Terms of Endearment: STREAMING on NETFLIX! #book2movies

As long as we’re stuck waiting in the virtual line for Steve Jobs tickets, I’m using today’s Saturday Matinee as an excuse to remind you about Terms of Endearment, one of the Steve Jobs movies’ cast member’s earliest film roles. Thanks to Jobs —and Wosniak, and Gates, et al—it’s easy peasy to play film historian and dig through the archives. I’ve got my MacBookAir, and my iPhone, all I need now is an E-reader. Aha! That’s you. 

If you’ve seen the Steve Jobs trailer, you know Jeff Daniels plays an Apple heavyweight in the Aaron Sorkin scripted film. Daniels is the real world tech titan John Scully who was CEO at Apple from 1983 to 1993; Scully left the company after butting heads with Steve Jobs over the licensing of Apple software. 

I can imagine Sorkin, who worked with Daniels on The Newsroom recommending him to Danny Boyle. It may be hard for some to separate Daniels from his Dumb & Dumber persona but his fans know he’s able to go dramatic on a large scale.

Daniels got his start in film way back in the early 1980’s and in 1983 he played Debra Winger’s philandering husband, Flap Horton, in the achingly painful and amazingly funny Terms of Endearment. It was a supporting role and while he didn’t make a huge flap, the movie itself was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won five of them: Best Picture, Best Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Director (James Brooks) and Best Writing of a Screenplay Based on Material from another Medium. Director James Brooks wrote the award winning adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s best selling book. 

While Debra Winger and John Lithgow were nominated, Jeff Daniels was not. Still, my hunch is he was pretty flap-happy to be associated with such an amazing film. And while star Michael Fassbender has a sure shot at being nominated as Best Actor for Steve Jobs, Daniels is likely thrilled to be a supporting actor in such a hot property. I’ve got no idea how big or small, interesting or not, a supporting part he actually plays. 

For now, let’s take a fond look back at Terms of Endearment. The 1980’s classic is available to stream on Amazon, VUDU, Google-Play and YouTube, and currently NETFLIX!