Ashton Kutcher and Steve Wozniak at odds over Jobs biopic

A row has emerged between the actor and the Apple co-founder over film adaptations of the story of Steve Jobs

 

Just the job … Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad in Jobs Photograph: Glen Wilson/AP

Ashton Kutcher has found himself caught up in a war of words with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak over his portrayal of late technology icon Steve Jobs in a poorly-received biopic.

Joshua Michael Stern's Jobs follows the Apple guru from his student days at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1970s to the launch of the world-beating iPod in 2001. The film opened outside the top 5 at the US box office at the weekend with $6.7m (£4.2m) and currently maintains a disappointing 25% "rotten" rating on the review aggregator rottentomatoes.com.

Wozniak, who founded Apple with Jobs in 1976, took to the tech site Gizmodo on 16 August to post his own impromptu review: "I thought the acting throughout was good. I was attentive and entertained but not greatly enough to recommend the movie," he wrote.
"I suspect a lot of what was wrong with the film came from Ashton's own image of Jobs. Ashton made some disingenuous and wrong statements about me recently (including my supposedly having said that the movie was bad, which was probably Ashton believing pop press headlines) and that I didn't like the movie because I'm paid to consult on another one. These are examples of Ashton still being in character. Either film would have paid me to consult, but the Jobs one already had a script written. I can't take that creative leadership from someone else. And I was turned off by the Jobs script. But I still hoped for a great movie."

Kutcher, 35, has questioned Wozniak's dismissive attitude towards the film. "Steve Wozniak is being paid by another company to support their Steve Jobsfilm," he said recently. "It's personal for him, but it's also business. We have to keep that in mind. He was also extremely unavailable to us when producing this film. He's a brilliant man and I respect his work, but he wasn't available to us as a resource, so his account isn't going to be our account because we don't know exactly what it was. We did the best job we could. Nobody really knows what happened in the rooms."

Wozniak, 63, is working as a consultant on a rival, Aaron Sorkin-scripted biopic, which will follow Jobs into production. The Oscar-winning screenwriter's take adapts the bestselling official biography of the technology icon, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography. Isaacson's book is based on more than 40 interviews with its subject, conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues. Jobs died on 5 October 2011, of cancer.

Sorkin's hotly-anticipated film, as yet untitled, reputedly plays out over just three scenes and in real time. The writer of The Social Network said in November he planned to deliver a trio of snapshots from Jobs' life, each from just before a vital product launch, in order to form a vision of the technology guru seen through the prism of his major successes.