When Steve Jobs passed away, Sony got the rights to his life, and Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men) has written the screenplay. This version has yet to be made, but a smaller, less expensive version of Jobs’s life, jOBS, has already been made with Ashton Kutcher in the lead, and is due for release on August 16.
The Kutcher version of Jobs’s life was screened at the Sundance festival, and it received decent reviews. Nothing amazing, but not the train wreck everyone feared. Yet Steve Wozniak has already voiced his displeasure with the film, and the L.A. Times has speculated that the movie may not give the Woz his due.
As Wozniak said, in the movie’s coming attraction, “Steve is lecturing me about where computers could go, when it was the other way around. Steve never created a great computer. In that period, he had failure after failure after failure. He had an incredible vision, but he didn’t have the ability to execute it.” Daniel Kottke, who also worked at Apple back in the day, wanted the filmmakers to give the Woz more credit and praise for his role in Apple, but they never got back to him.
Jobs was certainly a complicated man, and it would probably take about ten movies to truly capture him. We’ll see soon enough if jOBS is a good start in capturing a mad genius who helped change the world, or if it misses the mark.
