On Movies: Steve Jobs' life - in just three scenes

How do you compress 56 years of someone's life - someone with a troubling adoption story, someone considered a visionary of the computer age, someone whose products are used by millions every day, someone who embraced Zen and Wall Street with equal ardor, someone who treated friends, family, and colleagues with disdain if not cruelty, someone who died of cancer at the peak of his career - into a two-hour movie?

As far as Aaron Sorkin is concerned, you don't.

Presented with the assignment, and the paycheck, to create a screenplay based on the life of Apple and Pixar cofounder Steve Jobs, the Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network looked to try something different, something that wasn't merely a dramatic reenactment of a life.

"Yes, it's a daunting project," says Sorkin, who was handed Walter Isaacson's 630-page Steve Jobs biography in 2012 and told to make a movie out of it.

"You know, you hear complaints about this movie - 'How could you not write about the iPhone?' 'How could you not write about Pixar?' 'How could you not write about his cancer diagnosis?' There's a lot you can do, but before I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I didn't want to do, and that was write a biopic.

"I didn't want to write a cradle-to-grave story where we land on the protagonist's greatest hits, and then he goes to a doctor, and then he dies."

Instead, Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle, with Michael Fassbender in the title role, plays out in just three long, dialogue-driven scenes. The movie, which opened Friday at the Ritz Five and expands to more screens Oct. 23, tracks Jobs and his coterie - marketing exec Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), newly appointed CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) - as the tech guru debuts a trio of key products. Opening act: 1984, and the launch of the Macintosh personal computer. Second act: 1988, the Kubrickian black box known as NeXT. Third act: 1994, the iMac.

Behind each unveiling, tensions and tantrums fly. Fassbender's Jobs walks the halls, stalks the stairwells, holds forth in backstage holding rooms, makes demands of his engineers and his publicists, and is visited by the daughter, Lisa (played by two children at ages 5 and 9 and then by Perla Haney-Jardine at 19), whom he denies is his.

"I thought, well, if I were the mayor of Show Business, if I could do anything I wanted, this entire movie would just be three scenes in real time, each of them taking place backstage in the moments before a product launch," says Sorkin, on the phone from Chicago the other day.

"That was the aha! moment, but I didn't think that either the producer, Scott Rudin, or the studio, which was Sony at the time [the film subsequently moved to Universal] . . . I didn't think they would let me do that.

"I thought, 'No, you have been hired to write exactly the Steve Jobs biopic you don't want to write.' So I sent an email to Scott Rudin saying, 'Look, what I would really do if I could do anything is this . . ..'

"He wrote back right away and said, 'Do exactly that. Don't change anything.' "

The rest, as they say, is history.

Or not, if you listen to some of the Silicon Valley citizens who have condemned the film - foremost among them Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs; longtime Apple board member Bill Campbell; and current Apple CEO Tim Cook - none of whom, at the time they went public with their protestations, had seen Steve Jobs.

"I absolutely understand a man's widow, a close friend, wanting to protect Steve, but they haven't seen the movie," says Sorkin. "On the other hand, people who were very close to Steve, who loved Steve, knew him very well, who have seen the movie, like Woz [Wozniak], like Sculley, like Andrea "Andy" Cunningham, Steve's publicist, like Andy Hertzfeld, who was a member of the original Mac team and who stayed with Apple for a long time - they have seen the movie and they have all had very positive things to say."

In his research on the Jobs project, Sorkin spent a lot of time interviewing Jobs' associates, including the aforementioned Wozniak, Cunningham, Hertzfeld, and Hoffman. But it was his conversations with Lisa Brennan, Jobs' biological daughter, that were probably the most revelatory - and the richest in terms of what made it into the screenplay. For much of Brennan's childhood, Jobs denied he was her father - even after DNA tests proved otherwise.

"I was really lucky getting to talk to Lisa," Sorkin says. "Lisa's father was still alive when Walter Isaacson was writing the biography, so she was unwilling to speak to him, but she was willing to give me a lot of her time. She was generous with private stories. A lot came from Lisa."

And from Sculley, too. In most versions of the tale, including the one Jobs told in 2005 in a Stanford University commencement address, Jobs hired Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to run Apple. And then, in a tense 1985 boardroom showdown, Sculley fired Jobs.

That's not how the scene plays in Sorkin and Boyle's movie. "It wasn't a homicide; it was a suicide," says Sorkin, who used Sculley as his source.

"As Sculley says in the movie, the story of how and why Steve left Apple, which quickly became mythologized, is not true. And John had wanted to get the real story out there, so he was eager to talk, eager to lay it all out - in a 10-page email - sort of almost an hour-by-hour ticktock of what happened that night, the night of the failed coup on Steve's part."

Whatever the machinations were, the power plays, the feints and faceoffs, it makes for exciting drama in the hands of Boyle, who shoots, cuts, and augments the scene like it's a car chase, a shootout. Daniels and Fassbender shine.

And speaking of Fassbender, it's public knowledge, thanks to last fall's infamous hacking of the Sony Pictures Corp.'s computers and the release of a flurry of emails among Sorkin, Rudin, then-Sony chair Amy Pascal, and other players, that the West Wing and Moneyball scribe was not keen on the idea of Fassbender playing Jobs. In one missive, Sorkin suggested Tom Cruise, who starred in the adaptation of Sorkin's play A Few Good Men. Sorkin even called casting Fassbender "insane."

"Yeah, and obviously I had some explaining to do to Michael," Sorkin says with a chuckle. "But this is the truth: At the time that I wrote that email, being opposed to Michael, I was the only one in the world who had never seen a movie that Michael Fassbender was in. I hadn't yet seen 12 Years a Slave. I hadn't seen Shame. I hadn't seen X-Men. And so I had our casting director send me over a package of Michael Fassbender movies, which I spent the weekend watching, and by Sunday night, I was leading the Michael Fassbender parade.

"And I thank my lucky stars every night that it ended up being Michael. I can't imagine anyone giving a better performance."

srea@phillynews.com

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