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Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! How Hollywood turned a dorm-room start-up into a big-screen epic
Mark Zuckerberg is many things, not least a student of the classics. He reads Latin and ancient Greek, and his motto is said to be Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, or, loosely translated, "Maybe one day we'll look back on all this shit and laugh." Lately, though, he's probably meditating on another Latin phrase: annus horribilis. Because it's been one lousy year for the 26-year-old CEO, despite (and as a result of) the success of his dormitory-born company, Facebook, the most trafficked social-networking site on Earth.
His media appearances have been called Nixonian, his hoodie choices have been savagely critiqued. His occasionally Orwellian quotes have been obsessively parsed. He's even been stalked by a Gawker paparazzo.
He might as well get used to it. When the movie based on his college exploits and Silicon Valley conquests hits screens this autumn, he'll become the first tech nerd to be granted Hollywood celebrity. But then, that's what happens when Tinseltown turns your life into film, your callow college years into fable and your billion-dollar company into a metaphor for American ambition and the inherent loneliness that lurks just beneath its dark-blue interface.
On October 15, with much fanfare and an eye on the Oscars, Sony Pictures is releasing The Social Network, its liberally dramatised, completely unauthorised and (its makers hasten to add) thoroughly researched Facebook-origin story. In this telling, Zuckerberg (played by 27-year-old Jesse Eisenberg) is no mere code monkey with a fondness for dead languages and flip-flops. He's a tragic archetype right out of Sinclair Lewis: the driven, wounded trickster-genius accused of stealing a million-dollar idea and throwing his friends under the bus, all in an attempt to summit the American dream. The filmmakers -- Hollywood A-listers, all -- can't be accused of thinking small. Justin Timberlake, who plays Mephistophelean Napster cofounder and Facebook partner, Sean Parker, calls the story arc "very Greek". Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, creator of
The West Wing and A Few Good Men, compares his version of Zuckerberg to Shakespeare's Richard III, saying of his protagonist, "Give him a hunchback and a club foot and you're pretty close." As for the film's acclaimed director, David Fincher, he jokes that he's made "the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies".
The Fight Club auteur may jest, but his Kane comparison isn't far off. As with William Randolph Hearst -- Orson Welles' inspiration -- Zuckerberg is the most recognised figure in his era's new media, and Facebook is as vital to mainstream culture as Hearst's publishing empire once was. As with Hearst, there's a tang of the ruthless and untoward about Zuckerberg and, as with Hearst, he has a talent for pissing people off. And it doesn't hurt that he's an absurdly young, grotesquely wealthy Harvard dropout. That's why Silicon Valley's first true -- or rather "truthful", in Fincher's distinction -- zeitgeist film isn't *Linux:
Revenge of the Fallen*. (The news of a possible Google flick, no doubt inspired by The Social Network, generated little heat, probably because the company's motto is "Don't be evil".)
With Facebook, there's just enough moral ambiguity, blended with just enough brand recognition, to attract Hollywood's attention.
For Silicon Valley, The Social Network ends decades of celluloid neglect. Oh sure, moviemakers love hackers, the same way they love Magical Black Men and Rapping Grannies. Fictional techheads always come in handy whenever the hero needs to pop open a locked door or drain a bank account; they roll their eyes at n00bs and proudly display Boba Fett figurines on their desks. But silicon minstrelsy doesn't confer much respect: until The Social Network, the computer business has been denied a mainstream biopic or a resonating social drama. Hackers have
Hackers and WarGames and Sneakers, but they've never had their very own Wall Street: an empurpled, self-important, this-is-our-moment movie that makes splashy myth out of quotidian reality -- where everybody looks sexy-tormented into the bargain.
Ironically, for all the pre-release rumblings about a Facebook movie, Facebook as we know it today barely makes an appearance in
The Social Network. "From a plot standpoint, you could've told the same story about the invention of a really good toaster,"
Sorkin says. "The fact that it's Facebook just makes it ironic -- that the world's most successful social-networking device was the work of a socially awkward guy."
For the studio marketers, Facebook's popularity and visibility are presumably helpful. But for the filmmakers, Zuckerberg was the draw. As with Facebook itself, the unreadable public Zuck is a fascinatingly content-free platform, a cipher that avid minds can't help but fill with their own interests and obsessions. "I'm not gunning for Mark in any way," Sorkin says. "I'm not blind to his jerky qualities. I wrote all about them. But if anything, I'm more apt to identify with him... We all get called losers." Fincher, whose
oeuvre (Se7en, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) hardly feels compatible with the story of a tech start-up, is similarly taken with Zuckerberg -- though he seems to admire the guy's stones more than his vulnerabilities. "I know what it is to want to do it your own way.
I sort of know what that anger is. I have nothing but respect for him. I look at him and go, 'You did it. You fuckin' did it.'" But which Zuckerberg are these guys addressing, exactly? The poker-faced Valley whizz-kid? Or their own creation -- Citizen Zuck? Soon, it may not really matter. If early buzz on the film is any indication of potential impact, The Social Network could be widely regarded as the definitive portrait of Zuckerberg.
Myth is about to overwrite reality, whether the man in question "accepts" or "ignores" it.
Ben Mezrich had a problem. "What will the next bestselling Ben Mezrich book be about?" he wondered, lazing in his palatial Back Bay lair. Suddenly, the phone rang. It was destiny calling. "Hello," said a mysterious voice. "I'm the wronged, forgotten cofounder of Facebook, and I want to tell my story."
OK, so that's not exactly how the seeds of what would become
The Social Network took root in the winter of 2008. But sometimes, telling a story with literal precision isn't the point: the factual record can take you so far, and then deeper truths must be allowed to suffuse the interstices. This seems to be the journalistic philosophy of Mezrich, an author of thrillers turned chronicler of real-life nerd adventures. Mezrich is most famous for
Bringing Down the House, a dramatic tale of wily MIT maths freaks using advanced card counting techniques to milk Las Vegas blackjack tables for millions. The story was optioned and eventually used as the basis for the movie 21. Mezrich admitted he'd enhanced his account with composite characters and reimagined scenes. Despite these concessions, he also maintains the book is a "99.9 per cent true story".
Since Bringing Down the House, Mezrich's potboiler writing style and nonchalant attitude toward verisimilitude have earned him a slew of critics, Facebook now among them. The company publicly derided him as the Jackie Collins of Silicon Valley when Mezrich published The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal -- the germ cell for The Social Network. As with Bringing Down the House, many of its individual facts are hotly contested. But one thing he's sure of, according to Mezrich: "Facebook is scared of the movie, scared of the story I told."
That story originated with Eduardo Saverin, who contacted Mezrich in 2008 through a friend. He said he was the cofounder of
Facebook, its former CFO and the original investor. He claimed he'd been betrayed by Zuckerberg, screwed out of millions of dollars by a guy he thought was his friend -- a fellow nerd who'd shared his (rather Earthbound) dreams of being popular, gaining entry to selective social clubs, and, of course, getting laid. "Eduardo was an angry kid at the time," Mezrich says. "He'd been expunged from the story of Facebook. I built a relationship with him over a couple of months." Saverin was already suing Zuckerberg, but he also seemed to want his side of the story told, and Mezrich wanted very much to tell it. He invited Saverin and his friends to the Vegas premiere of 21, hoping the full red-carpet treatment would keep him talking. It did -- to a point. "I was close to a draft when Eduardo freaked out," Mezrich says. "Mark found out he was talking to me and made it part of the settlement that Eduardo couldn't speak to me again." (Saverin wound up with a reported five per cent of the company, worth roughly $600 million.
He didn't respond to an interview request.)
Around the same time, twin brothers and Harvard alums Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, along with their college friend and former business partner Divya Narendra, were also in the process of suing Zuckerberg for intellectual property theft. The twins had hired Zuckerberg in his second year at Harvard to code a social-networking site; he'd agreed to do it but never finished the work and launched his own competing site -- then called Thefacebook -- a few months later. Court records brought to light a personal blog Zuckerberg had kept at Harvard. In one beery entry, he called a girl who dumped him a "bitch" -- and then carried out a devilish hack, inviting readers to follow along. The result was the Facemash, a makeshift hot-or-not game fuelled by photos plundered from university databases. The irresistibly cruel little timewaster went viral across Harvard's networks, making Zuckerberg a campus celebrity. Even as Mezrich sorted through this pulpy trove of material, Facebook was hitting a bad patch. The 23-year-old Zuckerberg, previously renowned as a wunderkind, came across as defensive and chilly in a 60 Minutes appearance. (One blogger described him as "genetically unable to smile".) Did the Valley's golden boy have a dark side? Had he been a bit of a scamp back in his school days? And was he still?
Suddenly, Mezrich had a real character on his hands -- and a potential movie in the offing: "I was thinking, 'This is
Superbad in the midst of a multibillion dollar company.'"
He didn't wait to write the book: he dashed off a 28-page treatment (immediately leaked to Gawker) and sent it to Hollywood, where, he says, "Sorkin saw it and went bananas".
Suffice it to say, Sorkin didn't see the movie as
Superbad. He saw a chamber epic, recounted
Rashomon-like, with three different perspectives from the film's main characters: Zuckerberg, Saverin and the Winklevosses. "What drew me to it were the themes that were as old as storytelling itself," he says. "Friendship, jealousy, loyalty, power, love, betrayal. The kind of things that Aeschylus would write about -- but the invention at the centre of it couldn't be more contemporary." With Sorkin aboard, Sony sealed the deal on the property, and Mezrich and Sorkin proceeded to work in parallel, completing the book and screenplay at roughly the same time -- highly unorthodox for Hollywood, but then, so was making a movie about a website. "Sorkin came to Boston and was eager to get going on it,"
Mezrich says. "We sat in a room in the Four Seasons, and I just handed him chapters. I had all this incredible documentation that had been given to me by... well, I don't want to say who. You can figure it out." Sorkin is even cagier about the research he conducted (citing court-imposed gag orders and ongoing lawsuits involving his sources), though both he and Oscar-magnet producer Scott Rudin stress that a vast amount of shoe-leather reporting, independent of Mezrich's material, went into the script. (Mezrich and Sorkin did tour a couple of Harvard's "final clubs" together to get a feel for the invitation-only men's societies, which allegedly obsessed Saverin and Zuckerberg and may have inspired the early Facebook's "exclusive" ethos.) The movie and book versions converge on several points (the primacy of sex, partying and social acceptance), but there are key differences: Mezrich implicitly takes Saverin's side, whereas Sorkin's script unfolds as a series of legal depositions, thus highlighting the tale's ambiguities. (He also axed Mezrich's disputed account of Zuckerberg eating koala meat on a yacht and a digression about a Zuck assignation with a Victoria's Secret model.)
Rudin, meanwhile, assiduously solicited Facebook's involvement, even slipping the company a copy of the script and showing senior officials a cut of the movie. Facebook's official spokesperson inadvertently contributed a line to the movie: critiquing the script, he said, "Every creation myth needs a devil." (Sorkin loved the line and put it in.) Nevertheless, Zuckerberg and Facebook elected not to co-operate with the movie. (Or this story. The company provided only this statement: "The story presented in
The Social Network doesn't match reality. It's a portrayal designed to lure people into cinemas rather than tell an accurate story.")
But by that time -- in fact, from the moment its existence became public in August 2008 -- "the Facebook movie" had a more fearsome enemy than Facebook: the internet. The doubters were merciless, blog and troll alike. They smelled classic Hollywood fad-phreaking -- or maybe a fiendish corporate Face-plot to invade the multiplex. Such brutal, know-nothing speculation might be enough to put a sensitive screenwriter off the internet entirely; and indeed, web aversion was why the project leaked in the first place. You'll have to forgive Sorkin: he'd never used Facebook before. He created a group page to conduct research without realising that the page was viewable by anyone on the web. "I'd heard of Facebook the way I'd heard of a carburettor," he admits. "I really didn't know what it was." He wised up when Gawker and like-minded snark factories instantly began cracking A Few Good Pokes jokes. (Sorkin had his defenders, as well: those who pointed out how he makes smart people look sexy and technical subjects feel accessible, even thrilling.) But the carping quieted when Fincher, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Benjamin Button, signed on. Contempt turned into curiosity. Sorkin, Fincher and Facebook? Was there something we weren't seeing? "I didn't want to do Revenge of the Nerds," Fincher says. "I don't believe in this Mountain Dew-swilling, people-who-haven't-bathed, staring-at-phosphorescent- screens-with-luminescent-white-skin hacker stereotype. These are people who make stuff. I feel like they're kindred spirits." Still, he acknowledges that these kindred spirits are whole-cloth movie characters, not carbon facsimiles of actual persons. Fincher encouraged his actors to break free of their real-life counterparts. It's how he'd approached casting, after all. "There were a lot of people -- more than one, more than two -- who said,
'Justin Timberlake? Sean Parker is more like Art Garfunkel,'" he says. "But I need Mark to look across a restaurant table at Sean and say, 'That's what it looks like to have arrived.'" Timberlake, who once met Parker briefly (but before he was actually cast in the film, he says), sees the big-screen version of Parker in purely cinematic terms: his character's job is to "send the movie into Gordon Gekko land," a place where the temptations of a new Wall Street beckon.
The spirit of invention was in full force when it came to building the 'Berg himself. "I watched all the videos I could find online," says Jesse Eisenberg, who was asked not to meet Zuckerberg. "They proved not that helpful. Mark never gives grand speeches, not the way Aaron Sorkin crafts speeches. The challenge was reconciling the tabula rasa of Mark, his passivity, with these more grandiose, more aggressive monologues." Running up against the impregnable wall of Zuckerberg's clammy media appearances, Eisenberg turned to studying his own highly intelligent, socially awkward friends and relatives (including one cousin who actually works at Facebook). He also read books on Asperger's syndrome, though he's quick to admit he doesn't know if Zuckerberg actually has it. At least it was a starting point: a way to explain the character's emotional terseness and androidal reactions to humour and hugs, alongside Sorkin's sudden bursts of perfectly articulated oratory.
And so, just two years after Mezrich first put fingers to keyboard, teasers and trailers for The Social Network began to appear. And, to everyone's surprise, they were... kind of awesome. One moody preview features the song "Creep" by Radiohead, covered by a Belgian girls' choir, and knits footage of mundane Facebook usage together with tense, Fight Club-ish images of splintering male friendships and nightmarish bacchanals: women writhe, champagne spurts, nerds code. Darkly.
The web gasped, genuflected a bit. And then bestowed upon the trailer its highest honour: a gazillion parodies. In one, the real-life Zuckerberg's famously sweaty meltdown at the D8 tech conference (where probing questions about privacy had him shedding his trademark hoodie) has been underscored with the "Creep" soundtrack. The effect is uncanny: fact and fiction blend seamlessly. And creepily. This, one senses, is Facebook's ultimate nightmare. The Social Network arrives in the midst of an image crisis for Facebook that extends far beyond the silver screen. The company's aggressive and often unilateralist push towards user transparency -- publishing friend lists, broadcasting user activity on and off the site via "instant personalisation" -- has helped land it somewhere below the US Internal Revenue Service in user satisfaction, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. In the teeth of this, Zuckerberg has been deployed as figurehead and chief spokesgeek. If Hollywood then paints him as a Kane-like robber baron with a serious humanity deficiency, well, that's bad, right?
Not necessarily. A little infamy never hurt any US corporate overlord -- just ask Donald Trump. Facebook might even count itself lucky. The Social Network makes no mention of the privacy controversy, the site's greatest PR liability. What's more, the movie more or less declares Zuckerberg an unalloyed (if slightly evil) genius. He's got some ripping speeches, too, and all the most quotable lines, all the best fuck-you moments. (And fuck-you moments, as we all know, are the riffs moviegoers repeat on the ride home -- and then in their status updates.) Best of all, the movie steers clear of the real Zuckerberg's less, er, mythic qualities. Citizen Zuck is charismatic, restrained, often dryly, witheringly funny. The "real" Zuckerberg, on the other hand (according to The Facebook Effect, the corporate history he himself authorised), was often given to swinging a fencing foil in the faces of friends and associates, and quoting the movie
Troy. "Now you know who you're fighting!" he'd declaim in his Achilles persona, often apropos of nothing. The movie doesn't go there: no foils, no Troy, no epic-dorkdom. On the advice of Sony's lawyers, Sorkin says he even obligingly cut a line referring to recently unearthed instant messages that may or may not cast new light on the Winklevosses' claims against Zuckerberg.
And nobody in the movie brings up that insane-looking Facebook Illuminati symbol, which the flesh and blood Zuckerberg custom-stitched into the inside of his hoodie.
Citizen Zuck is, frankly, way cooler than all that. Real or un, Aspie or norm, it's all irrelevant: he's an American icon now, up there with Jay Gatsby and Elmer Gantry and George F Babbitt -- and he might yet prove to be the best thing that's happened to Facebook in a long while. At the very least, he's given the man himself a much better movie to quote around the office, something a little more Greek than crummy old Troy. As a classics man, he ought to appreciate that. Maybe one day, he'll look back on this and laugh. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, right?
Right. But that's a big forsan.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
