By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

The experts preparing against technological mayhem in 2000 are worried. Not about the mayhem. They're fretting about a movie. NBC will air next month Y2K, a made-for-TV film that forebodes disaster at the turn of the third millennium. Power failures sweep the Eastern Seaboard. Commercial jet instruments fail. A nuclear power plant teeters on the brink of a meltdown. Not only that: ATMs won't spit out any cash. Variety magazine calls it "a disaster picture that imagines near-apocalyptic results." The New York Times bills it as "a movie for the chronically panic-stricken." This is not what Y2K wonks expect to happen in the wee hours of Jan. 1, and they're worried viewers will react to Y2K the way listeners did to Orson Welles' infamous radio depiction of Martian landings in The War of the Worlds. "I'm hoping it doesn't become something like crying 'Fire!' in a theater," says Mike Benzen, president of the National Association of State Information Resource Executives. "Nuclear plants aren't going to melt down. Airplanes aren't going to fall out of the sky. We don't want to see people greatly altering behavior." After years of preparation, experts say most critical systems in this country are ready for the new millennium. You wouldn't know it from Y2K. The movie, which airs Sunday, Nov. 21, at 9 p.m. ET, stars Ken Olin as a systems-failure expert working for the federal government. As New Year's Eve turns into a catastrophe, he urges that all planes be grounded, then gets caught up trying to prevent a nuclear plant outside Seattle from melting down. NBC says no one has tried to stop the movie from airing. It begins with a reminder to viewers that it's fiction, not fact. "In no way are we promoting it in a way that we feel would frighten the public," NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks says. However, Lou Marcoccio, research director for the Gartner Group, one of the leading consultants on Y2K, says people who watch the movie might be influenced to buy a home generator, pull their money from the bank or overstock groceries. These are the types of actions that most Y2K experts counsel against. "I think it's absolutely wrong to depict a worst-case scenario of what can occur," Marcoccio says. "It will impact people's thinking." Otto Doll, South Dakota's commissioner of information and technology, says NBC is motivated by money. "They're out to make a buck, just like anybody else," he says. "There's nothing wrong with that. Heck, it's the American way." Some government watchdogs aren't at all concerned about Y2K the movie. "Entertainment is entertainment," says Don Meyer, spokesman for the Senate's special panel on Y2K. "How much of a social impact do

-- Jean Wasp (jean@sonic.net), October 31, 1999