Ashton Kutcher To Play Steve Jobs In Upcoming Film

An anonymous reader writes "Variety is reporting that Ashton Kutcher – who you likely recognize from That 70s Show, Punked, and Two and a Half Men – has been tapped to play Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in an indie film titled 'Jobs', based on a script from Matt Whiteley. The film will chronicle Steve Jobs from wayward hippie to co-founder of Apple, where he became one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of our time."

Re:Pointless, likely

[Stormwatch]

Just thought of something else. Don't the other players have interesting stories too? Commodore and Atari immediately immediately come to mind. I mean, Jobs was an adopted child, call him a waaambulance: Jack Tramiel is a friggin' nazi death camp survivor. That's academy award material!

Re:What's the hype?

[Dr Max]

Like it or not he made a huge amount of money telling certain types of people what to like. So much money in fact that he has influenced many other tech companies and their products for better or worse. Personally I don't like the man, or what he did one bit, but i do respect his power to lead a cult and make coin.

Re:Pointless, likely

[citizenr]

Just thought of something else. Don't the other players have interesting stories too? Commodore and Atari immediately immediately come to mind. I mean, Jobs was an adopted child, call him a waaambulance: Jack Tramiel is a friggin' nazi death camp survivor. That's academy award material!

This clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PPeHExUbqs [youtube.com]
has some interesting stories from the Commodore 64 days told by Bil Herd.

Re:What's the hype?

[GameboyRMH]

Not to mention that he accidentally stumbled into history's greatest moneymaker, the App Store. Originally he was going to release the iPhone with no ability to run 3rd-party apps whatsoever (apart from web apps which was and still is more of a punchline than a solution as a replacement for all native apps - even ChromeOS has full offline capability), which would have made it nothing more than another quirky footnote in tech history, but then he caved to overwhelming developer pressure to allow 3rd-party apps on the device. This also led to the popularization of curated computing, the most damaging event in computing history.

Re:What's the hype?

[GameboyRMH]

I have even less respect for Jobs than Thomas Edison. Both exploitative businessmen with negative contributions to society that overshadow the positive, but Edison at least had more tech skill and actually did some inventing himself, and his negative influence didn't have such long-lasting effects.

Also I think that Jobs wasn't even a great businessman any more than George Lucas is a great filmmaker. Like Lucas, he needed to be surrounded by critical peers to keep his crazier ideas in check, and without this moderating influence things went all to hell (see: NeXT, a lot of early Apple projects). Another example of poor business skill is his quest to destroy Android at all costs because he thought it was a "stolen product." He was an artist and not a techie, when another product showed any hint of influence from one of his own he didn't see it as normal tech evolution, he saw it as plagiarism.