Reel 8: SorkinFest Part 3--Almost-True Stories

That's a little bit of a misnomer, but not by much. This episode--the third in our series of five episodes dedicated to Aaron Sorkin's work--looks at two films he worked on that told stories about specific individuals: Steve Jobs (2015), Directed by Danny Boyle, and Sorkin's film directing debut, 2017's Molly's Game. Now, with Steve Jobs, Sorkin took some of the storylines provided by Walter Isaacson's biography, and placed them into specific contexts, with the upshot being that many of the real-life counterparts found themselves saying "...yeah, that's not quite how it went," but you can blame that on Isaacson, not Sorkin. 

Molly's Game, on the other hand, is based on the story as told by Molly Bloom in her book, so if there are inaccuracies, then it's either Bloom herself as the unreliable narrator, or Sorkin taking a little artistic license, or maybe it's a little of Column A and a little of Column B. Either way, what we have here is a pair of films that both work well with Sorkin's dialogue and aren't especially heavy-handed with some of the allusions they make. 

COMING ATTRACTIONS: In the next episode we step back a little bit and look at two films for which Sorkin has a credit for doing re-writes. 

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