Kevin Mitnick On Screen: Takedown (2000) and the Hacker Counterculture's Rebuttal, Freedom Downtime (2001)
The most famous hacker of the 1990s ended up with two dueling screen versions — and the fight between them is itself a story about who controls the hacker narrative in popular culture.
Track Down (released internationally as Takedown), directed by Joe Chappelle, dramatizes the 1995 manhunt based on the book by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff — the man who caught Mitnick telling it. Skeet Ulrich plays Mitnick, Russell Wong plays Shimomura. "Upon release, the film and its source material came under controversy due to inaccuracies and falsehoods alleged by Mitnick against Shimomura and the screenwriters." The film invents outright: "The film also shows Mitnick hacking NORAD, the NSA and other famous government institutes, which never in fact happened." Author Jonathan Littman sued the producers alleging the screenplay took portions of his book The Fugitive Game — litigation that kept the film out of American release until a September 2004 direct-to-video dumping by Dimension Films. Mainstream critics were unimpressed even where it played: Variety called it a "fact-based drama about notorious computer hacker Kevin Mitnick looks and sounds like an extended episode of a stylish teleseries," and DVD Talk's verdict was that "Sneakers is a better bet for anyone looking for a computer movie" (see Sneakers (1992): Cryptography, Red-Teaming, and the Shift to Information Warfare).
The hacker counterculture answered with its own film. Freedom Downtime (2001), directed by Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley) of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, "was produced in response to the 2000 feature film Takedown, which dramatized the pursuit and arrest of Kevin Mitnick." It follows a group of hackers road-tripping across the United States confronting the film's inaccuracies while documenting the "Free Kevin" movement and hacker culture itself. It premiered at H2K, the 2000 Hackers on Planet Earth conference, and interviews Phiber Optik (Mark Abene), Bernie S, Mitnick's grandmother Reba Vartanian, and — pointedly — Katie Hafner and John Markoff, the journalists whose book Cyberpunk had helped shape the media image of hackers.
What this means: the Mitnick affair marks the point where Hollywood's hacker imaginary — the WarGames/Hackers lineage of The 1983 Hacker Panic: WarGames, the 414s, and Whiz Kids and The 1990s Cyber Cinema and Virtual Reality Boom — collided with hackers as a self-aware subculture with its own media apparatus (2600, HOPE conferences, DEF CON). The 2000–01 pairing of Takedown and Freedom Downtime is the era's clearest on-screen argument over whether a hacker is a cyber-menace or a scapegoat, and it foreshadows the documentary-vs-dramatization battles that would follow every tech scandal since.