Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Google Welcomes Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s “The Internship” on Campus

You wouldn’t know that relations between Google and Hollywood are testy by the week they’ve had together.

Google has taken in movie stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn with open arms, lending its campus as the set for their upcoming film “The Internship.”

I’d previously written about the project coming to the San Francisco Bay Area this week, but hadn’t realized the extent to which Google was cooperating.

It wasn’t feasible to let the 20th Century Fox-produced film take over its entire campus for months, but Google’s marketing team consulted on the creation of “Google office” sets at Georgia Tech, and opened up its actual Mountain View, Calif., headquarters this week to shoot some external scenes.

Not only that, but Eric Schmidt interviewed Vince Vaughn for an employee talk (the video is not online yet, that I can see), and many Google employees (including Android guru Hugo Barra, I’ve been told) were extras on the film. Plus, Google co-founder Sergey Brin hosted part of the crew for dinner at his own home, and his Google[x] projects Google Glass and driverless cars are set to be featured in the movie.

Unlike some other Hollywood representations of tech companies, like the Facebook creation myth “The Social Network,” it sounds like this movie might as well be a Google advertisement.

Those last few details about the Google campus shoot come courtesy of Bloomberg TV reporter Jon Erlichman, who spent some time on set yesterday during the last day of filming at Google.

Vaughn told Erlichman that he wrote the first draft of the screenplay about an unspecified tech company, and later ended up making it explicitly about Google after meeting with people there.

Here’s a video of Erlichman’s time on the set, where he watched Vaughn and Wilson film a scene that involved arriving at campus on a Google shuttle bus:

And here’s Google’s statement on the film: “We’re excited that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson chose the Google campus as a backdrop for their first film together since ‘Wedding Crashers.’ We’re sure they’ll have a humorous take on life in Silicon Valley and look forward to seeing the result.”

Also, while they were in town, Wilson and Vaughn shot scenes on the Stanford campus (check out the great paparazzi shot taken by a professor) and showed up at a 49ers game, where Wilson committed a major local faux pas in admitting he was a Cowboys fan during a broadcast postgame interview.

Photo credit: San Francisco 49ers

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