Steve Jobs Ashton Kutcher Split Biopic - H 2012
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This story originally appeared in the April 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.
Steve Jobs would have appreciated the rules Texas businessman Mark Hulme broke in getting the independent biopic Jobs off the ground.
Hulme never has produced a movie, lives thousands of miles from Hollywood in Dallas and has no personal connection to the late Apple co-founder. Yet the founder of Five Star Institute, a publishing, communications and conference production company (pubs include Pasadena Monthly and Signature Kitchens & Baths), knew when Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO that he wanted to tell his life story. So he asked Five Star writer Matt Whiteley to pen a script, and when Jobs died in October, he decided the privately held Five Star would produce and finance the project despite Sony’s planned version of Walter Isaacson‘s authorized Jobs biography.
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Knowing he’d be an underdog, Hulme contacted Hollywood agencies a few months ago, not expecting anyone to return his calls. “We had no clout whatsoever,” he says. Then, a friend of director Joshua Michael Stern (Swing Vote) read about the project online, leading Stern to contact Hulme, who flew Stern to Dallas. Once Stern, who is represented by CAA, became attached in March, things began falling into place. Within days, CAA came forward and said its client Ashton Kutcher was interested in starring, and the agency agreed to represent domestic rights to the project.
“Things have just blown up,” says Hulme, who is working on casting the rest of the film. He has set up Five Star Features, which will operate out of Pasadena and plans to finance and produce one film a year.
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Jobs, which will cost roughly $15 million and begins shooting in May, will cover Jobs’ life from 1971 to 2000. Just before Easter, Hulme was in L.A. for another round of meetings and had lunch with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, who hired a 19-year-old Jobs. “He’s agreed to be a consultant,” says Hulme, adding that “the potential for promotional partners is tremendous.” Hulme won’t say which companies are talking to CAA about distributing the film but said that “dialogue is under way.”
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