A prophet in his own time
The picture is grainy. The camera remains stationary throughout. The shots consist entirely of one fairly static talking head being interviewed. Oh, and the interview took place 17 years ago.
It is no one’s notion of high-tech cinema, which is somewhat ironic considering the subject. But that was never the point behind the release of this 69-minute documentary. And viewers will care not a whit that they ain’t catching a Kubrick on screen here.
That’s because the camera is pointing at one of the most compelling characters of modern times: Steve Jobs, who passed away last year at 56. Though the interview took place in 1995 – when Jobs was in Apple limbo – he is uncannily prophetic. Nostradamus would be proud. More to the point, Jobs is remarkably candid and forthcoming and, yes, funny.
It is titled Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (playing at the Cinéma du Parc), largely because it was lost all these years until turning up in video format in someone’s garage. The interviewer is Bob Cringely. He was somehow able to prevail upon the normally camera-shy Jobs to sit down to chat on Cringely’s show Triumph of the Nerds – not to be confused with the comedy Revenge of the Nerds, wherein penpacks and ill-fitting specs ruled.
In fact, when queried by host Cringely if he was a “nerd” or a “hippie,” Jobs wasted no time in responding that he belonged to the latter classification, and so did his computer cronies. Furthermore, Jobs implied it was this hippie element that was responsible for the creativity behind Apple and, particularly, in the development of his beloved Macintosh. Methinks Cringely was hoping for another response.
It’s worth noting that Cringely’s meeting with Jobs took place 10 years after he had left Apple following a corporate duel to neardeath with John Sculley, the CEO whom he had lured away from Pepsico. Jobs was running another computer company, NEXT, at the time of the interview, and was still chafing at his dismissal from Apple all those years later.
It’s also worth noting that 18 months after the interview, Jobs got his revenge. He sold NEXT to Apple. And six months after that, Jobs was running Apple again.
Just in the nick of time, too. Apple was 90 days away from bankruptcy. The rest is, of course, history and piles and piles of cash. Jobs-inspired Apple stores, itunes, imacs, ipods, ipads, iphones have turned his enterprise into arguably the most valuable commercial empire in North America and even beyond.
Jobs – looking a lot like vintage rocker John Sebastian here – always knew he had a winner. he was just 10 years old when he tinkered with his first computer – a real primitive number, too – at NASA.
When he was 12, he blind-called Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-packard fame and asked for spare computer parts. Not only did Hewlett oblige him, he also hired Jobs for the summer at his company, which had created one of the first desktops – the size of a suitcase.
When Jobs was 15, he got together with eventual Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, and figured out how to replicate telephone tones in order to make free calls – including one to the pope – around the planet with their “blue box.”
Then the tandem started to build and sell computers for their buddies. Initially, it took them 40 hours to build each one. And with a little seed money, shortly thereafter the Apple brand was born.
By 21, Jobs was off and running in the business. As he points out in the interview, it was never about the money. At 23, he was worth over $1 million. At 25, he was worth over $100 million. By the time of his death, I don’t think they had yet invented the adding machine capable of calculating his wealth.
“Running the company, products and people were all what mattered to me,” Jobs tells Cringely.
Unfortunately, Jobs believed Sculley didn’t share that vision. Jobs notes that Sculley came from Pepsico, where the creation of a new bottle was a big deal. As a result, Sculley was more attuned to sales and marketing than product development, and this led to their battle and Jobs’s initial ouster from Apple.
True, Jobs didn’t necessarily play well with the other children. He could be a brutal taskmaster. But he was a visionary. And an over-achiever.
“I hired the wrong guy (Sculley),” he relates to Cringely. “He destroyed everything. He thought he had built a rocket ship, but he changed the trajectory (and it crashed) … It wasn’t about competing visions. (Sculley) didn’t have a vision.”
Sculley wanted to remain CEO of Apple. Jobs wanted to nurture the Macintosh. Something had to give and go. It was Jobs.
“Apple once had a 10-year lead on the competition … Apple is dying now (1995), and I don’t think it’s reversible,” Jobs says.
By that, Jobs meant Apple, without him at the helm, would be dead.
He would go on to explain what separated his vision from that of, say, Microsoft: “They have no taste. Third-rate products with no spirit. Like Mcdonald’s. So pedestrian. Same with their customers.”
The man was so arrogant. Yet history proves him correct on so many fronts.
The most telling moment of the interview comes when Cringely asks Jobs to play soothsayer 10 years into the future, 2005.
“The computer will then become mostly a device for communication. It will be a defining social moment and it will be huge,” Jobs shoots back.
Whoa! Something about being a tool for the Internet that would forever alter the course of human communication.
Jobs goes on to say: “Of all the inventions of humans, the computer will rank near or at the top of them all. It is the most awesome tool ever invented. I happened to be at the right place, at the right time. But I’m still at the beginning of that vector.”
Oh, and one more thing: Jobs tells Cringely a story he finds rather amusing if not surprising: “We don’t often hear about people actually loving products, but it seems that people love their Macs.”
In the words of Led Zeppelin, not even the brash Jobs could have anticipated then the “Whole Lotta Love” that was to come.
OK, so the man had hubris in spades. But in the darkest days of recession, in the harshest winter climes – hell, probably even postapocalypse – you can count on finding an overflow crowd inside, and a lineup outside, one retail outlet. And it ain’t Mcdonald’s.
Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is playing at the Cinéma du Parc.