Steve Jobs lived long enough to see just one of the four major films about him: the 1999 made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, written and directed by Canadian-born Martyn Burke.
True to his opposing nature, Jobs both loved and hated it.
A Fortune magazine story from 2011, published shortly after the Apple chief’s death from cancer at age 56, told how Jobs contacted actor Noah Wyle after the film’s broadcast to critique his performance.
He told Wyle he disliked both the movie and the script, which also documented the rise of his main rival, Bill Gates of Microsoft. But he loved Wyle’s portrayal of him, especially how much the actor resembled him. Jobs was so impressed, in fact, he arranged for the actor to later impersonate him onstage in a joke made during a Macworld convention in New York.
We can only speculate how Jobs might have reacted to three more recent portrayals of him, two dramas and one documentary: Ashton Kutcher in the 2013 film Jobs, directed by Joshua Michael Stern; Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs, the new Danny Boyle movie opening Friday in Toronto; and his own archival images in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, the Alex Gibney doc that arrived earlier this year.
He might have scowled at how the actors chosen to play him looked less like him with each successive turn in the spotlight. Perhaps he’d have sought more flattering interview clips for the documentary.
He’d probably be unhappy, if not furious, with scathing revelations that include how he cheated Steve Wozniak, his friend and Apple co-founder, out of an early payout; how he denied paternity of his daughter Lisa even after DNA testing proved he was her father, while also threatening her impoverished mother; and how he bullied the “bozos” who worked for him to achieve ever more incredible results.
Who can really say, though? Even Wozniak has expressed mixed emotions about the four films. Woz seems to most prize Pirates of Silicon Valley for its factual accuracy and Steve Jobs for its strong acting (he was a paid consultant on Steve Jobs), but his public statements have varied.
One thing seems abundantly clear, however, and it’s the fact that Jobs enjoyed being as elusive as his hero Bob Dylan, whom he idealized so much he even dated singer Joan Baez, a former lover of Dylan’s.
Dylan has resisted definition since he first arrived on the pop scene in 1961. Todd Haynes made high art of this with his 2007 film I’m Not There, in which seven different actors, Cate Blanchett among them, portrayed Dylan in various guises, everything from hillbilly poet to rebel rocker to mystery tramp to born-again shaman.
The four films about Steve Jobs are similarly blowin’ in the wind about their central obsession, none of them being a biopic in any conventional sense of the term.
Pirates of Silicon Valley gives us Hungry Steve, the hippie dropout turned capitalist striver, which is good as far as it goes — but since it came out in 1999, it misses the third act of the man’s life, where he changed global communications forever with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
DOUG HYUN/ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs in the 1999 TNT original movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Jobs loved Wyle’s portrayal, especially how much the actor resembled him.
Jobs rolls out Spacey Steve, the dreamer who somehow managed to start a computer revolution, although neither Kutcher’s dull performance nor the listless script and direction reveal much depth beneath the thousand-yard stare.
GLEN WILSON
Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 'Jobs'.
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine presents Conundrum Steve, the vindictive jerk, cheapskate and cad who treated everyone he met like dirt, yet somehow managed to inspire fanatical loyalty in the people he abused.
And finally Steve Jobs barrels out with Visionary Steve, a man so sure of how the future is going to unfold, and so determined to get there, he won’t waste time explaining his grand plan to mere mortals.
FRANCOIS DUHAMEL/ TNS
Michael Fassbender plays the title role in "Steve Jobs."
Which portrait of Jobs truly paints the man? Probably they all do, at least in part, while never capturing the entire image.
To quote a long-ago Bob Dylan lyric: “It’s all new to me / Like some mystery / It could even be like a myth.”
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