“You can’t write code. You’re not an engineer. You’re not a designer. You can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board! The graphical interface was stolen! … So how come ten times in a day I read Steve Jobs is a genius? What do you do?”
Steve Wozniak confronting Steve Jobs in a scene written by Aaron Sorkin
I thought the most dynamic scene in the movie Steve Jobs (2015) was the confrontation between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before the launch of the NeXT computer. It’s a confrontation that didn’t literally happen, but one in which Wozniak told Tech Insider that it was the “sentiment” and “feelings” that others had and that those words “were put into my mouth for the movie.”
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is clear in The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith that the entire film, not just that Wozniak scene, is a restructuring for dramatic purposes. That while the conversations weren’t real, the contents of those confrontations were real.
“I got a sense from all the time I spent with Woz that . . . for the first 10 or 15 minutes that I was with him—he is a man who doesn’t like saying a bad word about anyone, that he’s a man without ego, that he does not have the kind of ambition that Steve Jobs does, that he likes building, that he likes tinkering, and that the things that were important to Steve weren’t important to him. He doesn’t care who gets credit. That’s the first 15 minutes. In minute 16, it starts to become very clear that he cannot understand why in the world he’s Garfunkel. That he really believes Steve has gotten credit for things for which he did not deserve credit. That he really thinks Steve is a person whose integrity can’t be trusted. All this stuff starts coming out. So how do you dramatize that? You can do it one of two ways; you can have a scene that did happen which is between Woz and a screenwriter named Aaron Sorkin, or you can be a dramatist and write a movie, and not a journalist. And they both have their places. I knew what I didn’t want to do. What I didn’t want to do was dramatize a Wikipedia page.”
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin
It’s called dramatic writing for a reason.
BTW— That Q&A that Goldsmith did with Sorkin back in 2015 is easily one of my top ten interviews of all-time in regard to the screenwriting process.
P.S. The group Simon & Garfunkel created beautiful hit music together, but Paul Simon is the one who had a long and successful solo career. Though the began singing together when they were 11, as of 2016 (and now into their 70s), Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle were not on speaking terms. Their hit Bridge Over Troubled Water sums up many dynamic relationships over history “when times get rough, and friends just can’t be found.” (That album sold 25 million copies. The single Bridge Over Troubled Water was released in January 1970. The duo act broke up later that year.)
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The Journalistic and Cinematic Roots of ‘The Florida Project’
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