When the dot-com bubble burst, it took with it the promise of an entire cycle of films extolling the virtues of zany, in-your-face Internet entrepreneurs shaking up the system by thinking outside the box and subverting the dominant paradigm. A burst-era adaptation of a bubble-era novel, The First $20 Million provides a tantalizing glimpse of what a dot.comedy might look like. Not surprisingly, it looks like an '80s college sex comedy fortified with a few instantly dated high-tech buzzwords. Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche's screenplay for $20 Million is based on Po Bronson's novel, The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest (the film's original title), but it seems equally inspired by Real Genius and Revenge Of The Nerds. In a decidedly non-star-making performance, Coyote Ugly's Adam Garcia stars as the handsomest man in Silicon Valley, a "marketing puke" who longs to create something concrete and meaningful, to become an "iron man" like his father. Aching for new challenges, Garcia leaves behind the soulless, identity-crushing world of marketing and takes up the soulful, earthy task of designing computers. Giddy with excitement, Garcia joins a prestigious computer research lab where important work is ostensibly being done in between frequent nude hot-tub parties and epic mooning sessions. To thwart Garcia's idealism, the film's William Atherton-like heavy (Full Frontal's Enrico Colantoni) gives him a seemingly impossible mission: Design a $99 personal computer. Garcia eagerly accepts, and sets about assembling a design team composed of geeks, nerds, and spazzes, with the occasional Poindexter thrown in for good measure. From there on, it's a veritable battle of the cyber-slobs and the cyber-snobs, as Garcia and his team's work is stolen by their evil boss. The film begins with the phrase "Once upon a time" and writes the dot-com crash into its story, but $20 Million still feels like a weird relic of a revolution cut down in its infancy. Talk of paper millionaires and untold cyber-riches now seems cruelly ironic, even though the film's tone never strays from broad goofiness. A sloppy, strangely fascinating footnote to the dot-com explosion, it would make for a terrific "Remember The Bubble" double feature with the similarly misbegotten AntiTrust.