Blanc definitely would be trading in on favors for his past work, and not throwing around bribe money.
But it wouldn’t be the chief of police, or someone powerful. It’d be a clerk, or an IT guy. Someone the “powerful” people don’t really notice, but who actually has a lot of power because they know how things work. It’s wouldn’t be, “Chief Brody, here’s $10,000. Tell your guys to bury this case!” It’d be, “Tracy, remember that time I helped your cousin out of that jam? I’m trying to help someone else out in a similar circumstance, and it would be a real help if you could ‘forget’ to enter that case into the system until next Monday. Why, now that you mention it, that does sound like a nasty cough. Taking a few sick days sounds like a fine idea.”
People who bribe police chiefs are the villains in these stories.
Exactly as I described above. A filing clerk who will misfile the report for a few days, or something like that.
Also way more efficient than trying to leverage influence with the press, because there’s too many of them. Even if it’s a small town, the death of a even a minor celebrity is going to get someone’s attention. Better to catch it at the source rather than try to plug all the leaks down the line.
Makes sense, and it’s consistent with the timeline as presented in the movie. A bit too convenient, though, the way that Miles grabs the fax as it comes out of the machine, thereby saving precious minutes (or hours) to carry out his dastardly deed, but that’s the way it is.
I did wonder about the fact that they showed Lionel faxing a printed copy of the email instead of using internet faxing. I guess the audience would be more familiar with older technology, rather than something that’s been available for about 20 years.
When Helen introduced herself to Blanc, she mentioned her sister and he instantly recognised Andi’s name and mentioned the resemblance, so Andi must be pretty famous. Blanc is not a tech bro, though he seems to keep himself appraised of the adventures of the jet set (since he knew the diamond was a family heirloom).
A few comments about the Alpha/Klear contract that I mentioned upthread.
Miles is identified as CEO Alpha Industries Co. and his email address is alpha@500alphaHQ.com.
Andi has no title and she doesn’t have an Alpha email address.
Eight years have passed since Andi sketched her ideas on a napkin. What has she done since?
If, as Blanc says, Miles is an idiot, then Andi was responsible for the creation, development and growth of Alpha. And yet, she’s not even an officer of the company. Not Co-CEO, not Senior VP. Nothing.
What was she thinking? Why did she team up with an idiot and give him control over the company?
Then we find out that “Miles had the lawyers work the contract so she was cut out of the company completely.” Why did Miles have so much control over the lawyers and Andi had none?
BTW, on the subject of Miles’ idiocy, Helen says this about what happened after the gang met Miles:
Four for four.
Helen also tells us that, after Alpha started, “Miles’ aspirations keep getting bigger and bigger”. What about Andi’s aspirations? In the limited world that’s depicted in the movie, Andi contributes nothing to the company other than the napkin. No wonder she lost the law suit.
There’s nothing specific on the napkin about building the company. And if the napkin was indeed the key to the company’s creation and growth, then the ideas on it would have been copied and expanded somewhere and stored for future reference. Someone might even have framed the napkin …
I mean, it’s not a courtroom drama. They told you what you needed to know in 30 seconds. It’s clear it’s supposed to be a Wozniak/Jobs mixed with Saverin/Winkelvoss/Zuckerberg situation. She’s the co-founder. She doesn’t have a title or e-mail address because she’s already out of the company.
Andi was absolutely an officer in the company, and one who had enough clout to check Miles. That’s the entire reason he cut her out: she shut down development of Klear, so Miles forced her out so he could keep working on it. She doesn’t use an Alpha corporate address when we see her emailing Miles about finding the napkin, because she’s been forced out of the company by that point, and would no longer have access to her corporate email.
The one genuine skill Miles has is manipulating people. Presumably, he used that to manipulate the lawyers into cutting Andi out of the company, and Andi, thinking that Miles was her friend, didn’t see it coming, and so didn’t do anything to try to counter it until it was too late. The details of exactly how he did it aren’t important, because this isn’t the story about how Miles stole the company, it’s the story about how Andi gets revenge on him for what he did to her sister.
The point of the napkin isn’t that the ideas on it are secret, it’s that it establishes when the ideas were first conceived, and who conceived them.
I’m not talking about Andi’s email to the other four. I’m talking about the contract that Miles presents to Andi for her signature. Take a look at the 1:21:51 point in the movie.
This is the first time that we see Andi’s objection to Klear. It is before he forces her out.
Andi has no title and no corporate email address.
I didn’t say anything about the ideas being secret. Is it “the key” that you’re commenting on? I meant “the important aspect” of the company’s creation and growth.
Well, you said the ideas on the napkin would have been “copied and expanded somewhere and stored for future reference,” which sounds a lot like you thought nobody knew what was on the napkin until Andi turned it up after the trial. I’m not sure why you think the ideas on the napkin weren’t copied and expanded etc, or that Andi didn’t do anything for the company after coming up with the idea. I don’t think there’s anything in the movie to support that.
(Edited to clarify that this is a response to Miller’s post. I accidentally replied to AlsoNamedBort.)
The fact that I said the napkin could have been framed suggests that it wasn’t a secret, but instead something to be viewed regularly by many people.
My point is that, if the ideas on the napkin were copied and expanded somewhere and stored for future reference, then there would be records of the content and those records would have been presented at the trial to support Andi’s case. It seems silly to me (and IANAL) to have the entire question of ownership depend on the existence of sketched notes on a napkin and the testimony of three people who weren’t even involved in creating the company. (I’m being generous and giving Lionel some early involvement.)
Anyway, I’ll address one of your previous points:
Do you actually think that contracts can be modified by being able to manipulate lawyers? Both parties to a contract have a signed copy. What exactly (hypothetically) did the lawyers do to cut her out after eight years of developing the company?
I guess my silly-plot-device headcanon is that, yep, both parties kept a signed copy of the contract that says any officer of the company can be fired unilaterally by the person who, on the aforementioned date, sketched out on a napkin the plan to (a) offer consumers the free app in question for to (b) install tracking software so machine learning can then be used to pitch cybersecurity solutions, or whatever — because Andi, who’d unsuspectingly meet with Miles and never dream he’d slip stuff into her drink, agreed to that language while thinking well, that clearly refers to me, and not to him — after which, Miles hired lawyers to ask Andi, say, can you prove that’s you and not him? Because we’ve talked with people who are willing to testify, under penalty of perjury, to the opposite.
This movie is not a procedural. As a combination of glamorous heist movie and satire on modern socio-economic stratification, it has no particular interest in being a faithful mirror of modern institutional procedures.
What are the exact mechanisms by which suicides are reported and how does Blanc pull strings to prevent this? It doesn’t matter and he just does. Because if he didn’t the plot won’t work.
How did the asshole white male billionaire force out the talented woman of colour? He did it by using lawyers and contracts, the tools of the establishment elite. What specific legal mechanism or contractual jiggery-pokery? Doesn’t matter, not the point. He used the power given to him by the system. Which is the point the movie wants to make.
Every story ever told has some point that you just have to swallow. Even dramatisations of real world stories, like Watergate or Apollo 13, end up combining characters, collapsing timelines, eliding details or skipping major events. Because if you include everything you don’t tell a good story.
And for any given story, either you accept it or you don’t. There’s no right or wrong about it. Stuff that works for one person won’t work for another. I’m ok with “sure, Blanc can squash reporting of a suicide” and “Miles pulled a Social Network on Andi” without getting the details but I drew the line at “Somehow, Palatine survived” and I can’t particularly justify it.
Why would anything have to change now? Maybe there was a clause in the original contract allowing either of them to buy out the other and he exercised that. Or a rule that stated a member would be required to sell their stake in the company if they’re actively working against the company’s primary goal of developing Klear and bringing it to market.
I could see these being worded in such a way to seem like standard boilerplate stuff that maybe Andi glossed over.
Or you end up with a seven hour movie that no one wants to watch.
But I agree with you. Many of these details simply have to be accepted at face value. Not that they can’t be explained, but there’s no reason to waste time on it. Some of these things are just plot devices. Also, as I mentioned earlier, at least for me, some of the details they left out forced me to create my own mental backstory for these characters without making the movie longer.
For instance, the puzzle box wouldn’t work. From the very first puzzle. You can see and feel seams in the wood. Boxes with hidden seams use elaborate marquetry to add lots of superfluous seams to obscure the important ones.
The simplest explanation, IMO, is that the board of directors has ultimate CEO hiring-and-firing power, and that Miles schmoozed with them and convinced them either to vote her out, or to vote him in as sole CEO, and he fired her.
I’ve seen that happen before in small nonprofits, and I have no doubt that similar shenanigans can take place in giant companies.
I like this explanation, because as an answer to “how did the idiot white man get the better of the talented woman of colour?”, “he availed himself of establishment power via chummy backroom networking” is pretty much perfect, thematically speaking.
