The Oscar- and Emmy-winner screenwriter of the latest biographical film about Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, has
responded with hostility to a stray remark Apple CEO Tim Cook made
during an appearance on the
Late Night TV show last week. Cook had said, in response to a question about all of the various movies portraying former CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs' life, that he thought "a lot of people" were trying to be "opportunistic" and that "it's not a great part of our world." Sorkin, who was not likely the target of the remarks, appears to have taken them personally.
Cook was much more likely to be referring to the movies that had been released about Jobs up to that point, since Cook has not yet seen the new Universal Pictures release titled
Steve Jobs, which is set to debut on October 9 but has
won critical raves from film-festival screening audiences and critics. The new film stars Michael Fassbender as Jobs, with Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak.
Woz (who worked as a consultant on the film) has said that while the movie is, of course, not wholly accurate due to various dramatic necessities such as compositing quotes and time compression, it creates a more accurate portrayal of what Jobs was really like, at least in the early days of Apple, in his opinion. Cook may also have been thinking particularly of a recent, and much more mean-spirited, documentary by Alex Gibney called
The Man in the Machine, which he had not seen at the time of the interview but would have heard about from his friend and colleague Eddy Cue, who
walked out of the film at a screening.
There have been several earlier films, such as the independently-produced
Jobs starring
lookalike Ashton Kutcher, or the
Funny or Die-created iSteve biopic starring former Apple commercial pitchman Justin Long. Both received mixed reviews, and were clearly designed to capitalize on the gap between Jobs' death and the arrival of the big-budget Universal film (originally a Sony project) that is lightly based on the biography of Jobs by Walter Issacson.
Nevertheless, Sorkin appeared to believe that the remark was directed at the new film, and took umbrage in an interview with the
Hollywood Reporter.
Sorkin pointed out that he and some of the others who worked on the film took pay cuts to help ensure that
Steve Jobs got made after the project
was put in "turnaround" by Sony, following the loss of
several first-choice stars and its first named director,
David Fincher. "Nobody did this movie to get rich," Sorkin said, adding that Cook "should really see the movie before he decides what it is."
He also criticized Cook for characterizing what Sorkin believes is his project for being "opportunistic" by saying that "if you've got a factory of children in China assembling phones for 17 cents an hour, you've got a lot of nerve calling someone else opportunistic." While perhaps spoken in anger, the last remark is mostly untrue, though it is fair to say that all electronics manufacturers -- Apple included -- take advantage of lower-paid labor forces in other countries in order to keep the prices of their devices lower than they would otherwise be.
Foxconn and other suppliers in Apple's manufacturing chain -- the same companies that also make other smartphones and popular electronic devices such as the Xbox -- have previously been guilty of using child labor, but rigorous auditing by Apple under both Jobs and Cook following the discovery of illegal underage workers has all but eliminated underage workers. The figure Sorkin made up for the wage is also inaccurate -- workers in the factories at Foxconn, for example, are paid an hourly wage of $3 (figures expressed in US currency), which is well above the average for the country (around $2.12 per hour in urban areas, according to recent statistics).
Sorkin was unlikely to believe he was quoting an accurate figure, but was making a larger point about Apple's use of low-skilled, non-unionized labor in foreign factories, and trying to hit Apple back for the "opportunistic" remark he felt offended by. Whether Cook will reach out to Sorkin to clarify his intentions remains to be seen, but no Apple executives have commented directly on the new film thus far.
at the end of his remarks. 
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