“Universal Pictures has announced it will release Danny Boyle’s ‘Steve Jobs’ in the heart of awards season on Oct. 9, 2015,” Jeff Sneider reports for The Wrap.
“Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs, the pioneering founder of Apple, with Oscar winner Kate Winslet co-starring as Joanna Hoffman, former marketing chief of Macintosh. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple, is played by Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels co-stars as former Apple CEO John Sculley,” Sneider reports. “The film also features Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ ex-girlfriend, and Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original members of the Apple Macintosh development team.”
Sneider reports, “Boyle is directing from a script by Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin, who worked from Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Jobs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Best-selling and mind-numbing. Let’s hope and pray that the movie is better than the book, for a change.
Related articles:
Universal Pictures announces full cast of ‘Steve Jobs’ as biopic begins shooting – January 28, 2015
Filming for Steve Jobs biopic underway at Apple co-founder’s childhood home – January 17, 2015
Perla Haney-Jardine to play Lisa Jobs in Universal’s ‘Steve Jobs’ biopic – January 6, 2015
Kate Winslet eyed for female lead in ‘Steve Jobs’ biopic – December 22, 2014
Jeff Daniels eyed to play former Apple CEO John Sculley in ‘Steve Jobs’ biopic – December 9, 2014
John Sculley: Forcing Steve Jobs out of Apple was a mistake – April 18, 2014
Failed Apple CEO John Sculley: If I were Samsung, I would tap Ron Johnson – April 10, 2013
If John Sculley says Apple must do this then Apple probably shouldn’t – January 17, 2013
Former Apple CEO Sculley gives his take on Steve Jobs – January 13, 2012
John Sculley: I wish I told Steve Jobs ‘This is your company, let’s figure out how you can come back and be CEO’ – Septemeber 13, 2011
John Sculley: Apple’s big mistake was hiring me as CEO – October 14, 2010
Sculley: Uh, maybe I shouldn’t have fired Steve Jobs – June 7, 2010
Most readers here are hoping for an historically accurate depiction of Jobs’s life. They don’t understand what is the purpose of Hollywood feature movies: to entertain. There is a difference between documentaries and dramatic films: the latter are fiction. There will be a disclaimer near the beginning of the opening (or closing) credits, stating that the film is BASED on a biography of Steve Jobs, written by Isaacsson. In other words, it is NOT a re-telling of the actual life; it is not even a re-telling of the biography; it is a FICTIONAL (made-up) drama, based (to a certain extent) on a real person. To what extent? This usually depends on two factors. First is the historic significance of the person the film is about; second is the relative significance of the filmmaker (either screenwriter, or director) who takes on the job of writing / directing this film.
Sorkin is an exceptionally accomplished and skilled screenwriter. He knows how to write a good dramatic dialogue, develop characters and their interactions, and propel action forward. It is quite likely, though, that he has taken plenty of artistic liberty with historic facts and events in order to create more compelling drama. Same for Danny Boyle.
There are many Hollywood films that are based on historic events where there are plenty of verbatim records available for reconstruction. “Apollo 13”, or “Thirteen Days” come to mind. And while most will agree that Ron Howard and Roger Donaldson (respectively) stayed quite close to the verbatim records of those events (because the events themselves unfolded in such a powerful dramatic way that little dramatic intervention was needed), even they used some artistic liberties with characters, interactions, and events.
I am pretty confident that this Sorkin effort will be an artistic (and possibly a commercial) success. But I am not holding my breath for an accurate and precise biographical depiction of Steve Jobs.
And what is your opinion of the Steve Jobs biography? I’m learning that MDN might have been too hard on Isaacson, and that it may be worth reading after all. The last mass market book in the area of computing that I read was Turing’s Cathedral, 2012.
Don’t waste your money on the book. I read it once and I was not impressed. My 2 cents.
It is the only authorised one, and as such, likely the most definitive.
I liked it. It may have been a bit two-dimensional, but it contained a lot of personal details that Jobs never shared with anyone else. It is probably as close as you can get to a direct first-person account.
I liked it as well.
Me too