With "The Newsroom" headed toward a finale with its final six episodes (and you really should be watching, because it’s the best the show has ever been), Aaron Sorkin is out doing the rounds, talking to press, and using the opportunity to announce, among other things, that he’s done with television. So he’ll be turning toward feature films, and on the horizon is the Steve Jobs biopic "Jobs." He’s slowly been pulling the curtain back on the movie, revealing that there’s a healthy amount of supporting characters in his script, but that the focus is on the tech innovator, and in case there is any doubt that the lead role will be a challenge for whoever snags it (Michael Fassbender is currently rumored), Sorkin makes it very clear they have a lot of screenplay to deal with.
“It’s a 181-page script, about 100 of it is that one character,” the writer told The Independent. And while the (extraordinarily dialogue-heavy) movie will be centered around three Apple product launches, set across the span of sixteen years, like "The Social Network," character is king, and the heart of "Jobs" may surprise you.
“Both films are much more about the people than the technology they invented,” Sorkin says. “With ‘The Social Network,’ I was interested in the psychology of the world’s most successful social networking system being invented by the world’s most anti-social guy. And in the case of Steve Jobs, it’s the relationships he had – particularly with his daughter, Lisa – that drew me to it.”
Jobs’ daughter was estranged from her father until she was a teenager, but it seems her insights were valuable to Sorkin as he worked on the movie. “She didn’t participate in Walter Isaacson’s book, because her father was alive at the time, and she didn’t want to alienate either of her parents, so I was very grateful that she was willing to spend time with me,” he explains. “She is the heroine of the movie.”
Now, the rule in Hollywood is that, generally speaking, one page of script equals one minute of film time. That said, David Fincher got through the 163 page-script for "The Social Network" in a rapidfire two hours, so the question is: can Danny Boyle do the same for "Jobs"? Or will we get a three-hour look at the late Apple guru? Too much? Let us know below….