Hacker Cinema
Gold
2016 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
Kenny Wells, a modern-day prospector, hustler, and dreamer, is desperate for a lucky break. Left with few options, Wells teams up with an equally luckless geologist to execute a grandiose, last-ditch effort: to find gold deep in the uncharted jungle of Indonesia.
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There is a movie, Gold (2016), about a fake gold mine. One of its founders is a true believer: he found a few chunks of gold and started digging for more. The other founder is a nihilist: he realised that there is no gold there, but who cares if he makes the investors believe? So he does, and almost sells the company for $300M.
In our story, investors are mining intelligence from GPUs, and they truly believe they are one inch from discovering the biggest goldmine in history. But GPUs, unlike a goldmine, cannot be inspected for traces of gold by independent contractors. To keep the hype up, the nihilists in our story dig up cheap gold-looking metals from time to time and tell investors that with a bit of alchemy - agentic workflows, etc. - those metals can be magically turned into gold.
Investors will keep digging until the end of the age, or until they run out of money.
I was born and raised in Vancouver, and have deep personal ties to the junior mining industry - I worked for two decades as an exploration geologist, and my Dad has been in the industry since the early 1970s.
Bre-X was brutal. I was barely into my teens, but I recall - and have spoken at length with my Dad and many others - about how he was out of work for several years after the scandal. Investment completely dried up. Industry recovery took years, and was accompanied by the implementation [1] of fairly stringent disclosure rules, which define reporting standards to this day. Nonetheless, scams are still commonplace, and pretty much everyone I know has a story or two of a shifty promoter pulling the rug out.
Mineral exploration is a tough business. You can't just sudo apt install a drill rig! The logistics and expense of even small exploration programs are a bit insane. Crews head out to some of the most remote corners the world has to offer, moving hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of heavy equipment, fuel, food, and camp gear on to site for just a few months of near-constant work, then moving (hopefully most of) it out again. Hundreds of tons of rock and soil samples are collected, by drilling, by walking the ground, by trenching; these samples are shipped out to processing and assay labs. Some properties have the benefit of road access - deep-wilderness, often decommissioned logging roads - but many are accessible by helicopter only. It's an adventure, but it is also very demanding and taxing. There is very little year-to-year consistency, even in bull markets.
Sixty to seventy years ago, the majors - mining companies with actual mines and annual revenue - did the lion's share of exploration work. Over the years, however, the majors have divested almost entirely from risky grassroots exploration, leaving it almost entirely up to junior explorers who must raise their capital from investors.
There are lots of fascinating tales:
- How to Get Rich in a Gold Rush: https://youtu.be/yW5iGLLgzRc?si=Pk_9eZF0vBEjF2f4 two-part youtube documentary on the VSE
- Gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(2016_film) great movie starring Matthew McConaughey, loosely based on the Bre-X scandal
- The Big Score: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2370656) excellent book that covers the story of the Voisey's Bay discovery in Labrador
- Fire Into Ice: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1166624.Fire_into_Ice_Charles_Fipke_the_Great_Diamond_Hunt
- Barren Lands: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22322947-barren-lands
[1] https://www.cim.org/news/2019/how-cim-helped-an-industry-rocked-by-scandal-get-back-on-the-level/
It was very common to shoot a picture concurrently in different languages at the time.
Often with some lead playing the same role, as does Brigitte Helm in the French and German versions of 'Gold'.
Another such example is 'Andalusian Nights'[1] (German) with Imperio Argentina reprising her role in the Spanish version of that film, 'Carmen de la Trirana'.
The opening has phenomenal cinematography, editing and singing btw.[2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nights_in_Andalusia
[2] https://youtu.be/k42w7axKju4
They must have seen the movie and went digging for gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(2016_film)
Not to be confused with Bre-X. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X
Subject of the film Gold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(2016_film)