Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, adapted from a short story by John Varley, was coproduced by WNET and a Canadian TV company in 1983. It was shot on video tape to allow for an excellent variety of video and computer-produced special effects. Raul Julia is Aram Fingal, a computer terminal operator for Novacorp, one of five mega-corporations that run his world. To escape the boredom of his job, he accesses formidden Cinema files and punches up endless reruns of Casablanca on his video terminal.
When he is caught, Fingal is sentences to a 48-hour "Dopple." His consciousness is removed and placed in the body of a baboon, so that he can experience the world through an animal's perspective. But his human body is misplaced, causing a corporate scandal. In a desperate attempt to save Fingal's consciousness--and Novacorp's reputation--Computech's Apollonia James transfers his mind to the corporate mainframe computer.
Once inside the computer, Fingal creates his own reality centered around Rick's cafe from Casablanca. Rick is also played by Raul Julia, who does a very credible Bogart. Apollonia, meanwhile, must monitor Fingal's activities within the computer and prevent him from disrupting the programming, and appears in Fingal's fantasy world as his mother (complete with chicken soup), Venus (on the half-shell), and, of course, Ingrid Bergman. But the Novacorp chairman (Donald C. Moore) has also entered the computer as The Fat Man, seeking to destroy Fingal before he gains control of the computer and disrupt's Novacorp's control over the world.
A battle between Fingal's imagination and corporate reality takes place in the computer, a romance develops between Apollonia and Fingal, and reality is never quite the same afterwards.
-- From Design Lines, September/October 1989