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Steve Jobs: The Movie in the works

Sony Pictures bags $1m rights to biopic iMovie

After tributes from world leaders and spontaneous commemorations at Apple stores, Steve Jobs is to be honoured as only America knows how – with a Hollywood biopic.

Sony Pictures has made a magnanimous offer for the rushed-to-press authorised biography by Walter Isaacson, originally due to come out in 2012 and then at the end of November, but now being hurried along to later this month to ensure it captures the current interest in the billionaire fondleslab baron, who died last week.

The studio that made The Social Network is prepared to fork out a million dollars or more for Isaacson's book, according to film industry blog Deadline. Mark Gordon, producer of 2012 and Source Code, is said to be in line to produce the movie.

The only film to feature Jobs thus far is Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made-for-TV movie based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine; it was shot in 1999 and starred Noah Wyle as Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates.

Jobs liked Wyle in the part, though he disliked the movie, and had Wyle come out at Macworld NY that year dressed as Jobs to start the keynote.

Isaacson's biography, which had Jobs' full cooperation, is based on more than 40 interviews with the iTunes supremo himself and over 100 conversations with his friends, family members, colleagues and competitors, according to the publisher's description.

The author has also penned the life stories of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, among others, which is perhaps why Jobs picked him out of a reportedly long list of biographers who approached him over the years.

The promotional bit for the book, which is simply entitled Steve Jobs, also insists that although Jobs cooperated, "he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published" and "put nothing off limits". ®

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