The movie business has always been late to catch on to trends. But the swift shifts of technology make the studios' sluggishness all the more embarrassing.

Universal and Pirates director Gore Verbinski have acquired rights to make a movie from a Wall Street Journal article written in 2007 about a woman virtually widowed by her husband's Second Life addiction.

The problem: Ric Hoogestraat, the subject of the story, makes an unappealing leading man: He's a 53-year-old homebound diabetic. And Second Life, the virtual world in which Hoogestraat's hunky avatar, Dutch Hoorenbeek, "married" a user who was not his real-world wife, makes for a lousy villain. How do you make a movie about a place where nothing really happens? Once Verbinski gets to understand the boring porn-and-kink-filled universe of Second Life, I suspect he'll discard that whole angle. And he'll also drop the notion of an unattractive lunk as the hero. And then, if he doesn't drop the whole idea, he'll make a movie that really has nothing to do with Second Life at all.

We should have expected this, though. I asked Chris Null, the editor of FilmCritic.com, for suggestions on just some of the technological trends Hollywood has missed. Here's the list we came up with:

Movie: Hackers (1995)
Trend: Errr, hackers.
Why it was late: Hackers had been a known media phenomenon since 1971, when Esquire published a feature story on phone phreakers. By 1995, the Internet was making hacking tools so easy to distribute that amateurs known as "script kiddies" were taking over the scene. But hey, the movie had Angelina Jolie!

Movie: You've Got Mail (1998)
Trend: Email
Why it was late: An AOL inbox was trendy around 1990. By 1998, most people worth knowing had bozofilters set on anything from an @aol.com address. And movies with Meg Ryan.

Movie: American Pie (1999)
Trend: Webcams
Why it was late: The Internet-broadcast deflowering of the main character, Jim, relied on technology that was an Internet-culture phenomenon in 1996 (remember JenniCam)?

Movie: Chat Room (2002)
Trend: Chat rooms
Why it was late: The first text-based chat room dates back to 1974, but the notion of cybersex hookups was commonplace by 1998. The first example of deception in the course of a courtship is a few millennia before that. The first and last usage of the phrase "surfin' for cyber bootie" dates to 2002.

Movie: Cellular (2004)
Trend: Cell phones
Why it was late: The cell phone was invented in 1973, or 1944, depending on whom you ask. But the idea of cell phones as a means of rescue permeated society after September 11, 2001 — which is when this Kim Basinger kidnap thriller might have felt timely.

Movie: Firewall (2006)
Trend: iPods
Why it was late: Portable MP3 players had been widely identified as a security risk by 2004, making Harrison Ford's $100 million iPod heist implausible. Plus we'd moved on to Nanos by then.

He's a cheapskate.

Last week we noted how Tucker scoffed at a former blogger who wondered why he only made $82 for six months of work. Other employees tell us the standard pay for Rudius bloggers is somewhere in the $80/ quarter range, with one noting "I got just a tiny bit more than that when my site was doing really well." Sweet. So Rudius must be making a lot of money.

You work hard for the money.

One Rudius employee was ordered by Tucker to move to a different, more expensive city because Tucker thought that they could better do their job elsewhere. Once the employee had gone to the trouble of packing up and moving and finding a new, more costly apartment, we hear, their pay was reduced to almost nothing. Which seems like the standard Rudius pay rate, now that we think of it.

He's not popular with publishers.

We hear that at least one book agent quit working with Tucker because he flaked out on book proposal deadlines. (Not true? Email us!)

He's not popular with the bloggers that work for him at Rudius.

The emails we've received from disgruntled bloggers alone are ample evidence of this. He attracts bloggers he's interested in with the promise of writing for a wider audience—though, as you can tell by their pay, not necessarily more money. But when bloggers tire of Rudius and leave the fold, we hear, they are bizarrely wiped from existence in Tucker Max's world:

If an author leaves the site, the circumstances are never discussed. Not even on the message boards. It's reminiscent of some 1984 thought-crime type thing. The author is simply never mentioned again, the site stays up and repeated questions about "what happened" are ignored.

He's vindictive.

Those who have worked with Tucker say he's very protective of his "image," such as it is. We hear that his failed appearance on Opie and Anthony is a very sore point. This sensitivity manifests itself in both the disappearing of his fallen disciples as mentioned above, and in an atmosphere in which Tucker Max sycophants feel that harassment of detractors is a way to win approval. One blogger, Violent Acres, wrote a Tucker Max parody a couple of years ago. This resulted in 70 harassing phone calls from a crazed Tucker fan in a single weekend—and we hear the harassment is still ongoing, though the blogger has filed a police report.

Is it Tucker's fault that he has a crazy fan? Not necessarily. But it is Tucker's fault that he expressed his discontent with a cast member on his movie by taking a big crap in the toilet in the guy's trailer, taking a photo of it (do not click that link), and then blogging about it.

Can't wait till the movie comes out!

[Read all previous Tucker Max coverage here. Anybody else with Tucker stories, email us.]

1. The Dramatic Opening Scene:

2. Bar Scene One: Tucker Max Has A Way With Women And Dudes Better Not Give Him Any Shit Bro:

3. Bar Scene Two: Tucker Max Can Steal Your Sorostitute You Dumb Frat Boy So Watch Out Bro:

If we have the stomach, we'll bring you more lowlights soon bro!

The film will appeal to at least three camps: Those for whom Hartnett can do no wrong, anyone who appreciates a "Please, God, give me another bubble before I die" bumper sticker and New Yorkers of a certain age. I can identify on two of the three counts, but still, the film felt like a naked Indiewood appeal for me to consider Hartnett a serious actor. For starters, how did this startup founder know about tight, pegged jeans; skinny, shapeless, twill-cotton sportcoats and "douchebag neck" tees three years before Williamsburg?

A steely-eyed, remorseless David Bowie gives the movie a certain cachet and this appearance by Jason Calacanis as a master booster will also have its draw. But I can't see it crossing any mainstream borders even after building bridges between psychographic camps. I'd give it the early-mover advantage, except a lot of the same territory was already covered better by Groove.

And it's not the kind of zany premise that gets people into theaters. For that, Prendergast put on a puffy blue suit with a giant, round head — the fictional icon of fictional technology company BlueNexion, which hires his character Salman to stand on a lonely stretch of Texas highway and, inevitably, get into hijinx. To its credit, it looks far more entertaining than August.

Watching the slapstick-and-ennui portrayal of a schlemiel as corporate mascot in the film's trailer couldn't help but remind me of the poor Podcast Pickle, familiar to anyone who's attended South by Southwest Interactive the last few years. The film opened in New York City on July 4, and will be coming to a hip theater near you here in the Bay Area on August 1.

Slide rival Rock You's Super Wall saw traffic plummet 70 percent in the last week. InsideFacebook's Justin Smith speculates the dip is due to "some kind of punitive action against the application" over privacy concerns by Facebook, "perhaps by restricting feed access or by lowering the application’s notification or invitation limits." Another source tells us Flixster, the widgetmaker behind the Movies app, is going through similar punishment from Facebook over privacy concerns.

Ripped copies of commercial DVDs have replaced screener copies, thanks to early-release DVDs from other world regions. Those DVDs, which skip the special features and image processing that go into American releases, were originally made to sell copies earlier in countries like Russia, where pirated screeners get ripped to DVD and are sold on the street. But by beating the pirates to the punch in the East, distributors helped viewers in the West get high-quality pirated movies before the Academy even got their screeners.

But that's not all the irony! Fear of piracy can also kill a film's Oscar chances. Baio noted in last year's piracy roundup that late and broken screeners probably killed Munich's Oscar shot in 2005, and that Crash won Best Picture after sending screeners to all the voters it could, while Disney took such anti-piracy pains that over a fourth of Academy voters didn't even watch its screeners, and Narnia only won Best Makeup.

Since some studios seem willing to kill their chances at an Oscar just to keep leaks off the Internet, I want to know: How many of you actually pirate movies online?

It is a movie about hubris, both that of the C.E.O., played by Josh Hartnett, and the United States in the weeks before Sept. 11. There is one shot in which Mr. Hartnett wakes up woozy from a chemically enhanced night at the then-newly opened Bungalow 8, then is shown on the street against the backdrop of the World Trade Center. August has many of the little touches of the era right. There is a cameo by Jason Calacaniss, the Silicon Alley magazine founder, who seemed to be everywhere in those days. The employees at the doomed company compulsively check a Web site with an unprintable name that covers imploding start-ups, their impending layoffs and their large burn rates.

It's Fucked Company the Movie! Bungalow 8! Jason Calacanis! And ominous portent! The Times can't spell Calacanis' name right! Mid-2001 is back! Maybe Giuliani will be President! We're totally founding Dodgeball, see you suckers later.

Facebook is filming a movie this Sunday near NYU. If you'd like to be interviewed and have any funny Facebook stories or thoughts we'd love to hear them! Email [redacted] for details and times!

You don't need to e-mail; we found out Facebook will film from 11 to 5 on Sunday, around the Washington Square area. The movie will be used internally at Facebook (as a holiday video) but won't go out online — at least until someone forwards it to tips@valleywag.com.

Why is the Palo Alto company shooting film in New York? Probably because the students are prettier there.