Town Crier readers who watch the upcoming movie about the late Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs – part of which was filmed in and around Los Altos in recent weeks – might want to keep an eye out for a familiar bell ringer.
The filmmakers recently contacted the Town Crier for help with their plans to re-create editions of the paper from 1976 and 1984 as background for scenes in the movie.
The film, titled “Steve Jobs,” is scheduled to premiere Oct. 9, according to last week’s announcement from Universal Pictures.
This is the second movie based on Jobs to film in Los Altos in three years. Ashton Kutcher played the title role in “Jobs,” released in 2013.
This time around, Los Altos hosted a crew including actors Michael Fassbender (as Jobs) and Seth Rogen (Steve Wozniak), who filmed at the Jobs family home on Crist Drive. Jobs and Wozniak, with others, founded Apple and built the first Apple computer in the garage, though Wozniak recently downplayed how much of the work was actually done there.
The Los Altos History Museum’s latest exhibition, “Silicon Valley: The Lure & the Legends,” includes a replica of the workbench the co-founders used as they developed their first products from the family home. It runs through April 19 at the museum, 51 S. San Antonio Road.
A few miles south in Cupertino, “Steve Jobs” director Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting,” “127 Hours”) last week transformed De Anza College’s Flint Center, transporting it 30 years into the past to recall the original Macintosh launch Jobs introduced for Apple. He unveiled the Mac – the first mainstream personal computer to hit the market – during a stockholder meeting in 1984.
Filming on campus included the key scene from the movie – which is expected to highlight three product releases in Jobs’ history – and footage of extras shot throughout the area. The filming drew students from De Anza’s Film/TV Department as paid production assistants on set, and alumnus Todd Marks returned as a member of the production staff. Hundreds of students volunteered as unpaid extras; a casting company hired locals from around the Bay Area. They issued a special call for men sporting 1980s hairstyles – long hair, beards, sideburns and mustaches were in high demand – as were owners of cars in good condition from early in that decade.
The cast also includes Kate Winslet (as Joanna Hoffman), Jeff Daniels (John Sculley) and Michael Stuhlbarg (Andy Hertzfeld). Aaron Sorkin, Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Social Network,” wrote the three-act screenplay based on “Steve Jobs” (Simon & Schuster, 2011), Walter Isaacson’s biography of the tech pioneer. Sorkin’s script focuses on the debuts of the first Macintosh personal computer, the NeXT computer Jobs created in the 1990s after being temporarily forced out of Apple and the debut of the desktop iMac in 1998.
