Day 107: Pirates of Silicon Valley

"This is better than Miss October. It's a computer."

Before there was The Social Network, there was this. With all the hype and buzz surrounding The Social Network—a film I have yet to see—how about we throw in a throwback to what is essentially the genesis of the personal computer. A film about Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates. So while The Social Network brings us back to those ancient years of the early 2000s, let's take a journey back to the prehistoric era of...the seventies. *cue music*

Stories like these, or narratives that surround an entrepreneur or an inventor, are always more about the individual lives of the people, and less about the actual products. Take for example, The Aviator which is about Howard Hughes but not really about the Hercules itself. Another one would be probably every family saga story you've ever seen but I'll use the miniseries, Ford: The Man and the Machine, which is probably one of the first family sagas I've ever seen. Henry Ford changes the world but it's his antisemitism, his neglect and redemption of his relationship with his son, and the Great Depression. His bouts with Chevrolet and the Dodge Brothers are essentially trivial.

Pirates of Silicon Valley takes the opposite stance. It focuses more on the actual inventions and the efforts they put into their projects more than the personal lives of their subjects. For that Pirates of Silicon Valley is very different from The Social Network, though my opinion can only go so far cause I'm saying this from reading half of Sorkin's script—which is going great so far. From what I can see, The Social Network is fairly balanced in its treatment of Zuckerberg yet balanced is another word for, "they pretty much went to town on him but for good reason." Pirates of Silicon Valley on the other hand go to, what I see as, great lengths to sympathize its character. Proof of this is that Jobs, unlike Zuckerberg and company, didn't go on an egotistical campaign to try and discredit the film and call out its inaccuracies. Instead, Jobs brought Noah Wyle with him to Macworld 1999.

Throughout the story, Jobs is portrayed as a wandering man in search of his biological mother. This is undoubtedly a true and reoccurring theme in Steve Jobs' own life as he would later give a story fleshing out this narrative in a 2005 Stanford Commencement address, an address some consider to be one of the best Commencement speeches ever. Pirates includes scenes of Jobs taking drugs, and participating in somewhat bizarre religious philosophies. Jobs is no doubt a more broken character than Zuckerberg yet the writers decide not to go to town on him. Wozniak and Gates are less fleshed out characters in the story but the image of Gates is spot on. Gates is always the businessman while Jobs is the artist. From all accounts, that's probably true. They didn't have to hire the guy from Pepsi to kick Gates out because Gates made a pretty effective CEO.

Yet the problem with a film like this, despite it being a TV film and despite the fact that I did very much enjoy it, is that it was probably made too soon and the same could be said for The Social Network. Jobs has done a lot since 1999. The iPod came out in 2001! It was revolutionary to bring out the personal computer, something HP passes on in the movie, but Jobs became much more than a “computer man.” Jobs is the Howard Hughes of our time. Throughout his life he never could care much about money but instead was more invested into his own personal ideas. Jobs has always had an idea that what he does can change the world. During a Vietnam protest Jobs turns to Wozniak in the film and says, “Those guys think they're revolutionaries. They're not revolutionaries, we are.”

I don't think the casting here could have been any better. Noah Wyle as Jobs is genius! He looks exactly like him and is able to replicate the same charisma and ego (which is documented fairly well) perfectly. Joey Slotnick as Wozniak is less impressive but that's probably because of Wozniak not Slotnick. Wozniak was never the showman and figure that Jobs was so it's hard to say whether or not it's a very accurate depiction of him. From what I've seen it's fairly okay. Anthony Hall as Gates though is pretty spot on. Unfortunately, it's very clear that this film was a made-for-TV film. It plays like one, which means that there will be fade outs for commercials every five or so minutes. That could get annoying after a while as it sort of disrupts the flow of the film. It's also made in this “docudrama” style, so it basically plays like a much more serious version of The Office.

There's no doubt in anyone's mind that Jobs did change the world. He changes it through the course of this movie, but he's done so much more ever since that a movie like this simply shows that the filmmakers may have been WAY to eager. The concept of an MP3 player probably didn't even hit the mainstream in 1999. Then Jobs changed the way we view phones, and with the iPad (essentially a morbidly obese iPhone) we're now entering a post-PC computing age. So while I enjoyed this, and it's a well crafted story, there's really only so much it can deliver due to their own overeagerness.