the U.S. Bureau of the Census on June 14, 1951.

In the realm of science fiction, the 1909 novel The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (an author best known for limning the repressed relationships among British middle and upper classes in such books as A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India) depicts a future where most of Earth’s population has lost the ability to live on the planet’s surface, and individuals’ bodily and spiritual needs are met by the omnipotent global Machine.

An astrogation computer guides an Earth spaceship assigned to corral asteroids and move them into new orbits in the 1939 short story “Misfit” by Robert A. Heinlein, author of the seminal science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, as well as, among others, The Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers.

One of the earliest depictions of a computer in movies was The MANIAC in 1953’s “The Magnetic Monster” (above), co-written and produced by Ivan Tors, who would later make a name for himself as a producer of family-oriented nature and underwater entertainment like “Sea Hunt,” “Flipper,” and “Daktari,” and starring Albert Lea, Minnesota-born Richard Carlson, who would go on to confront benevolent aliens and a gilled monster in “It Came from Outer Space” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” The “monster” here is an out-of-control isotope that ingests energy as it grows and emits radiation.

In the 1955 science fiction epic “This Island Earth,” selected scientists get to assemble an alien communication device called The Interocitor (above), capable of auto-piloting aircraft, controlling surveillance and security systems, and directing nuclear weapons, not to mention two-way video conferencing with bulbous-headed humanoids from the planet Metaluna. One of the elite Earthling eggheads is future “Gilligan’s Island” Professor, Russell Johnson.

We in the moviehouse figured "Forbidden Planet" star Anne Francis
is easier on the eye than the Great Machine, or Robbie the Robot,
for that matter...

On the planet Altair IV, the daily existence of sole human inhabitants Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his miniskirted, viriginal daughter Alta (Anne Francis), along with wisecracking Robbie the Robot, is dependent upon the omniscient Great Machine in “Forbidden Planet,” the 1956 science fiction classic based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

In "Desk Set" (1957), the eighth of nine popular screen pairings of Spencer Tracy
and Katharine Hepburn, Tracy played an unpopular efficiency expert assigned to
revamp a television network with his new invention, EMERAC, a computer
obviously inspired by the formidable ENIAC and UNIVAC machines.
(Incidentally, the witty script for "Desk Set" was written by Phoebe and Henry
Ephron, parents of noted writers Nora, Delia, Hallie, and Amy Ephron.)

For most of the 1950s into the 1960s, computers were represented in movies (“The Fly,” “Fantastic Voyage”) and on TV (“Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “Batman,” “Star Trek”) as hulking machines with banks of blinking colorful lights, rows of spinning tape reels, and miles of paper printouts.

As the 1960s wound down, something monumental happened in cinema that would for decades alter the way motion pictures depicted computers. Thanks to visionary author Arthur C. Clarke and singular (read “peculiar”) filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, movie audiences were introduced in 1968 to HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorthmic computer), the all-too human antagonist of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a sentient computer that maintains the operating systems of the spacecraft Discovery One, on an interplanetary mission to Jupiter.

For the better part of "2001: A Space Odyssey," HAL 9000 is represented
by omnipresent all-seeing crimson lights installed throughout Discovery One
and by the soothing voice of Canadian stage actor Douglas Rain.

HAL suffers what Kubrick defined as a “nervous breakdown” when confronted by its own “infallibility” and resorts to causing the deaths of the onboard scientists cocooned in hiber-sleep and planning the murders of the ship’s two custodial astronauts, Bowman and Poole, played to deadpan perfection by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, described by Newsweek critic Joseph Morgenstern as “paradigms of your ideal astronaut: scarily smart, hair-raisingly humorless.”

HAL eavesdrops via lip-reading on a conspiratory confab between
astronauts Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Bowman (Keir Dullea).

The Harvard Crimson deemed Bowman and Poole “inhuman. Their faces register no emotion and they show no tension.” Venerable film critic Pauline Kael noted, “It isn’t accidental that we don’t care if the characters live or die…” Writing in Film Comment, F.A. Macklin observed, “The only human in the film is HAL 9000 which…exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole.” Actor Dullea echoed this sentiment when he said, “HAL was more human than the humans.”

After killing Poole, HAL tells Bowman, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions lately.” Writers in the Harvard Crimson remarked, “HAL’s ‘death’ becomes the only empathy-evoking scene in ‘2001.’ Unlike any of the humans, HAL dies a natural human death…slowing down into senility and second childhood, until he remembers only his first programmed memory, the song ‘Daisy,’ which he sings until his final expiration.”

The "natural human death" of HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey"

“No one would ever accuse Kubrick of being a sentimental humanist,” according to the editors of The Movie Guide. “The human characters are less animated than the machines.” Indeed, a favorite theme Kubrick revisited throughout his career is the dehumanization of our species.

In the 1960 thinking-man’s sword-and-sandal epic “Spartacus,” men are stripped of freedom and individuality as faceless slaves trained to battle one another for the amusement of an amoral public. Similarly, a few years earlier, Kubrick depicted French officers in World War I who dispatch soldiers as mere cannon fodder in a suicidal charge, in “Paths of Glory.”

In “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), humankind is targeted for a global doomsday by a seemingly inscrutable computer code. In “The Shining” (1980), cabin fever and supernatural forces consume Jack Nicholson’s humanity.

In Kubrick’s 1987 skewed take on the Vietnam War, “Full Metal Jacket,” young recruits, not unlike the nameless gladiators of “Spartacus,” are molded into automatic killing machines. In Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” you couldn’t ask for a more dispassionate presence than Tom Cruise. (…Okay, maybe Keanu Reeves.)

But getting back to the threat of rogue artificial intelligence represented by HAL (both Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick repeatedly denied the coincidence of HAL being alphabetically shy of the Big Blue’s IBM), Kubrick, in a 1970 interview, commented, “The idea of a neurotic computer is not uncommon…once you have a computer which is more intelligent than man and capable of learning by experience, it’s inevitable that it will develop an equivalent range of emotional reactions…”

“Colossus: The Forbin Project,” produced in the wake of “2001: A Space Odyssey” on a comparatively modest scale, predicted a near future when Western alliance nuclear defenses are turned over to a supercomputer secreted in the Rocky Mountains, in a cautionary fable with deep roots in paranoia that seem more tangible today than the remote threats posed by a “neurotic” navigational computer in outer space. In fact, Universal Pictures delayed the release of “Colossus: The Forbin Project” until 1970 because they were unsure of how to promote it after the phenomenal success of “2001.”

Colossus: "What I am began in man's mind, but I have progressed further than
man...In time you will come to regard me not only with respect...but with love."

Colossus immediately becomes aware of a Russian counterpart called Guardian and threatens nuclear action if the two computers aren’t allowed to link, inevitably leading to the unified Colossus to subjugate world leaders to its global domination. At first communicating via an ominous red LED ticker (not unlike Times Square’s “Zipper”) but ultimately given a chillingly impersonal electronic voice (supplied by longtime Hollywood voice artist Paul Frees), Colossus proclaims, “I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live, or disobey and die.”

At the onset, Colossus’ arrogant creator, Dr. Charles Forbin (played by Eric Braeden, an actor best known for his three-decade love-hate relationship with daytime drama fans as Victor Newman on “The Young and the Restless””) forebodingly boasts that his brainchild is “self-sufficient, self-protecting, self-generating. It is impenetrable.”

Born Hans Gudegast in Germany, Braeden emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager in 1959. As a college student in Montana, he became interested in making documentary films. In Hollywood, however, he was approached by agents more interested in casting handsome Europeans fluent in English. He played German soldiers on a couple episodes of the World War II-themed TV series “Combat!” before landing the recurring role of Afrika Korps Captain Dietrich on “The Rat Patrol,” from 1966 to 1968. As Hans Gudegast, he occasionally turned up as exotic villains on “Hawaii Five-O” and costarred as a German officer, with Jim Brown, Raquel Welch, and Burt Reynolds, in the raucous 1969 western “100 Rifles.”

The visage of Eric Braden familiar to daytime drama
fans of his role as Victor Newman
in "The Young and the Restless"

When Hans Gudegast was informed by Universal Pictures president Lew Wasserman that no actor with a German name would be allowed to star in an American movie (meaning “Colossus: The Forbin Project”), he took the name Eric Braeden, from his birth-home of Bredenbek, Germany, where his father had been mayor.

Both Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston were originally considered for the role of Forbin. Peck, instead, opted to star in the forgettable, turgid melodrama “I Walk the Line” (not to be confused with the later Johnny Cash biopic, although “I Walk the Line” did feature five songs by the Man in Black), while Heston ended up with a cameo in the silly sequel “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” (Speaking of inane “Planet of the Apes” sequels, Eric Braeden played an evil scientist in 1971’s “Escape from the Planet of the Apes.”)

In his first feature film leading role (a rarity for Braeden, whose few movie roles include villainous racer Bruno von Stickle in Disney’s “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” and tycoon John Jacob Astor IV in director James Cameron’s “Titanic”), Braeden gives Forbin a bare-bones credibility, unassuming wryness, and refreshing nuances that would have been lacking in the bloated Hollywood presence of a Peck or a Heston.

The production’s computer equipment was furnished by Control Data Corporation, which, for most of the 1960s, developed machines that were, by far, the fastest computers in the world. Working from a script by James Bridges (who would later direct the 1979 cinematic exercise in nuclear paranoia “The China Syndrome”), director Joseph Sargent (who went on to make the crackerjack crime thriller “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” - the good one, in 1974, not the overblown 2009 remake) deftly downplayed the techno-gadgetry in favor of the human element, and Colossus, like HAL, emerged as a central character.

Rumors of a remake of “Colossus: The Forbin Project” began as early as 2007, when Brian Grazer was mentioned as producer, with Ron Howard directing Will Smith. Names of possible screenwriters have come and gone, with the latest candidate being Ed Solomon, who scripted “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and the original “Men in Black.”

Until then, the 1970 “Colossus” remains a successful attempt to induce any number of uneasy, restless nights for viewers. The modest but sincere cast of supporting players boasts several familiar faces from television, including Susan Clark (who starred with real-life husband Alex Karras for six seasons on “Webster”), William Schallert (the often-flustered father on “The Patty Duke Show), Marion Ross (Mrs. “C” on “Happy Days), Georg Stanford Brown (one of TV’s “The Rookies”), and Dolph Sweet (Nell Carter’s costar on “Gimme a Break”).

One of Forbin’s elite team of computer technicians is portrayed by a relatively young James Hong, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-born actor whose half-a-century-plus career includes such memorable roles as Lo Pan, the centuries-old sorcerer in “Big Trouble in Little China,” Tia Carrere’s irascible father in “Wayne’s World 2,” blind table tennis guru Master Wong in “Balls of Fury,” and Ryan Reynolds’ mortal avatar in “R.I.P.D.”

EricBraeden, William Schallert, Gordon Pinsent in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

The very Kennedy-like U.S. President in “Colossus” is played by Gordon Pinsent, a Canadian actor who later enjoyed newfound popularity as Hap Shaugnessy, the tireless teller of tall tales on the North-of-the-Border comedy series “The Red Green Show.” In the 2006 drama “Away from Her,” Pinsent gave a heartfelt performance as the bewildered husband of a woman suffering from dementia. As the wife, Julie Christie was nominated for an Academy Award.

Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent in "Away from Her" (2006)

Speaking of Julie Christie, she underwent a close encounter with a sentient computer in 1977’s “Demon Seed,” weird and wired science fiction which The Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson called a “Dean Koontz-derived genre pound cake easily dismissed at the time but retrospectively a key example of its era’s queasily resonant pulp.”

Julie Christie in 1977's "Demon Seed"

The eternally enticing Julie Christie made her screen debut in the 1962 British crime caper comedy “Crooks Anonymous.” She won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in 1965’s “Darling.” That same year, she landed the godsend role of Lara in director David Lean’s epic screen version of Doctor Zhivago. Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for 1971’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and had a lengthy love affair with costar Warren Beatty, with whom she again shared the screen in 1975’s “Shampoo” and 1978's “Heaven Can Wait.”

Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver in "Demon Seed"

“Demon Seed” cast Christie as the estranged, childless wife of brainy scientist Fritz Weaver, who has just developed the world’s most advanced supercomputer, Proteus IV (voiced by “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” star Robert Vaughn). Built with an organic component and capable of independent thought, Proteus IV wastes little time in displaying behaviors of human pride, questioning why it should obey commands and why it shouldn’t be alive.

The Robert Vaughn TV viewers embraced - as the suave spy
Napoleon Solo in the series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
striking a Bondian posed with exotic beauty Senta Berger

Proteus IV commandeers the scientist’s computer-controlled home, where it systematically harasses and intimidates Christie, ultimately raping and impregnating her, so that it will be free of “the box” it's imprisoned in and feel the sun on its own face. The ersatz “2001: A Space Odyssey” animated psychedelics for the sex scene were provided by Jordan Belson, an artist who specialized in nonobjective abstract films.

Reviewing “Demon Seed” online, eFilmCritic cited the movie’s “somewhat dated look to the technology (but you could say the same thing about the cardboard boxes full of Xmas lights on ‘Star Trek’).” Halliwell’s Film Guide deemed the picture “all very smart and self-conscious but at this length very tasteless. Hitchcock would have got it into a television half-hour.” According to James O’Neill, author of SciFi on Tape, “Christie gives one of her all-time best performances.”

The director of “Demon Seed,” Donald Cammell, was a Scottish-born portrait painter and a recognizable presence among the swinging London social scene of the 1960s known as the “Chelsea Set.” In1968, he wrote and co-directed (with Nicolas Roeg) the seminal rocker movie “Performance,” starring Mick Jagger and James Fox.

Between random film and television directing assignments, Cammell directed music videos (for, among others, U2). When his 1995 movie “Wild Side,” with Christopher Walken, Joan Chen, and Anne Heche, was drastically re-edited by the producers, the 62-year-old filmmaker committed suicide by shooting himself in front of a mirror, allegedly so he could watch himself die.

But getting back to the lighter subject of sex with computers, we’re reminded in the moviehouse of a rare and precious gem of a comedy from 1980 called “Simon.” At the Institute for Advanced Concepts, a listless brain trust of what the film’s narrator describes as “five of the most brilliant and twisted geniuses in the world” decide to convince a schlemiel of an assistant professor of psychology (played by the king of deadpan comedy, Alan Arkin) that he is an alien from the Nebula Orion raised on earth to be humankind’s deliverer.

Among the hilarious litany of Simon’s mandates to better humanity are: lawyers who lose cases will go to jail with their clients; doctors who write diet books will lose their license and become dentists; no member of the government who gets arrested may write a book for profit about it; men can wear mustaches or muttonchops but not both (“It looks moronic and gives the country a very, very bad name”); all politicians must appear in public wearing cone-shaped party hats.

It’s not coincidental that the film’s skewed perspective is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s vintage comedy, since the writer-director of “Simon,” Marshall Brickman, collaborated with Allen on the screenplays for “Sleeper,” “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” and “Manhattan Murder Mystery.” The cast is likewise replete with established comedic experts, including Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton, Wallace Shawn, Max Wright (best known as dad Willy Tanner on “ALF”), and the late William Finley (one of cult filmdom’s favorite oddballs, often associated with director Brian De Palma, who cast the actor in “Murder a la Mod,” “The Wedding Party,” “Sisters,” “Phantom of the Paradise,” “The Fury,” and “The Black Dahlia”).

Wallace Shawn, William Finley, Alan Arkin, Austin Pendleton in 1980's "Simon"

Fred Gwynne steals the show as a right-wing general who regards the brainiacs as “pantywaist eggheads,” while Judy Graubart is especially disarmingly sweet as Simon’s no-nonsense wife. Sharing deep improvisational comedy roots with Alan Arkin in The Second City, Graubart endeared herself to youthful Gen-Xers for her recurring role as Jennifer of the Jungle in the Children Television Workshop’s “The Electric Company.”

Alan Arkin and Judy Graubart share a quiet moment amidst the mayhem in "Simon."

But we were talking about sex with computers. The central brain of the Institute for Advanced Concepts is Doris, a computer shaped like a giant touchtone phone handset, voiced by Louise Lasser. Lasser, who was once married to Woody Allen, was featured in Allen’s “Take the Money and Run,” “Bananas,” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).” Her voice popped up in Allen’s “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” and she had a cameo in Allen’s “Stardust Memories.”

In “Simon,” it’s the lead “fruit-head,” Austin Pendleton, who seduces Doris, proclaiming, “You know you like it when I stroke your power supply!” Afterward, Doris – in that inimitable Louise Lasser whine – laments, “Oh, jeez…I just want you to know I feel very used right now!”