Facebook’s founder is unhappy with the content and tone of a new film about the company’s birth. Does he have a point?
It seems the makers of The Social Network have fallen foul of the company whose creation they document: Facebook, and – most significantly – its youthful founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
The New York Times reports that Zuckerberg, a 26-year-old billionaire who now oversees an empire with profits of more than $800m a year, is concerned director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (of the West Wing) suggest his company’s birth to be the result of a series of betrayals by key personnel, including himself. He and his colleagues have apparently been in consultation with the makers of the movie, which stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, but have been unable to move the film in the direction they desire.
Much of The Social Network is based upon a book by journalist Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires, as well as court depositions from parties with whom Zuckerberg battled over the site’s origins (and with whom Facebook eventually settled). However, there are reportedly a number of scenes in the film which are embellishments, including a steamy sequence in which Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who was heavily involved with Facebook’s early history, delivers dialogue while a pair of teenage girls offer partygoers lines of cocaine from bared breasts.
That’s to be expected: a potentially mundane (if ultimately lucrative) company startup story looks a lot better through a rock and roll filter. Fincher and Sorkin know that in order to get us interested in these characters, callow ambition, extreme privilege and outlandish betrayal need foregrounding at the expense of discussions over server capacity. Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg seems to be pitched as an awkward chap who becomes intoxicated by the sudden ability to create the sort of social interactions which he has always struggled to achieve himself. Whether or not the real Zuckerberg fits this description is immaterial, unless you happen to be Zuckerberg.
I’d hate to see a Facebook-sanctioned version of The Social Network – the late, great Tony Wilson’s line about 24 Hour Party People, that the film correctly “printed” the legend, not the truth, springs to mind – but I do sort of wonder whether Zuckerberg and co might be right to suggest that this is a film whose very existence is dubious.
While there is undoubtedly a juicy tale in there somewhere, am I alone in wondering if this is another – albeit highbrow – example of a pitch being greenlit primarily on the basis of mainstream brand identification? How far is it from a Transformers, or a He’s Just Not That Into You, the one based on a children’s toy, the other on a bestselling self-help book? Both were shallow excuses for movies which arrived in multiplexes because studios knew they had ready-made audiences.
The story of Facebook’s birth does not even seem particularly emblematic of a voguish historical trend. It is not a Wall Street for 2010, because the circumstances that created Facebook did not lead to the rise of an entire tribe of wannabe social network creators, and even if it had, no one would have been remotely interested in what they got up to.
Check out the above trailer for The Social Network, and it’s apparent that the film-makers try and hook us with a reminder that this is a service most of us use every day. There are the “likes”, the tagged photos and the status updates, and a glimpse of the apparently torrid tale that led to them becoming as much a part of the average person’s existence as using a microwave or picking up a mobile phone. Without the story revealed by this film, they seem to suggest, your waking, browsing life would be a whole lot different.
That grand supposition is ripe for satire, and some smart types have already posted fake trailers for movies about the creation of YouTube and Twitter. Which would be merely amusing if it weren’t for the fact that plans were revealed last week for a film about the birth of Google. Will the trailer feature a variety of anonymous computer users searching for the nearest post office, or checking whether the bloke who played that cop in the show years ago is still alive?Yet it would be impossible to scan your eyes over the cast and crew involved in The Social Network, or to watch that trailer, without feeling profoundly excited. (Tweets like this rave from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers do little to soothe the pulse.) But if it does end up sweeping the board at next year’s Oscars (as some predict) it will not be because this was a story which simply had to be told on the big screen, any more than the birth of any corporation does.
