Trailer debuts for Steve Jobs documentary derided by Apple exec as 'mean-spirited'
The trailer for "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine," a highly criticized documentary from Oscar winner Alex Gibney, premiered on Friday, giving the general public their first glimpse at the controversial film.
Theh upcoming documentary from Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films was shared with Mashable. Gibney won an Academy Award for his 2007 film "Taxi to the Dark Side," and recently earned acclaim for the HBO documentary "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief."
The film opens in select theaters on Sept. 4, but it debuted at the South by Southwest film festival earlier this year. It was there that Apple executive Eddy Cue saw the documentary, leading him to slam the film on Twitter.
"An inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend," Cue wrote back in March. "It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew."
Other Apple employees who saw the film during its screening in Texas reportedly walked out before it finished airing.
A poster for the film has also been released by Magnolia pictures, as seen below.
The 120-minute documentary has been promoted as a "provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon." Other critically acclaimed films from Gibney include "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," and "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God."
Earlier this month, the full trailer for Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin's film "Steve Jobs" premiered. That dramatic retelling of the life of Jobs, as played by actor Michael Fassbender, will hit theaters on Oct. 9.
Theh upcoming documentary from Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films was shared with Mashable. Gibney won an Academy Award for his 2007 film "Taxi to the Dark Side," and recently earned acclaim for the HBO documentary "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief."
The film opens in select theaters on Sept. 4, but it debuted at the South by Southwest film festival earlier this year. It was there that Apple executive Eddy Cue saw the documentary, leading him to slam the film on Twitter.
"An inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend," Cue wrote back in March. "It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew."
Other Apple employees who saw the film during its screening in Texas reportedly walked out before it finished airing.
A poster for the film has also been released by Magnolia pictures, as seen below.
The 120-minute documentary has been promoted as a "provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon." Other critically acclaimed films from Gibney include "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," and "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God."
Earlier this month, the full trailer for Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin's film "Steve Jobs" premiered. That dramatic retelling of the life of Jobs, as played by actor Michael Fassbender, will hit theaters on Oct. 9.
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Then they go over and dredge up every scandal associated with Apple and slam Apple for murdering Chinese factory workers and beating up that blogger who was trying to traffic a stolen iPhone 4 prototype, bad Apple! [I]You're evil, and I'm gonna getcha in my documentary. Yeah, I gotcha good.[/I] My description is probably making the Apple haters salivate, LOL. Enjoy your bias confirmation, boys. You know who you are.
It's also true that the angry young man of the earlier years did seem to mature and soften under the influence of his wife and particularly as he faced sickness and death. Unfortunately, those changes didn't come soon enough to end his crazy ideas about fruit cures (versus surgery) that played a role in his death.
The truth is enough. Steve Jobs accomplishments are more than enough to negate any need to whitewash away his faults.
This is going to be good. It may prove to be the definitive Jobs film
Just mho off the trailer of course.
EDIT: Maybe I should have read Suddenly Newton's Comment first... :embarrass
Wow so not interested in this then. Doesn't sound the least bit objective.
There is a whole battalion of trolls, lowlifes, anti-Apple zealots, etc. who will get a major kick out of this garbage. It will probably do quite well for a documentary.
C'est la vie.
Jobs "brutal" behavior is well-documented. It's easy to suspect that the fond memories these Apple executives have for him now flow in part from the fact that he made them stupendously rich and that he's now dead, unable to trouble them any more. It's also probably true that Apple's upper ranks were a self-selecting group of those who could handle his abusive speech. Less thick-skinned but perhaps more talented people left.
It's also true that the angry young man of the earlier years did seem to mature and soften under the influence of his wife and particularly as he faced sickness and death. Unfortunately, those changes didn't come soon enough to end his crazy ideas about fruit cures (versus surgery) that played a role in his death.
The truth is enough. Steve Jobs accomplishments are more than enough to negate any need to whitewash away his faults.
Very little was known about Jobs's type of cancer at the time. He probably waited a little too long to have surgery, but it wasn't like he was being a moonbeam when he decided against it initially.
Like with most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Maybe he jumped the shark on this one and his career will take a dive. Karmically, he's earned a major bitch slap from the goddess Kali.
I think he's a virgin, in the Steve Jobs sense, which means he's disqualified from making the movie in the first place.
I think this isn't like most things, though. Gibney's left out the entire story of Jobs's redemption (from what I can tell so far), and one of the greatest atonements in history, the resurrection of this little company he and Woz founded and which Jobs sent into the future to change the world. It looks like that framework is missing. There's no middle for the truth to lie in.
It doesn’t really matter what Hollywood types think of Steve Jobs or how he is portrayed in these various biopics. The story of Steve Jobs and Apple is already entrenched in the text books of every business school in the Western world.
"Today in a profile in the New Yorker, Apple chief designer Jony Ive — a close friend of Jobs — explains how he once asked Jobs to tone it down after seeing his colleagues feel crushed.
Jobs disagreed.
"Why would you be vague?" Jobs asked Ive. "You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.”
His argument, which Ive came to agree with, is that managers should always give clear, unambiguous feedback. They should not care whether their employees like them — and to even consider that is a form of vanity."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-steve-jobs-was-such-a-jerk-to-employees-2015-2#ixzz3gqOmuFSQ
Well the above is from Jony Ive so the trailer appears to be fairly accurate. Jobs acted the way he did for a reason, it was about the product, the trailer make the point Jobs got people to do things they never thought could be done.
Every great CEO can be ruthless, mean, abusive, a jerk whatever. This is why Cook will be the downfall of Apple at some point. He is more worried about being seen as a nice guy and being an activist on Twitter. Cook doesn't understand the one thing Jobs did, if you have the choice of being feared or loved go with fear it last longer.
Just like the upcoming "Jobs" movie, this looks to be a nasty, hateful view of the person, which ignores massive aspects of his personality in order to drive the nasty narrative. How many more of these do we need? They bring NOTHING new to the table, other than recycling anecdotes and stories we heard decades ago. Nothing at all about the last 10 yrs of his short life.
I've seen nothing nasty in either trailer, but I can see how Jobs being direct, clear, and dropping the vanity of wanting others to like him, as [@]AtlApple[/@] mentions, could be interpreted as being nasty. In both cases — Jobs being himself and the film makers accurately portraying that aspect of character — neither is being nasty.