Nitpick: the Winklevi. It’s in the script! 
Just saw it - the theatre was full after a few weeks release - impressive.
Good movie - still on my mind.
I also read this columnby Joe Nocera of the NY Times - really captures my thinking about the book author, Ben Mezrich as a “hype artist” - but more importantly, it frames how I experienced the movie. Sorkin, even while he fictionalized bits of it (we don’t see Zuckerbergs’s IRL girlfriend, for instance) boils it down to two main storylines - relationships and transformational business change. When your buddy Saverin pushes advertising and Zuckerberg knows not to let go of Facebook’s cool and then Saverin doesn’t come to California, and billions are at stake in the decisions playing out over a few months, what do you do? That is the inherent tension in the story…and from the lawsuits, appears to be at the heart of what happened IRL, even if the particulars vary…
When I was in B-school, I enrolled in a negotiations class. It was actually very interesting as it dealt not only with negotiations strategies, but game theory as well.
One of the takeaways was that there really isn’t an obligation to act in an ethical and honest manner when engaging with other parties where there is no expectation that they will not engage in an ethical and honest manner themselves.
We also learned that ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is being able to successfully execute them.
I have a friend who just completed an MBA and then went to work for a start-up company. That company is having problems between the idea guy who started it and the money people who got it going. My friend is amazed by how exactly the real-world situation is matching the case studies in his business classes.
I finally saw the movie today. I am more firmly convinced than before that Jeff Jarvis (the guy in the OP’s link) has his head up his ass. The story in the movie could be the story of a thousand companies at any time since the industrial revolution. I am the farthest thing from a Tesla advocate and the following anecdote may be apocryphal though told repeatedly, but it will do as a comparable. Tesla spent a year working on a project for Thomas Edison and completed it successfully. When he asked for the $50,000 (a staggering sum) that Edison had promised him, Edison reputedly said, “You don’t get our American sense of humor.” Tesla dug ditches to make money until he finally got an opportunity to get revenge by working for George Westinghouse.
The story in the movie has nothing at all to do with the internet, the new social conventions, or “elegant organization.” It’s about people who will walk over others to see their ideas realized, which is the story of just about every famous person in all history. Has Jarvis ever read a biography of anybody in his entire life? (The one on Gutenberg apparently didn’t take.) Has Jarvis ever heard of Social Darwinism? All his writing (here and elsewhere) goes to the one point that successful people are special who deserve to be successful because they are successful.
Which makes it all the more odd that he keeps trashing Aaron Sorkin. How many other movies can you name from recent years in which people are talking about the writer rather than the director if they are different? When Hereafter is talked about you hear Clint Eastwood’s name a thousand times for every mention of Peter Morgan. Sorkin has achieved a level of success unknown by any other film writer.
And both Sorkin and Fincher (Fincher? David Fincher, the director not mentioned since the OP) do a great job. Sorkin’s dialog is unbelievably good. Fincher’s direction is equal to a near-impossible task. They have to take the most sedentary, boring subjects in the entire world - coding and depositions - and make them interesting. They do. The film is beautifully laid out, with continual subtle compositions, lighting, and editing. The characters are smart but usually age-appropriate, over-respectful of their brains but realistically limited in their understanding of the world. (The picture could have been about the forming of National Lampoon magazine by Doug Kenney and Henry Beard from their days at Harvard.) The only person I didn’t believe for a single second was Larry Summers. I assume Sorkin has a personal hatred because the scene was so false and jarring.
Sorkin will win the Adapted Screenplay Oscar next year. Why? Because movies are old media. And Sorkin nailed the movie.
I hear this said a lot about the movie, but while I enjoyed it, I can’t say that there was anything about the lighting, composition, and editing that stood out for me. (It probably doesn’t help that the last movie I saw was Inception, which was all about flashy cinematography). Could you point out some examples?
Lots of little things. Much of the movie takes place inside a dorm room. Yet you get a sense of spaciousness and spatial separation of each of the individual living sections. For that matter, the people in the background of almost every room are visibly doing things that would be ignored for close-ups in most movies.The lighting work on the faces of Zuckerberg and Parker in the nightclub. The crew scenes. The way the twins are usually visible in the same shot although one actor played both.
Inception hammered graphic nonsense at you non-stop. I liked the subtlety of this movie much better. Of course, I really, really hated Inception.
The brief hazing scene at the statue of three lies was especially well-lit. Really all the outdoor shots in and around campus, usually with the protagonist shuffling through the cold, really stood out to me.
I realize this thread is getting a little undead, but I just saw The Social Network and was searching all the threads on it. Anyway…
This scene is pulled almost verbatim from the book. If it’s wrong, it’s because that’s the way the Winklevi told it to Mezrich.
He probably will, but he shouldn’t. The scene with Larry Summers is one of the only scenes taken from the book. Most of the rest of it is made up out of whole cloth. The Social Network is far more an adaptation of the legal proceedings leading up to all those depositions than it is an adaptation of The Accidental Billionaires.
I’m not getting it. So what if he made up most of it? Isn’t the sandard the quality of the finished product rather than the degree of fidelity?
The point is, it’s somewhat dubious to give someone an adapted screenplay award when the screenplay was hardly adapted from anything at all.
Sometimes that’s the kind of treatment a work needs in order to make the transition to another medium.
No argument there. The book is more or less unfilmable (because nothing movieworthy happens) and Zuckerberg isn’t a villain, he’s just a nerd who likes to code. If he can’t be a nominal villain, The Social Network falls apart.
R. Fiore, a columnist for The Comics Journal, made what I thought was a very interesting point. In comics, publishing, music, etc., kingdoms are made all the time by money men screwing the idea men out of the ownership of their ideas. The Social Network showed the idea man coming out on top for a change. Once in a while a man needs to bite a dog.
But isn’t one key dimension of the movie the observation that Zuckerberg stole the Winkelvoss’ idea? The whole point is that the ideas are only worth so much and execution is what matters - and Zuckerberg had the vision and ability to execute…
I felt the movie was pretty dismissive of the Winklevi actually. They were treated as jerks who felt entitled to Facebook even though all they had was a kinda-sorta-maybe similar idea and talked to Zuckerberg about it.