The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is a 2002 film based on the novel of the same name by technology-culture writer Po Bronson. The film stars Adam Garcia and Rosario Dawson. The screenplay was written by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche.

Plot
Andy Kasper is a marketer who quits his job in search of something more fulfilling. He gets hired at LaHonda Research Institute, where Francis Benoit assigns him to design the PC99, a $99 PC. He moves into a run-down apartment building where he meets his neighbor Alisa, who's an artist, and puts together a team of unassigned employees. The team includes: Salman Fard, a short, foreign man with an accent who is hacking into CIA files when Andy meets him; Curtis "Tiny" Russell, a massively obese, anthropophobic man; and Darrell, a tall, blond, pierced, scary, germaphobic, deep-voiced man with personal space issues who regularly refers to himself in the third person.

The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the $99 mark. It is Salman's idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector. The last few hundred dollars come off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a "hypnotizer" code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they're done.

But immediately before he finishes, the whole team (except for Tiny, who is still writing the code) quits LaHonda after being told that there are no more funds for their project, but sign a non-exclusive patent waiver, meaning that LaHonda will share the patent rights to any technology they had developed up to that point. After leaving LaHonda, they pitch their product to numerous companies, but do not get accepted, mainly because the prototype emagi (electronic magic) was ugly, and something always seemed to go wrong during the demonstration of their product.

Alisa, whose relationship with Andy has been growing steadily, helps improve the emagi's looks, which helps the team with their callback with executive. They agree to give her 51% of their company in exchange for getting their product manufactured and for getting Andy's Porsche bought back, which he had had to sell in order to raise money to build a new emagi after leaving LaHonda. Unfortunately, she then sells the patent rights to the emagi to Francis Benoit, who plans to sell the emagi at $999 a piece and reap a huge profit.

The team interrupts the meeting in which Benoit is going to introduce the emagi to the world and introduces an even newer computer he and his team developed and manufactured at LaHonda, which was in a state of disaster when they arrived. It was a small silver tube that projected a hologram and lasers which would detect where the hands were, eliminating the need even for virtual reality gloves. Andy then reminds Benoit of the non-exclusive patent waiver, which had been Benoit's idea in the first place.

Cast

 * Adam Garcia as Andy Kasper
 * Rosario Dawson as Alisa
 * Anjul Nigam as Salman Fard
 * Ethan Suplee as Curtis "Tiny" Russell
 * Jake Busey as Darrell
 * Enrico Colantoni as Francis Benoit