Trailer
Plot summary
In 1969, student hackers Martin Brice and Cosmo move money from causes they consider harmful to ones that help people. Police arrest Cosmo, and Martin goes into hiding. Decades later in San Francisco he lives as Martin Bishop and leads a security team that tests how easily companies' systems can be breached. Its members are Donald Crease, a former CIA operative, technician and conspiracy theorist Darren 'Mother' Roskow, young hacking prodigy Carl Arbogast, and blind sound expert Irwin 'Whistler' Emery. Two men who identify themselves as NSA agents tell Martin they know his real name and offer to clear his record if he takes a Russian-funded black box codenamed Setec Astronomy from mathematician Gunter Janek. His former girlfriend Liz agrees to help.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sneakers (1992)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robinson received a visit from men claiming to represent the Office of Naval Intelligence, who said that for reasons of national security the film could not include any references to a hand-held device that can decode codes; after consulting a studio lawyer he realized the visit was a prank instigated by a cast member, possibly Aykroyd or Redford.
- Leonard Adleman was the mathematical consultant on the movie, the character Bernard Abbott was named after Robert Abbott, the so-called "Father of Information Security" and also a consultant on the film, and the character Whistler was based on Josef "Joybubbles" Engressia and John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper.
- The film's press kit shipped with a floppy disk holding a custom, partly encrypted program that required guessing a simple password to unlock, making it one of the first electronic press kits any film studio put out.
- Dan Aykroyd's brother Peter supplied conspiracy material on "UFOS, cattle mutilations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the staged moon landing, JFK, [and] Marilyn Monroe" that was used to spice up his character.
- Tobolowsky had initially scoffed at the script based on its title alone, but his agent persuaded him to read it and he told the agent, "Now I know what a hundred million dollars at the box office reads like"; he called it one of the most spectacular casts he had been part of.
- In October 2016 NBC was developing a TV series based on the film, with the writer Walter Parkes brought on as an executive producer.
