It is difficult to say anything about Steve Jobs that has not already been said. Unless, perhaps, you are Steve Jobs. And you are talking to us from 1995.
That’s the unintended premise of Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, which screened this week in select theaters around the country. The story of the project goes like this: Bob Cringely shot a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs in 1995 for a TV series called Triumph of the Nerds. Cringely used excerpts for the series, but the bulk of it was never seen outside of his editing bay. Moreover, the interview itself was believed to be lost and gone forever as the original PAL Digi-Beta SP tapes from the shoot were misplaced by a shipping service.
Unbeknownst to Cringely, director Paul Sen had dumped the raw interview to VHS. After Jobs passed away, Sen dug up the tape and alerted Cringely who had the idea to re-cut it as a stand-alone feature. He hit up Mark Cuban about screening the film at Landmark Theatres. (Cubes still owns those.) Cringely, Sen and their producer, John Gau, dropped a couple grand to re-cut the interview footage. And Landmark rolled out a schedule of limited screenings in a couple dozen cities.
If you’re a Jobs junkie who lives in one of those cities, we trust you’ve already seen the piece. If you’re a Jobs junkie who doesn’t live in one of those cities, here are a few anecdotes, takeaways and favorite quotes:
- When 12-year-old Steve Jobs was building a computer, he looked up the phone number of one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard and rang a guy called Dave to ask if the company had any parts it was going to throw away that he could use. Mr. Packard spoke to him for half an hour and eventually invited young Steve to spend the summer interning at HP.
- Jobs and Woz once built a Bluebox to hack the US telephony system. When they did, they impersonated Henry Kissinger and called the Pope. Somehow, they got through.
- On ideas v. craftsmanship: Some people have a disease where they think a really great idea is 90% of the work. They don’t properly value craftsmanship and the role it plays in a product experience.
- On his management style: It’s like a rock tumbler where really talented people polish each other via collaborative friction.
- “Microsoft used a fantastic opportunity to create more opportunities for itself.”
- “He said I looked like a renegade from the human race.”
- “Everyone should learn to program a computer. It teaches you how to think.”
Not sure how many revelations are there. Or even how revelatory the film is. It probably depends on how much of a Jobs junkie you are. Some of the material is surely covered in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography. And some of it has likely popped up elsewhere in the long, breathless telling of the Steve Jobs story. What is most interesting about the film is that it is a great time capsule that is somehow outside of time.
As he’s sitting in that 1995 chair, Jobs may already be aware of the whole iFamily of products that would eventually change the way we experience the world and make him a billionaire several times over. But none of the rest of us who were breathing that 1995 air had any clue what was coming next. In talking about both his early interest in telephony and the potential of the web as a vast marketplace, Jobs tips his hand as to the scope of the opportunities he observed. It is as if he saw an entire continuum and could warp the line whenever he felt like it in whichever direction appealed to him. It becomes unfortunate that words like “visionary” are so often misappropriated and debased. Our language just doesn’t leave us with many fitting options for discussing Steve Jobs.
Consequently, our best option may be to let Jobs speak for himself. From any time or any space.
