Useless Movie Trivia For
Hackers
Memorable Movie Quotes
Dade Murphy: I don't play well with others.
The Plague: Kid, don't threaten me. There are worse things than death, and uh, I can do all of them.
Kate Libby: I hope you don't screw like you type.
Kate Libby: God gave men brains larger than dogs' so they wouldn't hump women's legs at cocktail parties.
The Plague: You wanted to know who I am, Zero Cool? Well, let me explain the New World Order. Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are Samurai... the Keyboard Cowboys... and all those other people who have no idea what's going on are the cattle... Moooo.
Cereal Killer: Spandex: it's a privilege, not a right.
Dade Murphy: Mess with the best, die like the rest.
Trivia
The "pool on the roof" prank is actually based on an old Stuyvesant H.S. prank of the "Sixth Floor Pool". The original Stuy building on East 15th Street in Manhattan had only five floors, and freshman were sent to look for a pool upstairs. The building had no pool. There was a literary publication at Stuyvesant referencing the prank called "Sixth Floor Pool". The school moved into the new building (featured in the movie) shortly before filming began. Coincidentally, this building is across the street from Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. It was, amazingly, almost completely unharmed by the blasts. The school was used as the base of operations for the rescue efforts, and classes were moved for one term to Brooklyn Technical High School. The three "Specialized Math and Science High Schools" in NYC, requiring an examination for admittance, are Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech (in order of difficulty of admittance).
The computer they break into is a fictional mainframe computer called a "Gibson" - a homage to cyberpunk author William Gibson.
The "Hacker Manifesto" read by Agent Bob was actually written by a hacker of great renown in the 1980s who went by the name of The Mentor. It was published in PHRACK magazine, issue 07, file 03 in 1986.
Penn Jillette's character is named Hal in the credits, most likely a reference to the HAL9000 computer system from the sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
William Gibson "invented" the term "Cyberspace" in 1982 for his book, Neuromancer.
Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie were married shortly after the making of the film, and then were divorced four years later.
Around the movie's release, the official website was modified by its webmasters to appear that it had been "hacked into," and digital graffiti and instructions to "see 'The Net' instead" was added to the site's graphics.
The game being played in the arcade is a high-quality prototype of the Playstation game "Wipeout" by Psygnosis. It is done on a high-end SGI server and allowed the development team to try out tracks and gameplay, before porting it to the Playstation. As a result, there are features and graphics in the movie that do not exist in the actual game, including the "high score smashing" sequence.
Cyberdelia was built from scratch in an abandoned indoor swimming pool on the outskirts of London, with the center of the club in the depths of what was the pool. Producer Ralph Winter notes, "We never knew why, but the pool was designated an historic landmark, so great care had to be taken not to damage anything and to return it to its original state."
Goofs
Several scenes show the Met Life building (with "Met Life" in huge letters) behind Grand Central. However, the old stock "sky view" footage right before Dade's first day of school shows the building with its original "Pan Am" signage, which was taken down ten years before filming.
The satellite shown orbiting the Earth at the end of Cereal Killer's announcement is Skylab, a U.S. space station which crashed to Earth in July 1979.
The characters are arrested on the 14th of the month. However, When the hackers are being chased through the streets, Dade's watch (in the close-up) says 10-18-1995.
Hackers is set in NYC however in the "Hack the Gibson" scene Plague places a call to Dade in Grand Central Station but the phone rings using the European tone (ring ring - pause - ring ring) rather than the American tone (riiiiiing - pause - riiiiiing) indicating that this scene was either filmed or sound recorded in the UK.
Box Office Info USA
Gross: $7,564,000
Filming Locations
Battery Park City, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Bergen County Court House, Hackensack, New Jersey, USA
East Village, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Grand Central Station, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
London, England, UK
Manhattan Bridge, New York City, New York, USA
Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
New York City, New York, USA
Stuyvesant High School - 345 Chambers Street, Battery Park City, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA