What happened
The screening was on 24 February, which was Steve Jobs's seventy-first birthday to the day. The poster never used his name. It carried a pirate's eyepatch, the Think Different text set in grey behind the title, and one line in bold: a special screening in honour of the visionary's 71st birthday.
The evening produced an artefact, which is not a normal thing for a movie night to do. A five-point manifesto, written and put online the same afternoon: the repository was created at twenty past five and the last commit landed at ten past six, one of them swapping in the community's own logo. It has a toggle that scrolls the page by itself, so it was built to be projected rather than read.
None of it is original and it does not pretend to be. The first point asks for tools that are extensions of the human spirit, with a bicycle-like efficiency for the mind. The second refuses the mediocre and calls taste the only non-fungible resource. The third says it is better to be a pirate than to join the navy, and that good artists copy while great artists steal. The fourth is the one about everything around us having been made up by people no smarter than we are, so we do not merely inhabit the world, we poke it. The fifth takes mistakes as the price of ambition and keeps no regrets for things left undone. It ends on stay hungry, stay foolish.
Assembled that way and read end to end, it is less a set of borrowed quotations than a description of the kind of room this community keeps trying to be. Which is presumably why somebody spent an hour of the afternoon building it rather than putting the quotes on a slide.
What a movie night is
A film is the occasion rather than the point. Everybody watches the same thing at the same time, which is a cheap way to give a room something in common before anybody has to say anything, and then the actual evening starts.
It works because a film is easier to argue with than a talk. Nobody in the room made it, so disagreeing with it costs nothing and there is no speaker to be polite to. People who would not contradict a panellist will happily contradict a screenwriter, and once they have, they carry on.
The films are usually about building something, or about the people who do. The conversation afterwards is rarely about the film for very long.
No structure, no format, no slides. Turn up, watch, stay and talk.