Little-known until its debut at SXSW this weekend, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” has been picked up by Magnolia Pictures for a North American theatrical release, and CNN Films for television broadcasts, Deadline Hollywood reports today. An earlier story from The Hollywood Reporter claimed that several Apple employees in attendance walked out early, and Apple’s Eddy Cue has used Twitter to denounce the film, calling it “inaccurate and mean-spirited.”
[tweet https://twitter.com/cue/status/577493714567852032 align=’center’]
The Man in the Machine includes interviews with a number of former Apple employees including Jon Rubinstein, Bob Belleville and Daniel Kottke, as well as Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, and even video footage from a 2008 SEC deposition given by Jobs himself. Early reviews have described the documentary as “a riveting and important corrective to the myths Jobs helped to propagate,” and “unsparing portrait of Steve Jobs [that] will prove extremely displeasing to devotees.” A few representative quotes from those reviews follow…
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hP47HogmY]
Justin Chang, Variety
Alex Needham, The Guardian (4 stars out of 5)
Chris Taylor, Mashable
Bryan Bishop, The Verge
It’s also interesting that a significant portion of the documentary is devoted to the imbroglio between Jobs and Gizmodo following the infamous 2010 sale of a prototype iPhone 4. Former Gawker legal head Gaby Darbyshire, who was involved in the controversy, is notably one of the film’s producers.
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine currently does not have a release date, but is expected to debut before the Danny Boyle/Aaron Sorkin/Walter Isaacson film “Steve Jobs,” due October 9, 2015. Boyle’s film will focus on the events surrounding three of Jobs’ famous keynote speeches, starring Michael Fassbender as Jobs.
@blam @jesusdiaz @jasonchen @nicknotned Movie premieres tomorrow! #SXSW #stevejobsthemaninthemachine #alexgibney pic.twitter.com/S6BTvi0CbV
— Gaby Darbyshire (@gabyd) March 13, 2015
Premiere time… #themaninthemachine #SXSW pic.twitter.com/sjD0XDayUu
— Gaby Darbyshire (@gabyd) March 14, 2015