Aaron Sorkin says Steve Jobs biopic will have only three scenes

The script Aaron Sorkin is crafting for a film about Steve Jobs will be comprised of just three scenes, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter said Thursday.

The scenes will all take place backstage before three of Jobs’ most important product launches: the original Macintosh; NeXT, which was the start-up Jobs created after leaving Apple; and the iPod.

Steve Jobs Offered To Help Obama Campaign

Jobs met the president in in the fall of 2010 and later offered to help make political advertisements for his re-election campaign. The book, based on interviews with Jobs, says the Apple CEO hoped the ads would do for Mr. Obama what the famous “morning in America” ads did for Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide re-election victory over Walter Mondale.

“I think political advertising is terrible. I’d love to get Lee Clow out of retirement, and we can come up with great commercial for him,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson, author of the forthcoming biography “Steve Jobs.” Clow is the ad executive partially responsible for Apple’s famous 1984 advertisement launching the Macintosh. 

That’s not to say that Jobs was in love with Obama, but he supported him nonetheless.

Steve Jurvetson on Steve Jobs

When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice.

Dave Winer: Steve Jobs as Frank Lloyd Wright

In the first rush of memorials, people are comparing Jobs to Henry Ford (industrialist), Thomas Edison (inventor) or Walt Disney (media). But there’s also a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright in there. All these men had imperfections, and greatness. But Wright’s were, imho, more Jobsian than the others.  

“He’s so wonderfully prickly and famous for bursting into any house he built un-announced - just come in with a troop of people and show them the house, rearrange the furniture. He would even sneak into the houses to rearrange the furniture when the owners were away,” T.C. Boyle wrote of FLW, but it also describes how early Mac developers felt after demoing their products for Steve. 

To both Jobs and Wright the people who used their products were not as important as the computer or the building. More than the thing itself, what mattered to Wright, and I think what mattered to Jobs is the integrity of his vision. In a way it was a shame that the vision had to be instantiated.  

Of course that’s what made their ideas so great and influential. Among the many Jobs quotes worth remembering, and quoting — Artists ship. I agree. And when you ship, along with the vision, comes reality. And then you learn and ship again.