Oscar winner Alex Gibney bringing new Steve Jobs documentary to SXSW Film

Posted:
in General Discussion edited February 2015
Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney will premier his latest project, a feature entitled "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" that chronicles the late Apple CEO's influence on the modern world's relationship with computers, at the annual South by Southwest film festival next month.


A still from the upcoming documentary.


Produced in partnership with CNN Films, the 120-minute documentary promises to be a "provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon." The film's exact screening date is yet to be determined, and its inclusion was first noted by Variety.

Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, an examination of U.S. government policy toward torture, won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His work on Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room garnered a nomination for the same award in 2005, while another Gibney production --?the HBO film Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God --?won three Emmy Awards and a Peabody.

Jobs has become perhaps a more polarizing figure in death than he was while alive, with a number of attempts to document his life and career underway.

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Jobs is being turned into a major motion picture, penned by West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin and helmed by Trainspotting's Danny Boyle. Michael Fassbender is playing Jobs alongside Seth Rogen's Steve Wozniak, Kate Winslet as former Mac marketing head Joanna Hoffman, and Jeff Daniels as former Apple CEO John Sculley.

Principal filming for that project began last week, and interest remains high despite several setbacks. Hundreds of hopefuls turned up for a casting call at Cupertino's De Anza College earlier this week.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9

    With CNN involved, they'll probably claim that a solar flare gave Jobs cancer, and that Woz's plane crash was due to a black hole. MH370 will figure into the story somehow.

  • Reply 2 of 9
    pazuzupazuzu Posts: 1,728member

    I'll take a documentary any day over Hollyweird's casting of Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak.

  • Reply 3 of 9
    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post

    With CNN involved, they'll probably claim that a solar flare gave Jobs cancer, and that Woz's plane crash was due to a black hole. MH370 will figure into the story somehow.

     

    Right, so, Steve and Steve were stoned out of their minds in the woods, right?

    And then all of a sudden WHOOM, here comes the plane through the other end of the wormhole!

    And it crashes, right, because it 1. isn’t even the same make of plane and 2. just went through a wormhole.

     

    But the Steves go on over to the smoldering wreckage and find everything burnt up. Everything. Except one thing…

    IT’S AN IPOD OR WHATEVER I DON’T KNOW SOME SORT OF APPLE PRODUCT.

     

    So they come down from the drugs, you know, and they realize it’s not a hallucination. They don’t know what it is, but they do know it’s…

    And so the Steves embark on a quest to reverse engineer it and make all sorts of money on the idea.

     

    Woz is skeptical.

    But he eventually relents and they start a company to get the capital to figure out how it works and how to make more.

     

    Something something, character interest, something something, Steve pretends Lisa isn’t his…

    Something something, they eventually hire Sculley, something something, Steve gets fired.

    And then Scully says, “NO, STEVE, YOU ARE THE FUCKING FUCKING FU?K!”  And then the Steves were manga characters.

    CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 85

     

    THE END.

     

  • Reply 4 of 9
    ^^^ Did you create this? I want to buy this in the form of an e-comic...NOW!
  • Reply 5 of 9
    v900v900 Posts: 101member
    Uh-oh... Sounds like a hypocritical hipster piece that explains how Steve Jobs betrayed his own values, maaan!

    And how he was worse than Hitler, since he forced people to use iPods and proprietary software, instead of sticking it to the fascist machine by using open source, free as in free, crap as in crappy software.

    There'll probably also be a segment on how Jobs personally ensured, that everyone under 16 in Foxconn's Apple production lines had to work 60 hours a week.

    And that he not only forced Apple's HR department to exclusively hire white, heterosexual males, but also personally gave every minority job applicant a kick in the scrotum. After lecturing them on the superiority of the white race, and telling them they didn't get the job.

    I can't wait!
  • Reply 6 of 9
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    v900 wrote: »
    Uh-oh... Sounds like a hypocritical hipster piece that explains how Steve Jobs betrayed his own values, maaan!

    The synopsis is here:

    http://schedule.sxsw.com/2015/events/event_FS17862

    "When Steve Jobs died the world wept. But what accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn’t know him? This evocative film navigates Jobs' path from a small house in the suburbs, to zen temples in Japan, to the CEO's office of the world's richest company, exploring how Jobs’ life and work shaped our relationship with the computer. The Man in the Machine is a provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon."

    The usual route authors take is to attack Steve and Steve even said this in an interview:

    "At times I've been pretty hard about managing companies and a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any choices. If somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find the handful of a few dozen people that I fired in my life who hate my guts. It was certainly the case in the one book I skimmed. I mean it was just "let's throw the darts at Steve". Such is life. That's the world I've chosen to live in. If I didn't like that part of it enough, I'd escape and I haven't so I'm willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn't find it very accurate."

    Hopefully they'll actually try to focus on why the world wept when he died. We already know why. It's not really something that's easy to explain to other people. It would be like trying to explain why you make friends with certain people or marry a particular person. Even if the public perception differed from his private character, it's the public character that inspired people. Tim Cook has said that the biographies he's read about Steve don't describe the Steve that he knew so there's room left for a different portrayal.

    At the very least, it looks like they'll give some coverage to the mustache years:

    http://www.americanmustacheinstitute.org/2011/10/steve-jobs-the-mustache-years/

    1000

    Maybe they'll cover the giganto beard too:

    1000

    The documentary can give an insight into the ratio of success to level of facial hair. It's like Sorkin said, there's enough content with Steve's story for 10 movies.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    Originally Posted by SpamSandwich View Post

    ^^^ Did you create this? I want to buy this in the form of an e-comic...NOW!

     

    Taken from Steve & Steve.

     

    The construction is gorgeous, but the models and story are way off base. Woz never did drugs, and that’s the first plot point.

     

    As for Steves at the end, I’m still trying to find it. It looks like it might be a comedy.

  • Reply 8 of 9

    I'll watch this. I enjoyed the Sorkin's biography, sort of. I enjoyed the movie "Jobs," sort of.

     

    I miss Stevo. Watching the Keynotes was one of the great joys in my life. 

     

    Best

  • Reply 9 of 9

    This should definitely be worth a watch. Something to wash the bad taste that the "Jobs" movie with Kutcher left in my mouth...

    _________________________________

    belviq reviews

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