April 21, 1999
Next Stop Hollywood?

Talk About It Garrett Rice woke up the morning after his 30th birthday and started writing a screenplay. Through his two years as a channel marketing manager at Next Software, and the following year at Apple, he kept grabbing his laptop after work and heading down to Starbucks to tap away at it some more.

Reaching 30 can be a traumatic milestone. For Rice, who has always been fascinated by film, it was a wake-up call. "If I'm going to do this, I should do it now," he thought. "Why wait?" So this past February, four years later, he had assembled a crew and started shooting. Now he's got 12 hours of film to edit into "The Surprise Party," in the hopes he can finish it by the end of June and enter it in the Toronto Film Festival.

Silicon Valley fever has gripped much of the entertainment world. A few authors have received huge advances (John Heilemann reportedly got $1.2 million) to write nonfiction accounts of this unique place. Television programs and movies are being created about life in the land of startups and venture dollars. Not so for Rice. The Valley is the backdrop in his screenplay, but not a central character. His protagonist works in high tech, and filming took place here (at the City Pub and Franklin St. Café in Redwood City, Ed's Diner in South San Francisco, and the city of Brisbane, a small enclave south of San Francisco). But "The Surprise Party" is about emotions.

Rice's main character is turning 30 (surprise!) and wants to propose to his girlfriend. But just as his friends are calling out "surprise!", she tells him she's cheated on him. That's just the first few minutes.

Rice, a Gen Xer, does have a bit of marketing savvy. After all, "this whole generation is turning 30," he says. The film is a metaphor about how unstable the world is, and how change is constant.

Not that he doesn't enjoy high-tech work, and that it doesn't sometimes have its own drama. While managing channels of distribution for Next, he read that Apple was looking at acquiring Be to replace its tragically late operating system. He picked up the phone and called Ellen Hancock, then chief technology officer at Apple, to suggest they look at Next's operating system instead. And you know what happened next -- the fall of the house of Gil Amelio, and the return of Jobs to the company he co-founded. "I find the whole thing a little embarrassing," he says, over lunch at Il Fornaio. "It was just picking up the phone." Others, like Avi Tevanian, Next's CTO, did much more, he says. Still, Jobs credited him and his friend John Landwehr for the matchmaking that led to the deal, and gave the two of them sizable bonuses for it.

Which was a good starting point for funding "The Surprise Party." He tried the VC route, but got no interest. Instead, he raised additional money from friends and family. All he'll say about the amount is that it's less than $1 million. Rice did learn a thing or two about how to run a project through his high-tech work. And when he describes his work, he often falls back on Valley analogies. "It's run like a start-up," he says. He had to raise most of the money up front, and convinced local actors and others whom he found through the Internet Movie Database to work to for equity. He's put together an assembly version, which he calls a first draft or "alpha version" of the film, to get feedback.

Rice doesn't see this move as "escaping" high tech. He still consults. But in the end, he says he would like to continue making films. "My dad once told me, 'Do what you like and you'll never work a day in your life,'" he says. "As much as I think high tech is rewarding, it's exciting to take your own thing and bring it to fruition."