After Facebook Comes Steve Jobs for Sorkin - The UpStream

After Facebook Comes Steve Jobs for Sorkin

posted Thursday Nov 22, 2012 by Scott Ertz

After Facebook Comes Steve Jobs for Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and The Newsroom and writer of The Social Network has a new project underway and it will probably be his most controversial topic to date - Steve Jobs. He has the task of turning Walter Isaacson's biography of the co-founder of Apple Inc into a motion picture, which is not an easy task. From random bouts of crying to calls with the President of The United States, there is a lot of content to bring to life on the screen.

Sorkin, however, does not like a project that is not a challenge. With The Social Network he made it clear that Zuckerberg was a creative guy but a real jerk. With this film, however, there is a lot more jerk than there is creativity. So, how does Sorkin plan to bring the man's story to life for those who didn't know him personally? Sorkin explained at The Daily Beast's Hero Summit,

This entire movie is going to be three scenes, and three scenes only, that all take place in real time. Each of these scenes is going to take place backstage before a product launch-the first one being the Mac, the second one being NeXT, and the third one being the iPod.

So, we will completely blow off the original success of Apple, jump right to one of the failures of the company, jump to the company he founded after being fired from Apple and the come back to the product that brought Apple out of bankruptcy in 2001. Each of the 3 scenes will take place in 30-minute segments highlighting the behind-the-scenes prep for the individual product launches. If there is something Sorkin knows how to write, it's "behind-the-scenes" stories (a sports show, the White House, a sketch comedy show and a cable news network, plus Facebook so far in his career).

His biggest problem here will be his unusual focus on realism and comedy. If he shows Jobs to be the person he really was, who would throw engineers out of his office for bringing him the wrong shade of white for the iPhone or crying because Woz's father believed he wasn't doing enough work in the company, it could possibly alienate Apple customers who, through some sort of Apple-delusion, have come to believe that he was a kind genius, neither term really describes him.

I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to seeing Sorkin's take on Jobs. Are you excited to see what others really saw of the Apple co-founder? Let us know in the comments.

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