BoomTown’s Thumbs-Up “Weekend King” (But for Appalling Reasons)
by Kara Swisher
Posted on May 20, 2008 at 12:19 AM PT
Thanks to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington for pointing us to “Weekend King,” a San Francisco-made movie, which sounds just delicious from the trailer below.
It’s about a repulsive but rich computer programmer named Rupert Coleman from Silicon Valley who buys a bankrupt town in Utah and hopes to become its beloved ruler.
High jinks and heart-warming life lessons ensue, of course!
Arrington thought it sounded “sappy,” which it does, but BoomTown went all soft and melty in the middle over the idea of it.
Why? True story: Once, while at a party in 1999 talking with a well-known Web billionaire, sick of the excess, I suggested that he take a ton of his Web 1.0 bubble money and buy a village or town somewhere and dude it up with all sorts of cool stuff like free everything.
The catch? Require the citizens to rename it after him and hold an annual parade dedicated to his glorious accomplishments.
He demurred (No, it was not Mark Cuban, because he’d have totally done it!), much to my disappointment, so you can see why I love the idea of this movie.
(In the latest excessive Web 2.0 bubble, my new request of an Internet multi-billionaire recently was to convince him to try to become best friends with Brangelina and brood by dangling the plane and donations galore to worthy causes and free babysitting forever. Again, no luck.)
Here’s the video:
