From what I’ve heard, The Social Network is a great film, and with David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin working on it, I’m not surprised.  However, from the day the first trailer hit, it’s always had a strong scent of Hollywood bullsh*ttiness about it.  I mean really, children’s choirs? Drawing equations on a window?  A little melo D for a movie about a nerd who started a website, no?  Anyway, Nicholas Carlson wrote a piece for Business Insider and Gawker today which purports to tell the story of how Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, and the movie based on it came to be.

The only reason The Accidental Billionaires exists is because one of Mark’s Facebook co-founders pitched the book to Mezrich in an attempt to permanently damage Mark’s reputation. According to those sources, that cofounder and Harvard student is Eduardo Saverin. [...]

Eventually, sources say, Eduardo decided to attack Mark’s reputation.

He approached Ben Mezrich – the author of Bringing Down The House, a book about how a group of MIT students made it big in Vegas. Bringing Down The House makes its characters out to be rock stars and scoundrels; the Facebook book, Accidental Billionaires, does the same. The upcoming movie based on the book features cocaine, models, and dark, moody, lighting from the director who brought you Fight Club. It’s a character assassination.

So it’s not very realistic, then? All girls that go to Stanford don’t look like this?  I refuse to believe that.  Next you’ll tell me Rudy didn’t really show that good-fer-nuthin coach that hobbits can play football.

The full article is pretty long, but I did my best to condense it for you:

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With The Social Network playing the New York Film Festival on the 24th and opening wide at the beginning of next month, a New Yorker profile of the real Mark Zuckerberg is ever so timely.  I wanted to find out how the real guy compared to the Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher version, and I’ve done my best to translate the hyper-literate New Yorker piece into ape-like blog grunts and esoteric memes for you.  (*shrieks, bangs laptop with chicken bone*)

Sue me in FEDERAL court, New Yorker:

Sorkin said that creating Zuckerberg’s character was a challenge. He added that the college students were “the youngest people I’ve ever written about.” Sorkin, who is forty-nine, says that he knew very little about social networking, and he professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media. “I’ve heard of Facebook, in the same way I’ve heard of a carburetor,” he told me. “But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn’t know how to find it.”

Time out, you’re telling me a 49-year-old intellectual has a knee-jerk reaction to an online world he doesn’t understand AND doesn’t realize his Cooper Mini is fuel injected?  Please take caution, friends, do not tread on my monocle.  In my surprise it has fallen.

Sorkin insisted that “the movie is not meant as an attack” on Zuckerberg. As he described it, however, Zuckerberg “spends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an antihero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero.” He added, “I don’t want to be unfair to this young man whom I don’t know, who’s never done anything to me, who doesn’t deserve a punch in the face. I honestly believe that I have not done that

I told Sorkin that his TV series West Wing was one of Zuckerberg’s favorites. He paused. “I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he said finally.

Aw, under different circumstances, you two could’ve been friends!  That’s your story!  It’d be just like that Nazi talking about Betty Boop with the Americans in Saving Private Ryan.  …Although they did have to shoot him later…
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At their best, Aaron Sorkin scripts are driven by engaging, thought-provoking dialogue that still manages to sound natural. At their worst, they become rapid-fire word gauntlets where shrill actors talk-rape you with lines that communicate little more than “I was quite pleased with myself when I came up with this.”

This second teaser for David Fincher’s The Social Network (written by Sorkin, based on the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal*) is closer to the latter.  Hard to know if it’s the movie’s fault or just the trailer editor, since it seems mostly like a tighter-edited version of an earlier, much less-annoying version.  Anyway, it stars Jesse Eisenberg, Scarfield (they say he won his Spider-Man role based on this performance), Justin Timberlake, Rashida Jones, and Joe Mazzello.  I can only hope the movie is less obnoxious than this teaser, because I had the overwhelming urge to punch someone even before they got to the “We’re gentlemen of Harvard,” line.  Drama!  Yelling!  Gravitas!  Timberlake! (*fart sound*)

*Jesus, what is it with ridiculous subtitles these days?  It’s like they’re trying to search engine optimize book titles now.  You only get one colon, dude, this isn’t Human Centipede.

RELATED ASYLUM POLL: Would you want to see a movie about Facebook?

The Social Network started out sounding like one of those Magic 8-Ball/Bazooka Joe movie concepts (Facebook is popular!  It should be a movie!).  But then when we heard it was based on a book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and that David Fincher was directing a script by Aaron Sorkin, we realized it was serious.  But even knowing that, before this new teaser trailer hit the web, I didn’t realize it was Inception-trailer-bass-sound serious.

“We have an idea that we’d like to talk to you about.”

(*BRAAAAAAAAHM*)

“Who should we send it to first?”
“Just a couple of people.  The question is, who are they gonna send it to.”

(*BRAAAAAAAAHM*)

“The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours?”
“Thousand. Twenty-two thousand.”

(*BRAAAAAAAAHM*)

“A million dollars isn’t cool.  You know what’s cool?  A billion dollars.”

(*BRAAAAAAAAHM*)

Their braaaahm sound isn’t as bassy as the Inception braaaaahm sound, which I assume indicates less gravitas. Still, it sounds pretty serious. (*BRAAAAAAAAHM*) It’s like the movie trailer equivalent of David Caruso putting on his sunglasses.

[via Pajiba]

The story of Facebook is set to hit theaters in October, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) and Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, directed by David Fincher, based on the book by Ben Mezrich.  (*deep breath*).  The script, from The West Wing‘s Aaron Sorkin (your parents’ Joss Whedon), made the 2009 blacklist, and a review of it showed up on the Times Online a couple days ago:

Six years ago Zuckerberg created what was to become the internet phenomenon Facebook in a “tidal wave” of grief after being dumped by his girlfriend. The Social Network is a highly dramatised version told in flashbacks recalled in the drama of a court hearing. The film opens on the night of February 4, 2004 when Zuckerberg, then 19, is seen to be dumped in a Harvard bar by his girlfriend, Erica.
In the film Zuckerberg retreats to his college dormitory where, in a drunken fever, he writes the computer code turning Harvard’s annual collection of student photographs and biographies into a website where he and his male friends rank Harvard women as barnyard animals. Thirty minutes after “Thefacebook” goes live, it is so popular that it crashes Harvard’s computer network.
The film claims that after Zuckerberg quit Harvard his personal life spun out of control, with Parker helping him indulge his fantasies with a stream of “groupies”. Sorkin’s screenplay suggests Parker knew Zuckerberg was driven not just by money or fame but also sexual insecurity. While he is depicted as receiving sex in bars, Parker runs the business.

I never receive sex in bars, mostly because I measure my sex in complicated pie charts.  In any case, BroBible has posted the first scene from the script if you want to read it.  It’s exactly what you’d expect from an Aaron Sorkin script — characters with specific motives that will drive the story, illustrated through rapid-fire, borderline excessive dialog.  It describes Zuckerberg as a guy “whose lack of any physically intimidating attributes makes a very complicated and dangerous anger.”  To me that seems like it’s a pretty simple anger, but whatever.  Anyway, what I read was actually pretty good. I want to see this now.  But keep in mind I just sat through Robin Hood last night, which was like Braveheart meets Schoolhouse Rock for retarded kids. Any dialog seems genius compared to Cate Blanchett yelling “This one’s for Robert!”