Firing Steve Jobs A documentary about one of the most dramatic and important moments in Steve Job’s life: the one in which he was fired from Apple
iCrowdNewswire -
Jun 25, 2017 8:15 AM ET
Firing Steve Jobs
A documentary about one of the most dramatic and important moments in Steve Job’s life: the one in which he was fired from Apple
About this project
The story
This movie is about one of the most dramatic and important moments in Steve Job’s life: the one in which he was fired from Apple.
We are going to capture the intimate contradiction of this event, the controversial path that led to such a tough decision: we want you to know how you would feel “Firing Steve Jobs”.
As he himself used to describe it, this experience was the best thing that could ever happen to him. It has been a crucial moment in Job’s professional life.
This is true for Apple also, who put themselves on the path of self-destruction, that inevitably had occurred without Jobs comeback in the late 90’s.
Why did they at Apple behead themselves by firing their own front man, the first cover man in the digital industry history?
Why did they consciously get rid of the strongest drive for vision and innovation of their entire ranks?
Two fictional movies have been already heavily focused on this single event. Although a reconstruction may impressively convey the emotions that would arise in such an incident, it falls short when compared to real accounts, the actual reason and the practical consequences of it.
What we did was searching for the people who fired Steve Jobs and listening to the story of his dismissal as being told by the main protagonists of that decision.
One of them is John Sculley, the CEO of Apple who fired Jobs in 1985 and led the company until 1993. He never spoke extensively on camera about this episode before and a lot of his assertions are quite impressive.
The other one is Mike Markkula, Jobs mentor, Apple nurturer, who always had a leading role at Apple until recent years. If one should name an Apple insider, he definitely is the one.
None of Jobs, Sculley and Markkula is an average guy and their relationship is key to understend how great goals are achieved throughout history.
These are no actors: these people are real and they are talking about their own deeds, their emotions and their personal memories.
Along with this two main characters the film will feature a huge panel of digital revolution stars we had the chance to met in these years of development: Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Tesler, Jay Elliot, Paul Terrel, Chuck Peddle, Alvy Ray Smith, Steven Levy, Alan Cooper, Stan Veit, Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberg, everyone of them giving their personal account of the rise of Apple, the MacIntosh development years and the confusion of the early nineties.
The reason why
We’re going to tell a fact already known by Apple enthusiasts around the world, but we are going to tell the full story from a different point of view.
We are going to explain the how and the why of a tough decision, one that dangerously borders with rashness and obscurity, influenced by odd behaviors, which led to a fate of slow decline, but that ultimately was, perhaps, unavoidable.
At the same time, this will turn out to be the story of a computer that would have become a signature trait of Apple and many computer users for decades: the MacIntosh.
The MacIntosh, was not a success from day one, but nontheless it was a matter of faith from day one, first of all in the Apple ranks. Indeed it was more a failure than anything else and Steve Jobs was the one pushing the Mac more than anybody else.
Could this story have been different if the Mac had been an overnight success? How much of his winding career Steve Jobs owes to devoting himself completely to the Mac vision?
Was Steve Jobs some 20 years ahead of the personal computer market? Did the users and the technology have to allign with Jobs vision before Apple could really change the world?
Steve Jobs stuck on to his vision, no matter what the numbers told him and it took him 15 to 20 years to see it fulfilled. Is this the way you normally do a revolution?
Those questions, among others, we are going to answer in our next movie which will likely run 90 minutes.
Our aim and our vision
By the end of 2016, we found ourselves with one documentary about Commodore computers on the way of self-distribution and the second one about Atari almost ready for delivering to our bakers.
We were just thinking about our next endeavor in the early computer history and we concluded that we could no longer avoid talking about Apple.
Tough indeed… it`s not that easy to approach a topic like that!
What is sure is that our mission is to bring the digital revolution consciousness to a wider audience, keeping accuracy and insightfulness possibly beyond our standard level.
We committed ourselves to give the audience something they never had, which would be worth listening and watching and that will give a payload of knowledge that they would never find elsewhere. So in the beginning of 2017, we reached John Sculley and Mike Markkula.
It was not easy, but their words are an invaluable contribution to telling the story right, aside of any established storytelling about what happened.
Interviewing those people was a stunning experience and in some cases very intense, more than you would ever expect. We are confident we can let the audience feel the same involvement that took place on set and the same emotionalism that was tangible there.
Moreover, this is a story about humanity, difficult choices, ambition, passion and friendship that deserves to see the light of day.
We need your help now to deliver this same experience and first-hand accounts to the mass audience. Our main goal is to preserve the memory of this personalities for the years to come by means of good storytelling, beautiful footage and insightful words.
We do believe that the digital revolution history is a mass audience matter.
We asked your help twice in the past and always succeeded to deliver and now the time has come to put our storytelling at stake for the most iconic company and the most iconic visionary of the entire digital revolution history.
Stretch Goals
We considered a couple of strecth goals to make our movie even better:
–Goal at 60,000$: exclusive photos! To make this documentary visually stunning and rich we need to use third party exclusive photos about Steve Jobs that we are going to turn into animated footage.
We already are in contact to get them, but the cost is really high! If we reach 60.000 $ we will acquire the material needed to a unique touch to our work!
–Goal at 75,000$: new interviews! We have the opportunity to shoot some new footage and interviews of two or three personalities that are going to add extraordinary value to the movie.
This will cost another 15,000$ to make, peaking our goal to 75,000$.
Risks and challenges
The basic footage for this movie is already shot, so there’s virtually no risk to fail delivering