Steve Jobs, Trumbo, The People v. O.J. Simpson

Three movies about real people and real events --Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle; Trumbo, written by Dave McNamara and directed by Jay Roach; Ryan Murphy's The People v. O.J. Simpson -- indicate how much better, generally, books can handle the complex issues raised by these films.

Dalton Trumbo's letters (M. Evans and Company,1970) and Bruce Cook's biography of Trumbo (Random House, 1970) cast far more light on the issues of the blacklist than Roach's overly simple film version.  Trumbo was a fascinating character that Bryan Cranston never effectively illuminates.
Aside from the general creepiness of actors trying to portray real people --Hedda Hopper, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson -- the only character that's vividly alive is John Goodman as the low-budget producer Frank King for whom Trumbo wrote pseudonymous scripts:  when the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals threatens King for employing Trumbo he smashes their offices with a baseball bat and tells them to publish whatever they want, since the audience for his films can't read anyway.

Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs is similarly unenlightening about its subject, in spite of a typically witty Aaron Sorkin script.  If one knows much about Jobs -- his perfectionism and the fact that he was adopted -- one won't learn much from this film about his successes and failures and his persistence.  And if you don't know much about Jobs you won't learn much either:  he was nasty to everyone and did not like to share credit.  For a more detailed view of  Jobs and his ups and downs read Walter Isaacson's biography (Simon and Shuster, 2011).

Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life (Random House,1996), the source for Ryan Murphy's 12-hour TV film about O.J. Simpson, tells us more in one chapter than the whole miniseries does, especially about Simpson's relationship with the Los Angeles police and with the African-American community.  It also includes detailed analyses of the trial and all the mistakes the prosecution made, including underestimating how sympathetic Simpson would be -- they were used to sympathetic victims and unsympathetic perpetrators -- and becoming so convinced that Simpson was guilty that they lost sight of the obstacles they had to overcome. 

One interesting thing about Jobs, Trumbo and Simpson is that all three were poor parents.  Simpson mistreated the mothers of his children brutally, Jobs was better at psychological abuse, while Trumbo generally ignored his children, except to yell at them when they interfered with his work. Obsession with oneself, for whatever reasons, can have an alarming effect on one's children.