Steve Jobs Movie Clip Historically Inaccurate, Says Woz 330
Yesterday saw the release of a clip from the upcoming movie jOBS, a biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The clip shows Jobs, played by Ashton Kutcher, having a conversation with Steve Wozniak, played by Josh Gad, about how influential an operating system for a personal computer would be. The real Steve Wozniak commented on the clip, saying the situation it portrayed was "totally wrong." He said, "Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs. They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away. Steve came from selling surplus parts at HalTed he always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time). The lofty talk came much further down the line." Wozniak was quick to add that he isn't making any judgment on the quality of the movie based on a single, 1-minute clip, and that the rest of the movie may or may not be more accurate. He also says he hopes it's entertaining.
Apple summed up in one breath! (Score:5, Insightful)
Historicaly accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone want to see something historically accurate? Do you really want to see Jobs portrayed accurately?
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
You could fill this thread with war stories from the people that Steve Jobs burned. That's now what's going to sell this movie at this time, give it a few years and someone might be willing to do so, but until the idol worship tempers down it simply wont sell.
They turned Woz into a loser (Score:4, Insightful)
What a shit piece of film-making. Woz was the real hero behind Apple.
Re:Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
One wonders why they didn't bother asking Woz for information about what happened.
Because they are more interested in making the movie entertaining than historically accurate. Woz is quibbling over details. Most movies about things that really happened have huge deviations from accuracy. For example, the movie about Facebook [wikipedia.org] had a completely made-up girlfriend as a significant character.
Re:Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the truth doesn't sell well. Blind idol worship over a dead guy is much sexier.
The sad fact of life is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that 50 years from now the media will have deified Jobs and next generations will believe he was a much much larger than life superhero who bootstrapped the entire computer industry and singlehandedly created new innovative products and touched so many people on a deep and personal level through his enduring work. And the real heros, Woz and the hundreds of Apple engineers and designers, will remain a footnote in some obscure appendix in a seldom read computer book, if that.
Makes me sick, this cult of the Jobs personality and posthumous canonization of a glorified $20-profit salesman.
Re:Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
Woz is quibbling over details.
I dunno. Woz is actually quite nice. If somebody made a movie with me in it in which I wear a suit and tie even though I never do that in real life, I'd be pretty pissed.
Re:Oops (Score:2, Insightful)
You think all the scenes in Lincoln really happened? Or The Iron Lady? Or Moneyball? Or the Social Network? Or 127 hours?
It's a movie. It's entertainment. Just because it's a biopic, doesn't mean it's a literal reporting of history as it happened. If they made them like that, they'd bomb at the box office for being 4 hours of tedium.
Re:Apple summed up in one breath! (Score:2, Insightful)
The Raspberry Pi is a non-profit organization. When a charity feeds the poor with at-cost-produce, you don't see a lot of people complaining they're undercutting the competition...
Re:The sad fact of life is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad fact of life is that 50 years from now the media will have deified Jobs and next generations will believe he was a much much larger than life superhero who bootstrapped the entire computer industry and singlehandedly created new innovative products and touched so many people on a deep and personal level through his enduring work. And the real heros, Woz...
It's quote amusing to see all these people criticising the deifying of Jobs, which isn't actually happening, whilst at the same time they are deifying Woz.
Re:Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were accurate, then they would be documentaries. ;)
Re:Apple summed up in one breath! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have mod points right now, I'm an across-the-board Apple user, and I think this movie is very likely no more than sycophantic shite for pinheads.
Everything the Mac is, came from Apple engineers. Not Jobs. Everything I like about Macs (which is almost everything), and everything I hate (like the stupid, stupid one-menu-to-serve-them-all, the inability to send keystrokes to anything but the frontmost app, the immense memory leaks in Safari, the limited control of the audio system, the broken color pipeline, the constant stream of deprecated APIs, the crackpot leakage of IOS concepts into OSX, the lack of a mid-tower... I could go on but I'll spare you.) Likewise, everything the iPad/Phone/Pod ecosystem is, came from Apple engineers. Not Jobs.
Jobs took these things and marketed them. He cherrypicked them, too. Whoopie. This is only notable in a culture that is in love with illusion -- television, etc.
Jobs is gone. Apple isn't. Apple still puts out great products. And bugs and irritations. And tries to be our "mommy." It's like anything good, really... issues remain. So the best users keep poking at them, hopefully they will do better as a result.
Anyway, none of my mod points, at least, will be used to step on those irritated with the Apple PR machine, which, IMHO, is the only place you will ever run into Jobs. Or his shade.
Re:Historicaly accurate (Score:4, Insightful)
As early as 1980, when Apple had it's IPO, Job's had created 300 millionaires, 40 of which were employees.
Woz himself is worth 100s millions of dollars, thanks to Steve Jobs taking an interest in his hobby projects. Without SJ, Woz would undoubtably have been an obscure engineer. He's certainly done nothing impressive without SJ.
Re:Steve Wozniak is a loser. (Score:4, Insightful)
Without Woz, Jobs would have been that annoying fuck trying to sell you a cellphone at Radio Shack when you went in looking for a 10k resistor.
Re:Oops (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems with these movies is seemingly 90% of the public believes every detail about them as long as they don't contain vampires or other supernatural forces. We'll be hearing all sorts of moments in this movie pushed on others as if it's fact, and it's damn frustrating when you're trying to have a conversation with someone who can't see passed the fantasy of these stories because it's "based on a true story".
Re:The sad fact of life is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple summed up in one breath! (Score:4, Insightful)
NEXT was about bankrupt when Jobs convinced Apple to buy it.
And he profited from that deal quite nicely. I'd argue he was a lousy manager, but a very good businessman.
Woz is sure being very diplomatic ... (Score:4, Insightful)
He also says he hopes it's entertaining.
I think I am not the only one, especially those of us who knew Steve Jobs, who will say this ... It'll be a very sad day if the movie that supposed to tell the story of Mr. Steve Jobs becomes a movie that is "entertaining".
Steve Jobs is never an "entertaining" kind of guy. In fact, Mr. Jobs can be the worst kind of SOB when he was in his mood.
I hope the movie producer can get more information from people who knew Steve Jobs and make a movie that is not just entertaining but instead, also give proper justice to Mr. Steve Jobs, the man.
Re:Historicaly accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
After Jobs was booted from Apple, he built two companies, without involvement from Woz.
One merged into Apple. One merged into Disney. The transactions were in the order of billions of dollars, and arguably revitalized the two companies, and helped them keep their positions as the leaders of their respective industries.
Call it salesmanship if you insist -- it was *very* fine salesmanship. Could Jobs have done it without Woz? Yes, he actually did it twice. You don't have to like him personally to recognize that.