The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Crossing Cyberpunk's Threshold : Hollywood: Author William Gibson's dark view of the future hits the mainstream this week in 'Johnny Mnemonic.'

By AMY HARMON

May 24, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s premiere night, and William Gibson, the lanky, bespectacled father of cyberpunk, is wandering bemused among the buzzing Hollywood crowd at the reception for “Johnny Mnemonic.” Armani-clad entertainment executives insist on his participation in conversations about what the film will gross overseas, as he tries to eat the hors d’oeuvres.

“It’s like being at Harvard, and I’m supposed to know all these guys,” says hackerdom’s most beloved cult hero. “Except I didn’t go to Harvard.”

Alien as Hollywood may be to Gibson, his dystopian vision of a future dominated by multinational corporations, hacker cowboys and technology run amok was until recently even more foreign to all but a hard core of devoted fans.

But Sony Pictures’ release later this week of “Johnny Mnemonic,” based on a Gibson short story and adapted to the screen by the author himself, represents a crossing of a threshold for the cyberpunk counterculture. In an age when technology often seems to equate with power, the cyberpunk blend of technological literacy and social subversion is coming into its own as a cultural force--and moving into the mainstream.

“I think it’s fair to say we live in a more cyberpunk world than we used to,” Gibson says. “Technology is what we do now, as a species, and I think increasingly it is what we are.”

Just what kind of force cyberpunk will be is still up for grabs. Veterans of the subculture--which traces its roots to the publication of Gibson’s “Neuromancer” in 1984--worry that the mainstream fascination with high-tech rebellion may co-opt their icons and water down their message.

Clearly, though, the unbridled growth of high-tech society, fueled by the incessant spread of the Internet computer network, is a big reason Sony decided to spend $26 million to make “Johnny Mnemonic.” Variations of a “Neuromancer” screenplay have been circulated for years with no takers, but it too may now be produced. And Paramount Pictures is planning a movie version of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a cyberpunk novel set in the Los Angeles “burbclaves” of the not-too-distant future.

“Johnny Mnemonic,” based on Gibson’s short story of the same name, stars Keanu Reeves as a 21st-Century courier who has jettisoned his childhood memories so he can carry confidential data securely in his head. When defectors from the powerful Pharmakom corporation overload his circuits with the cure for a disease sweeping the world, he turns to the “Lo-Teks,” a sort of guerrilla information gang, to escape the bounty hunters who are after him and download the data before the neural seepage does him in.

“It’s tough. Up to now I think the [cyberpunk] concept was too hard for studio executives, let alone the moviegoing public, to handle,” says Sid Ganis, president of worldwide marketing for Sony’s Columbia/TriStar Pictures. “But now, what bigger subject is there than the Internet? Everyone’s talking about it.”

Indeed, for Sony, marketing “Johnny Mnemonic” has been an exercise in reaching out to an unfamiliar but, studio executives sense, increasingly important audience. And Sony executives note proudly that their oft-stated goal of corporate synergy was achieved through “Johnny” more than any previous film project.

Sony Imagesoft, the company’s electronic publishing arm, produced a multimillion-dollar CD-ROM game based on the film. Sony ImageWorks, its digital-effects division, created the movie’s version of the 21st-Century Internet with computer animation. Sony’s Columbia Records subsidiary released the soundtrack. And its new-technology division launched a scavenger hunt on the Internet, with $20,000 in prizes, to help promote the movie.

“We realized that not only can we make a movie about the Internet, we can use the Internet to sell our movie,” Ganis says.

Adds another Sony executive: “We see the Internet as turbo-charged word-of-mouth. Instead of one person telling another person something good is happening, it’s one person telling millions!”

Conveniently, from the site where the “net.hunt” is located on the World Wide Web (https://www.mnemonic.sony.com), prospective consumers can also call up pictures of “Johnny Mnemonic” merchandise such as the “hack your own brain” T-shirt and coffee mugs emblazoned with the Pharmakom logo. They can be ordered by calling Sony Signatures’ toll-free number prominently displayed at the top of the Web page.

Jeffrey Fox of the games division even convinced the normally reclusive Gibson to make an appearance on two commercial on-line services to answer questions about the game. (“Isn’t Keanu too cute to play a nerd?” asked one subscriber.)

Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace but had never before ventured on-line, compared the experience to “taking a shower with a raincoat on” and “trying to do philosophy in Morse code.”

The irony of Sony’s many-tentacled marketing juggernaut is not lost on Gibson, whose work is filled with less-than-flattering references to huge Japanese electronics conglomerates. In the movie, for instance, a doctor played by musician Henry Rollins blames the “black shakes” on information overload and “all the poisoning electronics around you.”

Gibson jokes that he’s always been soft on Sony “because they invented the Walkman, which is my favorite piece of modern-age technology.”

“I’ve never been comfortable with the marketing of my art,” he says. “But the nature of commodification sometimes requires my presence. In this case, I thought that the gentlemanly thing to do was to oblige them and go on-line. With the treasure hunt, it seemed to me that that is Sony trying to explore the landscape. It’s not the users exploring cyberspace, it’s Sony saying, ‘Is this what we can do?’ So I thought it was kind of cute.”

Hard-core cyberpunks may yet be disappointed. Compromises were made to make the movie less dark than Gibson originally envisioned it. In Gibson’s story, a dolphin who has been trained by the Navy to crack codes is the key to saving Johnny and his information but must be shot up with heroin first because the Navy had to get him hooked to harness his talents. Gibson says they shot the scene but removed it in the editing process.

“It was totally watered down,” says Derrick Oien, 28, a longtime Gibson fan who works for Sony as a courier and managed to get into the premiere as an usher.

Whether Hollywood’s newfound fascination with cyberpunk will have any effect on the movement or its philosophy is unclear. But Oien says the Internet and the popularity of magazines such as Wired are already raising the profile of cyberpunk issues such as digital surveillance and technological empowerment.

“This is a crucial time for it. They’re cyberpunk issues, but people are going to find out that they’re important to them too,” he says.

Bruce Sterling, one of cyberpunk’s pioneers and co-author of a novel with Gibson, says more significant than Hollywood is the fact that the world itself is becoming more and more like one in a cyberpunk novel.

He sites as an example the recent nerve gas bombing in Japan allegedly orchestrated by a cult leader who is fascinated with technology and was recruiting chemists and scientists to his organization. The cult, Gibson agrees, “could have sprung full-grown from the brow of a cyberpunk novelist.”

That, in turn, gives the cyberpunk movement momentum.

“It’s gaining momentum to a fantastic degree,” Sterling says. “A postindustrial culture has a postindustrial counterculture. The two generate one another.

“Cyberpunks have never believed in Armageddon, and we don’t think there’s any easy way out. But we do think people can survive and find some crack in the world machine and save some piece of the day. And that makes a lot more sense than pretending the worker’s paradise is just around the corner or pretending everything will be better if you just read the New Testament.”

Gibson’s exposure to Hollywood may well be providing him with inspiration for the book he is working on, “Idoru,” about virtual celebrities who are pure information constructs. Like much in the cyberpunk genre, it’s a fiction that’s steadily moving toward reality.

Says Gibson: “We could get there pretty quick.”