Paper Man on AllMovie

"A computer can only give back what the human mind has put into it." So explained screenwriter James D. Buchanan when discussing the made-for-TV melodrama Paper Man. A group of five bright college students decide to take advantage of a computer glitch. Partly as a social experiment, partly as a prank, but mostly out of sheer boredom, the students feed phony data into the faulty computer, creating a human being who doesn't exist--complete with biographical background and credit-card history. Unfortunately, the computer spews forth the embodiment of Pure Evil--and by the end of the film, three of the five pranksters lie dead. An early example of the technothriller genre, Paper Man originally aired on October 12, 1971.