"Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story

theodp writes: Didn't like Jobs, the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you'll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender. "Steve Jobs is a tech visionary, total dick," writes Esquire's Matt Patches in his mini-review of the just-released Steve Jobs trailer. So, is inspiring kids to become the "Next Steve Jobs" a good or bad thing?

Comments

Re:Why does Jobs always steal the limelight?

[mccalli]

Thing is - there were a lot of talented hardware engineers at the time. Woz owed an awfully large amount to Chuck Peddle, for instance, and the role of MOS and Commodore is massively underplayed these days in a "history is written by the victors"-style approach. Most of the early pure engineering-led eight bit companies died a death, but Apple survived. Why is that? It wasn't due to Woz.

I really don't want to underplay Woz and I agree with the comments, but you can see from his ventures since that the involvement of Woz does not necessarily make for a sustainable company, and Woz alone could not have created Apple.

Re:We're All Dicks

[nmb3000]

We're all dicks.

I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.

And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.

Trailer left me unimpressed

[bfwebster]

I didn't know Jobs well, but I did have a number of direct conversations with him, sat in on meetings at NeXT with him, spent five years developing software for NeXTstep, and had many talks with people who worked closely him (again, mostly at NeXT); our last conversation was him calling me up to yell at me for an op-ed piece of mine in BYTE (Nov 94) called "Whither Nextstep?"

With that tee-up, I'll say that Fassbender's portrayal of Jobs in this trailer pretty much falls flat. Fassbender looks too professional and lacks that burning gaze that Jobs used to such great effect, even while using up the people around him. Frankly, Fassbender comes across more like John Scully trying to act like Steve Jobs than like Jobs himself. Also, it took me a bit to realize that Seth Rogan was supposed to be playing Woz; again, the wrong vibes and aura. Frankly, I think that Jack Black with a beard would have been a better choice for Woz. ..bruce..