A TALE MADE IN CANADA
Blackberry story is a `romantic, beautiful, sad, funny thing'
The story of how the late Steve Jobs developed Apple's iphone, and helped change the world, is one most people are familiar with.
Less well-known, and little-talked about nowadays, is how a bunch of tech nerds in Canada started our obsession with little hand-held devices as they introduced the Blackberry into the marketplace
A new film from director Matt Johnson — working from his and Matthew Miller's adaptation of Jacquie Mcnish and Sean Silcoff 's book, The Lost Signal — traces the creation of the company that transformed our day-to-day lives as we started thumb-clicking our way through the days, conducting work and making calls.
Blackberry, an insightful biopic, tells the unlikely story of how a group of computer geeks, led by Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), teamed up with foul-mouthed businessman, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), to invent the device that revolutionized modern communications before it was supplanted by Apple's iphone.
At its peak in 2008, the Waterloo, Ont.-based company — then known as Research In Motion, RIM — was valued at $85 billion and in 2010 nearly half of smartphone users in the U.S. used a Blackberry. Today, the company no longer makes phones and has pivoted to providing cybersecurity software.
Johnson never owned a Blackberry, or Crackberry as they were nicknamed, but he became instantly fascinated after reading Mcnish and Silcoff's account of the company's rise and fall.
“People didn't know these two guys, but they did things that are extremely risky and very much of themselves,” Johnson says of Lazaridis and Balsillie. Howerton (best known for his role in the TV series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) wasn't familiar with RIM'S aggressive CO-CEO Balsillie. But he says the story depicted in Blackberry captivated him from the moment he started reading Johnson and Miller's script.
“I think the only reasons something can succeed in such a massive way is if you have a singular drive to make that thing the best thing it can be,” Howerton says.
In the film, Balsillie's bid to bring an NHL team to Hamilton is pinpointed as one of the reasons for the company's ultimate failure, but Howerton thinks the truth is more complex.
“If you were to ask Jim, he'd tell you that it was a million other things, and not that,” Howerton says.
“I saw an article where he said he had spent more of his time training for triathlons than dealing with the NHL.”
For the Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised Baruchel, the actor loved how Blackberry tells a uniquely Canadian story.
“What these nerds did at the end of the '90s helped set the table in a pretty profound way for the world as we know it and recognize it today,” Baruchel says. “Smartphones are integral to our everyday lives. But this was the one — the first one. Everything good and bad now, started in this lab above a diner. So that in itself makes it worth talking about.”
Of course, Blackberry shows how egos and unchecked ambition helped fast-track the company's demise. Balsillie's personality becomes even more outrageous and unpredictable as his CO-CEO Lazaridis fails to grasp the impact Apple's emerging product would have on RIM'S marketplace dominance.
“Why would anybody want a phone without a keyboard?” Lazaridis asks incredulously at one point in the film.
I think the only reasons something can succeed in such a massive way is if you have a singular drive to make that thing the best thing it can be.
“He lacked the foresight to understand that they are now behind the game,” Baruchel says. “The big takeaway is: we flew too close to the sun, but it was in utter anonymity. There's no cult of personality around these guys the way there is around (Mark) Zuckerberg or Jobs or Bill Gates. These are not household names. So it felt like a kind of tragic, romantic, beautiful, sad, funny thing, which speaks to the dysfunction of being Canadian.”
Lazaridis's fall into almost obscurity is Shakespearean in its narrative arc.
“It's like you're watching a creature from one ecosystem — the creature in the lab above the diner, that's where he's from — and you watch him try to become what he thinks the rest of the world needs him to be, and that spoils him,” Baruchel adds.
Fregin, who is portrayed as a cheerleader in the film, sold his Blackberry stock before iphone took over, so he was harder to nail down for Johnson. But the co-writer and director likes the idea of audiences exiting the theatre and debating where it all went wrong for the company.
“I think the CEOS splitting the role and having two men in charge of this company was a big mistake,” Johnson says. “There's a moment in the film where Jim says, `Mike will figure it out,' and he didn't. So you may be able to find the beginning of the end in that line of dialogue, but I don't know exactly what it was.”