Tag Archives: Aaron Sorkin parody

Aaron Sorkin takes on Steve Jobs

But can it sing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”?

He has said he loves his Mac, so I guess it’s no shock that Aaron Sorkin has agreed to write the upcoming big-screen retelling of the life of Steve Jobs.  What can we expect from this new venture?  I can see the fateful moment of the founding of the world’s biggest corporation unfolding something like this:

INT. JOBS HOME (CRIST DRIVE) – GARAGE – NIGHT – 1977

STEVE JOBS, STEVE WOZNIAK and RONALD WAYNE are standing around their first, crudely built computer.

JOBS:  What do you think?

WAYNE:  It’s ugly.

JOBS:  What do you mean it’s ugly?

WAYNE:  It’s ugly.  As in “unpleasant or repulsive in appearance.”

JOBS:  I was thinking “ugly” as in “involving or likely to involve violence.”

WAYNE:  Violence?

JOBS:  As in what I’m going to do to you if you don’t shove that Silenian gloom and doom up your ass.

WAYNE:  Forgive me for being the only one in the room worried about aesthetics.

WOZNIAK:  It is kind of ugly.

JOBS:  Kind of ugly?  There are degrees of ugly?

WOZNIAK:  Well, yeah, I suppose… there’s “yeah, whatever” ugly and “I-am-Oedipus-gouge-your-eyes-out-to-purge-the-horrible-memory” ugly.

JOBS:  It’s not that ugly.

WAYNE:  It’s pretty ugly.

JOBS:  Pretty ugly is another degree of ugly?  Like gorgeously abhorrent or beautifully hideous?

WAYNE:  Beautifully hideous, that’s good.  That suits it.

WOZNIAK:  What are we going to call this beautifully hideous thing?

JOBS:  Somehow I don’t see “beautifully hideous” as an effective selling point.

WOZNIAK:  Depends who you’re selling to.  You’d clean up with Dadaists and deconstructionists.

JOBS:  Yes, because they’re well known for their interest in computers.

WAYNE:  I can’t think of a good name.

WOZNIAK:  Me neither.

JOBS:  Come on, guys.

WOZNIAK:  I’m very good at integral and differential calculus, not naming things.

JOBS:  We need to think this thing differently.  You know, when Gautama sat under the Bodhi tree, he vowed not to rise until achieving enlightenment.  Part of enlightenment is what Buddhists call the concept of “sati” – the awareness to see things for what they are with clear consciousness and being aware of the present reality within oneself, without any craving or aversion.  Gentlemen, we are not moving from this garage until we come up with a name for this product, and I don’t care if we sit here until we are all so old and beautifully hideous that we can’t stand the sight of one another.

WAYNE:  The tree.

JOBS:  Pardon?

WAYNE:  The Bodhi tree.  What kind of tree was it?

JOBS:  A fig tree.

WOZNIAK:  “Fig Computers”?

JOBS:  No, something more primal.  Something indicative of beginnings.  Genesis.  Garden of Eden.  The fruit… the fruit of knowledge.  Apple.

WOZNIAK:  “Apple Computers.”

JOBS:  Apple Computers.

No one speaks for a moment.

WAYNE:  It’s ugly.

WOZNIAK:  Pretty ugly.  Beautifully hideous.

JOBS:  We’ll go with that then.

Not coming to theaters anytime soon…

Fun with words: If Aaron Sorkin wrote Star Trek: The Next Generation

Plenty of room for a pedeconference.

For those weary of the blatant Sorkin-worship on this blog, I promise this will be the last of him for a little while.  But as he often does, he has inspired me to try my hand at something a little offbeat today.  I would never claim to be half the wordsmith he is, but Sorkin does have a particular style that can be mimicked by us lesser mortals who have studied his works a little too obsessively.  Behold then, for your amusement, Star Trek:  The Next Generation as written by Aaron Sorkin.  Hope you dig.  (Sorry about the pdf, but script format doesn’t seem to want to play well here.  And oh yeah, characters copyright Paramount Pictures, no infringement intended, purposes of parody, so on and so forth.)

Aaron Sorkin’s Star Trek: The Next Generation

Yes, as William Shatner would say, I need to get a life.