Consuming the Apples: Steve Jobs and the Reality Distortion Field
May 2001
The director introduced me. “This is Bill. He’ll follow you wherever you go.”
The host nodded at me. No rehearsal, no fixed plan, just stay with him, shoot whatever he says, and always try to show where we were. I slung the Sony F900 HD camera onto my shoulder, and we rolled tape.
He stood in a pool of light in front of a black wall, smiled, and spoke to the camera:
"Hi. I’m Steve Jobs, and I’m here at Tyson’s Corner Mall in Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. I’m standing in front of this wood barricade we’ve built in front of our first retail store, that’s gonna open in six days.
"Now, nobody’s seen inside here yet, and I’d like to take you inside for a little private tour. So come on in."
He opened a door in the black wall, and I followed him into the first Apple Store, a week before its opening, gleaming like a bright new jewel with iMacs, PowerMacs, Titanium PowerBooks, iBooks, and no one but the two of us. A huge photo of John and Yoko was visible at the far end. Steve beamed a welcome to the audience.
“Now, this is our store. The store’s divided into four parts.”
Then, pointing broadly to his left, “The first quarter of the store has our home section, with great home and education products…”
He stopped and glared at me. “You’re supposed to pan over when I point there,” he said.
Great. There we were, barely a minute into the tour, and I’d already pissed him off.
I had discussed what to do about pointing with the director, Bill Couturie, and we had agreed that I would stay on Steve. Later in the day, after Steve left, we would shoot cutaway shots of the home area and the pro section and all the other places he pointed.
It was a long, awkward moment.
Then Bill C came out of the back room where he and the Apple people were monitoring my camera and the audio.
“I asked him to stay on you, Steve. We’ll shoot cutaways later.”
“He should pan over when I point.”
So we started again and I followed his points each time, then came back to him. He related easily to the camera and took us around the store with great pride. He had wanted to do it all off the cuff, without a Teleprompter, in one long take without a break, like a live performance. We came close to doing that, as he led us from one section to another. We did shoot cutaway shots of each area of the store later, and some were used in various edits of this piece.
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