It wasn’t long after Steve Jobs passed away that there was speculation his life would be turned into a film.
And sure enough, practically right after the fact, the rights to Jobs’s life story was swept up by Sony. The top choice to write the screenplay? Aaron Sorkin, who penned A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and The Social Network.
Of course this is a project that Sony will want on the fast track, yet as reported on Cinemablend and E! Online, Sorkin said, “Right now I’m just in the thinking-about-it-stages. It’s a really big movie and it’s going to be a great movie no matter who writes it.”
Well, that’s certainly a diplomatic way to put it, as there are some writers who wouldn’t do a good job with Jobs’s life, certainly Joe Eszterhas, creator of Showgirls, wouldn’t be the right choice, but we get the gist of what Sorkin’s saying. This is definitely a big story, and in the right hands it indeed could make a hell of a film.
As Kelly West writes on Cinemablend, “Having recently rewatched Pirates of Silicon Valley, I’ve gained an even bigger appreciation for Sorkin’s contributions to The Scoial Network. [Pirates] drags a lot and never really comes together as a story, nor do we ever really get to the root og Gates or Jobs as people. The Jobs biopic might turn out to be great with some other writer, but the chances seem even more favorable with Sorkin involved.”
As Noah Wyle, who played Jobs in Pirates, said to writer David A. Kaplan, Jobs hated the Pirates script, but thought Wyle did a good job playing him.
Interesting enough, as Cinemablend also reports, Jobs contacted Sorkin about writing a movie for Pixar. Sorkin’s show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had gotten cancelled, and Jobs called Sorkin to tell him not to get discouraged. Jobs pitched him on writing a Pixar film, and Sorkin demurred, telling Steve his daughter loved Pixar, “[And] I don’t want to disappoint her by writing the only bad movie in the history of Pixar.”
It would have been unreal to imagine a story meeting between Sorkin and Jobs, you could probably make a movie out of that, or at least have sold tickets to it, and wherever he is right now, perhaps Jobs will finally get his wish of Sorkin writing for him.
