Jerry Maguire
The 1996 hit film Jerry Maguire starring Tom Cruise was modeled on real-life super-agent Leigh Steinberg ’70, J.D. ’73, who started his career fresh from attending law school at Berkeley. Steinberg had a single client back then: Cal quarterback Steve Bartkowski, the top pick in the 1975 NFL draft. That client proved golden: The young attorney secured his fellow Bear a $600,000, four-year contract with the Atlanta Falcons—a record for a rookie player at that time.
Hollywood took liberties of course. Unlike the film (in which Steinberg got a cameo and served as a technical adviser), he was never fired for delivering an impassioned mission statement. And Bartkowski never bellowed “Show me the money!” over the phone. That line was based on another player Steinberg represented in the ’90s: Tim McDonald of the 49ers.
Show ’em the money: Tom Cruise as Maguire (L) and his character’s inspiration, Leigh Steinberg (R). (Andy Hayt/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images; Alamy)
For his part, Bartkowski told ESPN in 2021 that the only thing he regretted from that long-ago draft was skipping the barber. “I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those draft pictures, but I look like a hippie … in the middle of the hippie culture out there in Berkeley, California.”
—Pat Joseph
The Berkeley Mafia
Don’t think Gambinos or Genoveses. Think technocrats with Ph.D.s.
The “Berkeley Mafia” were more like the “Chicago Boys,” the University of Chicago–trained Chilean economists who led economic reforms for the Pinochet dictatorship. Only the Berkeley version came a little earlier, in the late 1960s, when a team of Berkeley-trained economists, including Widjojo Nitisastro, Ph.D. ’61, and Emil Salim, M.A. ’62, Ph.D. ’64, rose to prominence in the staunchly anti-communist and authoritarian Suharto regime in Indonesia.
Their rise was no mistake. Both the Chicago Boys and the Berkeley Mafia had direct connections to the Ford Foundation, which, in 1960, helped found the Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies to promote international scholarship and also instill American values in the region’s politics. The foundation funneled students from the University of Indonesia to universities like Berkeley with a clear purpose in mind. As one foundation director said, “Ford felt it was training the guys who would be leading [Indonesia] when Sukarno [the leader overthrown by Suharto] got out.”
Thanks in part to the Berkeley Mafia, Indonesia—which President Richard Nixon once called “the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area”—enjoyed years of economic growth and closer ties with Washington. But the technocrats also likely paved the way for entrenched corruption, crony capitalism, and the 1997 financial collapse, part of the wider Asian Contagion, that finally exposed the system’s underlying fragility.
—Leah Worthington
The Matrix
The year was 1997, and visual effects supervisor John Gaeta was not sure how to bring the sci-fi project he was working on to life. Called The Matrix, it would require convincing digital backgrounds for the movie’s epic fight scenes. To pull it off, computer graphics artists would have to scrounge up architectural plans and painstakingly add texture to each building. Even if they could get the hero to dodge bullets, what good would that be if the cityscape behind him wasn’t believable.
The answer would come to Gaeta not from Hollywood, but from Berkeley, where, the previous year, doctoral student Paul Debevec, Ph.D. ’96, working with postdoc Camillo Taylor and Professor Jitendra Malik, had created a computer system capable of modeling and rendering buildings from ordinary photographs.
As proof of concept, Debevec photographed the Berkeley campus from a kite, then used just 20 images of the Campanile and its surroundings to model the landmark and environs. With a crew consisting of students, professors, and the university carillonist, the Cal production wrapped in eight weeks.
The Campanile Movie debuted at the SIGGRAPH convention in Los Angeles that summer. In the three-minute film, real footage of Debevec toting a model of Sather Tower up the real one is seamlessly stitched together with virtual cinematography that loops and flies with a peregrine’s-eye view around a purely digital one. “When I saw Debevec’s movie, I knew that was the path,” Gaeta later told WIRED.
The Matrix won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at the 2000 Academy Awards, and, in 2002, Debevec was awarded an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award.
—Esther Oh
