General Magic

In 1989, Marc Porat sketched a device that looked exactly like today's iPhone. A year later, he spun out of Apple with Macintosh legends to found General Magic. Their first smartphone sold fewer than 3,000 units.

Using rare archival footage shot inside the company in 1992, the film captures the team inventing the future in real time—their ambition, creativity, and hubris. Present-day interviews reveal what they learned from catastrophic failure and how that wisdom shaped their subsequent world-changing work. The structure moves from invention to collapse to an unexpected coda showing where each person ended up.

The story Silicon Valley rarely tells: how spectacular failure by humble, brilliant people became the foundation for technologies that changed billions of lives.