Four months after it premiered at SXSW 2015 in Austin, Texas, Magnolia Pictures has finally shared the first trailer and movie poster for Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine online. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, the new documentary takes a critical and largely unflattering look at the late co-founder of Apple.
In The Man in the Machine, Jobs is depicted not just as a visionary, but also as a ruthless leader. “His stuff was beloved, but it wasn’t that he was beloved,” a voiceover said in the trailer below the fold, which also shows parts of Gibney’s interview with some of Jobs’ old co-workers.
Apple executive Eddy Cue has already expressed his disappointment at the documentary following its debut at SXSW. The senior VP of Internet Software and Services at Apple has described the film on Twitter as “an inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend” and “not a reflection of the Steve I knew.” Cue added that the best portrayal of Jobs is in the book Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, which he describes as “well done and first to get it right.”
Very disappointed in SJ:Man in the Machine. An inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend. It’s not a reflection of the Steve I knew.
— Eddy Cue (@cue) March 16, 2015
Alex Gibney is one of the most respected documentary filmmakers in the world, with a reputation for tackling sensitive and controversial subjects in a very precise and methodical manner. His films, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side have dealt with topics as diverse as the Iraq occupation to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. His last documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief , based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, has been lauded for blowing the doors off the deeply secret and controversial world of Scientology.
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine arrives between dueling biopics of Jobs, the first largely disappointing one starring a young Jobs-lookalike Ashton Kutcher, and the other, by Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, adapted by The Social Network-writer Aaron Sorkin, based on Walter Isaacson’s official biography of Steve Jobs, and starring Michael Fassbender, to be released in September.
The documentary will be released in limited theaters and be available On Demand on September 4th, 2015. One thing though, we don’t expect it to be showing up on Apple iTunes anytime soon.
