The Social Network, which hits theaters on October 1, 2010, is a drama directed by David Fincher about the founding of the social networking website, Facebook. The film focuses on Facebook’s tumultuous early years, focusing on founder Mark Zuckerberg, who launched the site from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. It was written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted by Ben Mezrich’s 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires.
Casting for the film began in August 2009, and Jesse Eisenberg was the first announced actor to join the project during the following month. Eisenberg plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2009, he shared his enthusiasm for the Baltimore Sun saying, “Although I’ve gotten to be in some wonderful movies, this character seems so much more overtly insensitive in so many ways that it seems more real to me than ever. The best way “.
The film also stars Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, and Justin Timberlake as Facebook co-founders Eduard Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Sean Parker. The star-studded cast also includes Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones, and Brenda Song.
The Social Network, the film is told in a series of flashbacks recalled during a court hearing. The film begins the night of February 4, 2004 when Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, Erica, in a bar. He then returns home in a drunken stupor and transforms the online collection of Harvard student photographs into a website where he and his friends classify Harvard women as various farm animals. His “Facebook” is so popular that it blocks the entire Harvard network in half an hour.
Zuckerberg then drops out of college and moves to California, where he teams up with Sean Parker, the co-founder of the music hacking site Napster, to build his Facebook. The film focuses on the turbulent early years of Facebook, the global social networking site now seen as a communication revolution. Six years after the creation of this social network, Zuckerberg is named the youngest billionaire in history. However, with a great deal of success comes responsibility, as well as legal and personal difficulties, as the motto of the film goes, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without having some enemies.”
Although Zuckerberg was not consulted during the writing of the book The Accidental Billionaires, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin was. However, it has been said that the portrayal of the characters in the film is not entirely true. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz called the film a “dramatization of history,” according to the International Business Times.
After the film’s script leaked online, it became clear to Zuckerberg that he was not going to be portrayed in the most positive light. He later made a statement that he wanted to establish himself as a “good guy,” according to The Times Online. Moskovitz told International Business Times, in regards to Zuckerberg “the book’s plot / script attack blatantly [Zuckerberg], but actually I felt like a lot of his positive qualities were sincerely manifested in the trailer. At the end of the day, they can’t help but portray him for the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is. “
Zuckerberg has not been actively supporting The Social Network and when asked about it, he replied, “I just wished that no one would make a movie of me while I was still alive.” According to The Times Online site, critics who have seen the film’s script say it portrays Zuckerberg as an “autistic machinist on the edge.”
The movie is being produced by Kevin Spacey, who told MTV that it’s a “great story for people who don’t really know how it happened. Very filmic, very modern, very cool.” This will be the second project that Spacey and director David Fincher have worked on. His previous film, Se7en, was a dark and violent horror film, which is exactly what Fincher is known for. Spacey told MTV News that The Social Network, however, will take a different approach and “will probably be a lot more fun than people might expect.”
Whether the film is true to life or not, it is sure to attract viewers when it makes its big screen debut on October 1. Facebook users will no doubt flock to theaters to see it and then report their reviews, positive and negative, via status updates on their favorite social network.