Trivia for
Sneakers (1992) More at IMDbPro »

• The name "Werner Brandes" was inspired by Dr. Werner Brandes, an associate teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy in New England.
  
  
• Mother wears a T-shirt bearing the name "Aleka's Attic", a band formed by co-star River Phoenix.
  
  
• Mother wears a t-shirt from the Kingston, Ontario-based band The Tragically Hip, whom Dan Aykroyd loves and promotes. He had them as his musical guests on an episode of "Saturday Night Live" (1975) that he hosted.
  
  
• The access code entered at the very beginning of the movie ends in 1138, most likely in reference to George Lucas's first film, THX 1138 (1971).
  
  
• When Liz goes to the Dim Sum bar with Werner Brandes under the assumed name of Dorris, there is a group of singers singing the song "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" in Chinese. In the English version of the song, Leroy Brown gets in trouble over a girl named Dorris.
  
  
• Robert Redford's jacket is the same one he wears in The Natural (1984).
  
  
• In Three Days of the Condor (1975) starring Robert Redford, a CIA building is hit. Subsequently, a list of the casualties is displayed, the final two names on the list being Martin and Bishop, which is Redford's alias in Sneakers (1992).
  
  
• The term commonly used to describe "information phishing" (e.g., trying to get a person to divulge her password) as applied by hackers, is Social Engineering.
  
  
• The computer in the room off of Cosmo's office in the PlayTronics building (the one that looks like a circular bench) is actually a Cray Y-MP, a multi-million dollar supercomputer that was one of the worlds fastest computers at the time the film was made.
  
  
• The movie deals with the impact of a factoring breakthrough on encryption, an obvious reference to the RSA algorithm, the most popular public-key encryption algorithm in use today. 'Prof. Len Adleman', one of the co-inventors of the RSA algorithm, provided some technical guidance on the film in exchange for giving his wife a chance to meet lead actor Robert Redford.
  
  
• The warehouse set that the characters are in having a party after getting the device is modeled on the set of the warehouse party in The Conversation (1974).
  
  
• James Craven is billed in the credits as "FBI Agent". His character introduces himself as "Special Agent Bestrop". Juel Bestrop was casting director for this film.
  
  
• 'Prof. Len Adleman' is one of the three mathematicians who invented the RSA (he's the "A") cryptosystem, currently the preeminent method of encrypting any form of data in the world. Adleman served as a mathematical consultant on the film, and spent several days constructing the slides Janek displays at the college symposium on "unbreakable codes" (which took Adleman a considerable amount of time to create using primitive early-'90s computer graphics technology). In the end, director Phil Alden Robinson had the slides transposed as oil crayon scribbles, on account of the notion that "that's what a regular mathematician would have done". Adleman later remarked that this was indeed true and what he would have done, and would have saved him days if only he'd known.
  
  
• The orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible driven by Robert Redford in the Embarcadero area ("The Handoff" scene) is the same vehicle driven by Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) - also filmed in San Francisco - the following year.
  
  
• To prevent the project from being thought of as a kids' movie by being rated G, the directors intentionally added profanity to the script.
  
  
• James Earl Jones' character, Bernard Abbott, was named after Robert Abbott, a charismatic technical consultant for the film. In addition to being about the same age and complexion as Jones, Bob designed the first time-sharing (multi-user) operating system for the Cray CDC-6600, the predecessor of the Y-MP seen in the film. He is also often referred to as the "Father of Information Security" by seasoned veterans of the computing industry.
  
  
• While picking through Dr. Brandes' trash, Mother holds up a folded box of "Cap'n Crunch". In the 1970s, "Cap'n Crunch" came with a small whistle in the box. A "phone phreaker" called "Captain Crunch" (John Draper) discovered that this whistle could be used to get free phone calls (one of many components in the practice of "phone phreaking", which digital phone switching-systems has made almost totally obsolete). There is another reference to Draper during the Scrabble game (the word "CRUNCH" is visible upside down before it gets turned into SCRUNCHY). Whistler is patterned after Joe Engressia, a blind telephone expert born with perfect pitch who was one of the original phone phreakers.
  
  
• Director Phil Alden Robinson once did an internship at WRGB-TV in Niskayuna, New York. As a favor, he has former WRGB news anchor Ernie Tetrault cast as the news anchor in this film.
  
  
• Cast member James Earl Jones was the only actor to appear in all of the first three Jack Ryan films: The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). Director Phil Alden Robinson went on to direct The Sum of All Fears (2002), the only film in the series in which Jones did not appear.
  
  
• James Earl Jones, David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell all also appeared together in Matewan (1987).
  
  

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