It was the reaction of magazine designers that gave Mark Hulme, the co-founder ofFort Worth, Texas magazine, the idea for a movie about Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. He is no longer associated with the magazine.
Hulme had started a city magazine in Pasadena, Calif., and "through that connection and time in LA, I met people in the film industry and began to research that," Hulme said.
"I was looking at several other projects when Steve Jobs retired," Hulme said.
It was just a retirement, but Apple is the standard for most magazine design operations, and there was a lot of "buzz around the retirement among our creative people and technical people in the company that afternoon about what is going to happen to Apple," Hulme said. "It was all anybody could talk about."
That's when he decided.
"That's the movie I wanted to do," he said. "That's the story that needs to be told."
The film will chronicle Jobs" path from hippie to one of the most successful entrepreneurs in U.S. history. Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011.
An announcement early in April that Hulme would fund the movie Jobs through his newly formed Five Star Feature Films and that Ashton Kutcher of Two and a Half Men would star in it triggered a major buzz in social media circles, especially among Apple fanatics.
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Inc. with Jobs, gave his tentative approval of the casting in an interview with TMZ.
"The fear that many might have is that Ashton was selected because he's "hot" right now," Wozniak said. "But I feel that his selection was done in the most professional manner. And I'm glad that he's onboard. I think he'll put a lot into it and that he cares about this particular subject. … It's almost too bad that Steve Jobs is gone. His opinions and guidance, as to the story and film crew and cast would have been invaluable."
Joshua Michael Stern will direct, and shooting is scheduled to begin in May.
Jonathan Takiff, writing in the Philadelphia Daily News, says that Ashton's "physical resemblance to Jobs in the latter's hippy-youth clearly was the clincher."
Takiff also noted that the announcement puts pressure on Sony Pictures, which is planning a film using Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, to find a writer and a star and "get its much bigger project off the ground."
Kutcher replaced Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. He most recently appeared on screen in New Year's Eve and No Strings Attached, both in 2011. - FWTX Staff
