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'Steve Jobs' Slips, Silicon Valley Cheers

'Steve Jobs' Slips, Silicon Valley Cheers

By Nick Bilton, The New York Times | Updated: 3 December 2015 12:21 IST

The movie "Steve Jobs" had all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It had a starry cast (Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Michael Fassbender). The screenplay was by acclaimed writer Aaron Sorkin (who also wrote "The Social Network"). And it received rave reviews ("'Steve Jobs' is a rich and potent document of the times," wrote my colleague A.O. Scott.)

But the movie tanked at the box office, earning about $18 million (roughly Rs. 120 crores) in the seven weeks after its October 9 release. Perhaps Hollywood had overestimated the public's fascination with the man. Perhaps the film came a couple of years too late or a couple of decades too early. Or perhaps we have Steve Jobs fatigue, after all the books, movies and documentaries on the visionary Apple co-founder.

But perhaps most surprising is the way in which Silicon Valley relished in, and contributed to, the film's demise.

Before the film's release, Ron Conway, a high-tech investor and self-appointed custodian of the technology scene, emailed prominent people in the industry and implored them not to support the film because he thought it portrayed Jobs in a disrespectful and unflattering light. According to two people who received the email, Conway went so far as to suggest actual tweets they could use. Conway did not respond to a request for comment.

Marc Andreessen, a high-profile venture capitalist known for his voluble Twitter account, followed suit. "The Steve Jobs 'biopic' is deliberately fabricated nonsense," he tweeted.

What was also surprising was how veteran technology journalists took issue with the film's depiction of Jobs. They attacked the film and its makers like piranha that had just come off a two-week juice cleanse.

Walt Mossberg, who was a technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal for many years before co-founding ReCode, wrote a 1,400-word column on how Sorkin "chose to cherry-pick and exaggerate some of the worst aspects of Jobs' character," proclaiming over and over that the Steve Jobs portrayed in the film "isn't the man I knew."

Steven Levy, who covered Apple for Newsweek and Rolling Stone, said that the Steve Jobs portrayed wasn't "the person I knew."

And Larry Magid, who covered Apple as a syndicated technology columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, wrote in Fortune that the movie was "not about the man I knew."

It felt like a contest among high school classmates vying to be the football captain's best friend.

Here's the thing: They didn't know Steve Jobs. None of us did. I don't care if you had a sleepover party at his house once a week while you watched rom-coms and did each other's nails. Or if he granted you a 15-second interview after one of his product introductions. The reality is, Steve Jobs was trying to sell things, and he was an absolute master at using the media to do that.

Sure, these folks knew a version of Jobs that he wanted to show, and they knew his products, perhaps better than anyone. But the only people who may have known the true Steve Jobs were his family and a few close friends. And even they had different reactions to the film.

His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, reportedly tried to have the movie killed numerous times and was unusually public about how she disliked the film. And yet his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, chose to speak to Sorkin for the film, sharing, as Sorkin said in an interview, "stories about her father that weren't necessarily flattering."

It seems odd to me that given all the hagiography written about Jobs and his wonderful gadgets, the tech media would not allow for a more balanced portrayal of their idol.

More suspect, still, is how they have downplayed some of Job's flaws, including how he had practically disowned his daughter, Lisa, during her formative years.

Sorkin chose to focus on this aspect in the film, noting that the real Steve Jobs denied his paternity to Lisa, whom he had with his former girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. Jobs went as far as to tell Time magazine that, "Twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father," in reference to Lisa.

(Despite claiming to "know" Jobs after "scores of hours in private conversations," Mossberg of ReCode said in his column: "I know very little about his relationship with his daughter Lisa.")

Putting aside how well people did or did not know him, the truth is, there will never be a Steve Jobs movie that could ever satisfy the tech media and Apple worshippers.

In the same way they hated Walter Isaacson's biography, "Steve Jobs," because it wasn't a glowing tribute of the man they idolized, they were going to hate "Steve Jobs" the movie, no matter who wrote, directed or starred in it. They hated the Ashton Kutcher biopic of Jobs (I personally agree with them here) and they hated the documentary "The Man in the Machine" by the Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney.

Even when people who were close to the real Jobs offered positive reviews of the movie, like Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple who is depicted in the film by Seth Rogen, Apple fans attacked there, too, saying that Wozniak's viewpoint should be disregarded because he was paid $200,000 to consult on the film.

So when the film was declared a bomb, you could almost hear the venture capitalists and reporters in Silicon Valley breaking out the Champagne and patting themselves on the back.

"Another wannabe Steve Jobs movie goes into the dustbin of history," declared the blog Patently Apple. "Should have gone straight to home video," wrote the blog Daring Fireball, the esoteric authority on all things Apple.

That sounds like the Apple faithfuls I know.

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