“On the eve of its opening in New York and Los Angeles, Universal Pictures has released… [a] 2:20-minute scene in the second act where Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) tells Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) that his NeXT workstation will be the single biggest failure in the history of personal computing,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“One caution: We all know that Apple didn’t steal the Mac’s graphical user interface from Xerox PARC,” P.E.D. reports. “It’s one of many places where Aaron Sorkin’s script departs from reality for dramatic effect. Try not to let that spoil the movie for you.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Great, now everyone including many who’ve been educated about this fallacy and future generations will believe “Apple stole the GUI” because some screenwriter chose confrontational dialog over the actual truth, when a less lazy writer could easily have provided both.
Putting that lie into Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s mouth is not artistic license, it’s historical malfeasance.
Yes, we understand artistic license. We also understand how fictions can be implanted as facts, and even be forced to become facts, by Hollywood movies. There never was a bridge on the River Kwai, but there is now (kinda, sorta), thanks to a Hollywood movie that made up that “fact.” — MacDailyNews Take, October 8, 2015
Aaron Sorkin is a lazy writer who recycles his sententious dialog with shocking regularity:
SEE ALSO:
The Steve Jobs in ‘Steve Jobs’ is a fictional character invented by Aaron Sorkin – October 8, 2015
Jony Ive joins chorus of insiders’ complaints about new ‘Steve Jobs’ movie – October 8, 2015
The Strange Saga of ‘Steve Jobs’: A widow’s threats, high-powered spats and the Sony hack – October 7, 2015
‘Steve Jobs’ director Danny Boyle warns of ‘tremendous, terrifying power’ of tech giants like Apple – October 7, 2015
Forbes reviews ‘Steve Jobs’: ‘An electrifying interpretive dance of abstract biographical cinema’ – October 7, 2015
Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa skips movie screening, but parties with cast – October 7, 2015
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reviews ‘Steve Jobs’ movie: ‘I loved it’ – October 7, 2015
Aaron Sorkin: Steve Jobs just wanted to be loved – October 6, 2015
The ‘Steve Jobs’ movie that Sony, DiCaprio, and Bale didn’t want is now an Oscar favorite – October 6, 2015
Michael Fassbender already the odds-on favorite to win an Oscar for ‘Steve Jobs’ – October 5, 2015
Steve Jobs’ widow and friends take aim at Hollywood over ‘Steve Jobs’ biopic – October 5, 2015
‘Steve Jobs’ biopic too nasty to win Best Picture award – October 2, 2015
Andy Hertzfeld: ‘Steve Jobs’ movie ‘deviates from reality everywhere’ but ‘aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths’ – October 2, 2015
Aaron Sorkin blasts Apple’s Tim Cook over ‘Steve Jobs’ critique: ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve’ – September 25, 2015
I smell panic. Try to build buzz any way you can, since the movie can’t stand on truth or beauty.
For MDN – Kanchanaburi, in Myanmar border, is home to the famous Bridge River Kwai. During WW II, Japan constructed the meter-gauge railway line from Ban Pong, Thailand to Thanbyuzayat, Burma. The line passing through the scenic Three Pagodas Pass runs for 250 miles. This is now known as the Death Railway.
The railway line was meant to transport cargo daily to India, to back up their planned attack on India. The construction was done using POWs and Asian slave laborers in unfavorable conditions. The work started in October 1942 was completed in a year. Due to the difficult terrain, thousands of laborers lost their lives. It is believed that one life was lost for each sleeper laid in the track.
Kanchanaburi War Cemetery
At the nearby Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, around 7,000 POWs, who sacrificed their lives in the railway construction, are buried. Another 2,000 are laid to rest at the Chungkai Cemetery.
Allied Forces bombed the iron bridge in 1944. Three sections of Bridge River Kwai were destroyed. The present bridge has two of its central spans rebuilt. The original parts of the bridge are now displayed in the War Museum.
Yes, the film didn’t give the exact facts, but it didn’t portray itself as anyones biography and the essential truths are correct. It was a real place built by real POWs.
The number of people coming to Kanchanaburi to see ‘the’ bridge from the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” are probably not as numerous as they once were. Still, there are those who still show up expecting to see the gerry-rigged construction of timber and bamboo (even though it was blown up in the movie). The concrete and steel bridge they’re presented with is a bit less impressive.
Of course, the truth is that there never was a bridge over the River Kwai. The ‘death railway’ ran parallel to the Kwai Noi river but never crossed it. The bridge people flock to see is really over the Mae Klong River. After the 1957 movie came out and people began coming to Kanchanaburi in search of ‘the bridge’, the local authorities renamed a section of the Mae Klong to Kwai Yai.
Source: Thailand For Visitors
I’m all for dramatic license, but I wish they’d at least get facts correct: Stolen GUI? Bah.
I guess I’ll wait for it to come out on Netflix on DVD.
‘We knew they hadn’t done it right, and that we could – at a fraction of the price. So I told Xerox, “I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will open the kimono at PARC. You’re sitting on a gold mine. I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.” And it’s good that they showed us, because the technology crashed and burned at Xerox. The problem was that Xerox had never made a commercial computer. They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do.’
Steve Jobs Bio: The Unauthorized Autobiography.
This isn’t “creative license”, it’s slander. Sorkin’s biggest problem is there’s too many of us who know what really happened, and what Steve Jobs was really like. Sorkin might have gotten away with such a snow job rewriting of history if this were 200 years into the future, but he was apparently too dumb to pick up on this little fact.
Hollywood and the screen writers… they truly have immense power to produce disruptive perception(s) and never have to disclose what fact(s) in history that was changed for artistic license.
I wouldn’t pïss on this movie if its ass was on fire..or any of its “actors.” Seth Rogen today tweeted to Ben Carson, a Republican neurosurgeon candidate: “Fück you @RealBenCarson”
puke.
Besides the lying crap like Stolen Gui others have pointed out…
What I want to say is that NEXT perhaps in a narrow definition as producing a ‘box’ might have been a ‘failure’ was actually a success as it was SOLD to Apple and NEXTSTEP became OSX which morphed in iOS making Apple the richest tech company in the world. NEXT was the egg that hatched hundreds of billions.
(btw when I was a kid i went to the nearest big town to see the launch of the NEXT machines in my area. I believe I still have one of the original NEXT magazines . those machines were awesome, coal black — they said Jobs sifted dozens of blacks to get the right tone… oops better stop here before I fanboy too much …. ).
No, don’t stop, I love it. I didn’t ever get a look at the Next machines themselves — at the places where I worked, they were always locked away in labs — but eventually I was privileged to set up new MacOS X servers and just had a blast playing network administrator. Meanwhile I could chortle at the “real” IT workers who were still transitioning clients off of MS-DOS and battling viruses in Windows installations. Those days were as lucky and happy as any in my “have code, will travel” career. It would have been a lot different had Apple gone with BeOS instead…the conquering hero would have been Jean-Louis Gassée instead of Steve Jobs, diamond ring and lambskin coat instead of Levi’s and black turtleneck. Would Apple have triumphed under Jean-Louis the way it did under Steve? I don’t know. I’ll guess no.
“Apple stole the UI form xerox”???
I won’t watch that film, When I watch science fiction, I want aliens and monsters in the movie, not just plain and simple lies.
I know understand why Jobs’ widow wanted to stop that film.
Failure? The NEXT was used to create the world wide web!
http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web
Good lord, people. It’s a movie!!! It’s not a biographical documentary, it’s a fictional account focused on a single man. Just about every important person in history has had this done to them..beginning with Shakespeare’s plays. Using the myth of a person to tell a much bigger and larger story is nothing new. One can nitpick the film to death (Steve didn’t wear that color bow tie at that event! The movie is crap!!) or step back and try and see what the filmmakers were trying to capture or say Steve Jobs. Even Sorkin has stated “this is not a biopic.” This film will not be the end-all discussion of Steve Jobs life and anyone who takes history lessons from films, needs to have their heads examined.