MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.
Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.
Logline (provided by The Black List): “The story of the founders of the social networking website Facebook and how overnight success and wealth changed their lives.”
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Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line
Fall, 2003. At Boston college bar, 19-year-old MARK ZUCKERBERG discusses his strong desire to get into a “final club” (from the context, I gather this is the Harvard equivalent of a fraternity) with his girlfriend, ERICA. The conversation is a bit circular and frequently absurd, but the bottom line is: Mark wants to get into a final club but doesn’t exactly know a way to make himself stand out enough to get into one. The other bottom line is: after Mark arrogantly announces final clubs will help Erica, as well, by allowing him to introduce her to people “she’d never meet otherwise,” Erica dumps him on the spot. Mark tries to recover by condescendingly making light of her school - Boston University, which obviously lacks the prestige and influence of Harvard - which only makes things worse.
Angry, Mark returns to his dorm and continues drinking. While he blogs nasty things about Erica, Mark notices the Kirkland dorm’s facebook and hatches a scheme to get revenge against all womankind. Within a few hours, he hacks into servers for each of the Harvard dorms (because the school doesn’t have a centralized facebook, only one for each dorm), finds digital copies of all the girls’ photos, and cobbles together a website called “FaceMash,” which is similar to Hotornot.com, except (a) it’s only Harvard girls, and (b) students don’t judge the hotness on a 10-point scale, they judge the relative hotness of two women. In order to get it working, Mark enlists the aid of his best friend, business student EDUARDO SAVERIN, who worked up an algorithm for a different application that will work for Mark’s site. Mark hacks together the code and launches the site. Within a few short hours, it becomes so popular on campus that Harvard’s intranet crashes. Eduardo reacts fearfully, but Mark’s both impressed with himself and a little amused.
The action cuts to Mark, a few years later, listening to a lawyer read back Erica’s deposition. It irritates Mark that she told so many lies. Mark sits across a table from Eduardo and his attorneys. Eduardo is suing him for unknown reasons. As Mark clarifies his side of the story and proudly announces that 80% of Harvard’s male population had visited FaceMash within two hours of its launch, we’re back in 2003 and introduced to CAMERON and TYLER WINKLEVOSS, athletic twins involved in Harvard’s rowcrew team. Their friend, DIVYA NARENDRA brings them copies of Harvard’s student paper, which carries a story about Mark’s scandalous FaceMash site. Impressed with Mark’s skills, they decide “this is [their] guy” — but for what? Another future deposition involves Mark against Tyler, Cameron, and Divya - they’re also suing him, for separate currently unknown unknown reasons.
Back in 2003, Mark faces a board of administrators for his FaceMash stunt, but Mark successfully talks his way out of it by observing that, in addition to already apologizing to any groups he may have offended, his stunt revealed many security holes in Harvard’s system, so they should be thanking him. He’s sentenced to six months’ academic probation. Afterward, Eduardo’s sympathetic. He points out that, on the plus side, everyone knows his name. True, but potentially bad: the abuse from female classmates is such that he’s forced to bail on lectures and hide in his dorms. Soon enough, Cameron and Tyler approach Mark. They invite him to the exclusive clubhouse of the Porcellian final club, where they introduce him to Divya. They go over his impressive credentials: in addition to FaceMash, he created a website called CourseMatch that allows users to find out what classes their friends are taking and an MP3 player Microsoft wanted to buy (before Mark released it for free on the Internet). They pitch their site idea, HarvardConnection, a social networking site that differentiates itself from competitors by being Harvard-only. Mark tells him he’s in, but in the future depositions, he denies ever having said that. The lawyers grill Mark on when he came up with “theFacebook” — before or after he learned about HarvardConnection? It was after, right around the time Eduardo announces he’s been “punched” to join the Phoenix final club. Mark pitches an idea that’s eerily similar to HarvardConnection, getting his attention when he describes it as an exclusive club — their own version of a final club, only one where they’re in charge.
In the deposition, Mark explains he approached Eduardo — instead of his suitemates, who are programmers — because he had the money and business sense to help pull it off. They agree to split the profits 70-30. Lawyers ask Eduardo if he had any awareness of HarvardConnection during this time; Eduardo did not. The lawyers begin reading e-mails from Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and/or Divya. All sound enthusiastic and strongly imply he’s working on building the site without much trouble, but soon enough he starts putting the others off. A simultaneous montage shows Mark working his ass off on theFacebook while Eduardo works his ass off to get into the Phoenix club. Just as Mark’s preparing to finally launch the site, his suitemate DUSTIN sheepishly asks Mark if he knows a particular girl and whether or not she’s single. This leads Mark to a final brainstorm — a “relationship status” feature that also allows users to describe what they’re interested in (friendship, romance, etc.). He excitedly tells Eduardo about the idea as he implements the code, and that’s it — they go live. Mark demands a list of Phoenix members’ e-mail addresses to start generating interest in the site. Eduardo’s unsure, but he ultimately gives them up.
The site takes off immediately, and before long, Divya, Cameron, and Tyler catch wind of it. They’re all pissed, especially when they can’t get ahold of Mark or anybody who knows Mark. Divya and Tyler vacillate between wanting to sue Mark or beat the hell out of him, but Cameron calms them down, urging them to let Mark respond to it. Ultimately, they compromise and have the Winklevosses’ father’s in-house counsel draft a cease-and-desist order for Mark. In the deposition, lawyers ask Mark if he knew the Winklevosses were wealthy at the time he started the site. Mark dances around it but eventually admits he did. Back in 2004, Mark (and to a much lesser extent, Eduardo) becomes a big man on campus, garnering attention from attractive women, including JENNY (who will eventually become Eduardo’s girlfriend). In addition to women, nerds and student entrepreneurs want a piece of Mark, but he’s having none of it — he wants the recognition but doesn’t seem to have much interest in cultivating any actual relationships, business or otherwise.
Not long after, Eduardo announces it’s time to monetize the site. Mark doesn’t want to put ads on it, because it’ll lose the “cool” factor. Eduardo notices the C&D from the Winklevosses and freaks out. Mark tells him to relax, arguing that he didn’t steal any of their code and that “a guy who builds a really nice chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who’s ever built a chair.” Eduardo demands to be let in on everything in the future, good or bad. In the deposition, things get heated between Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, in part because billionaire Mark is more interest in running his business from the deposition room than answering lawyers’ questions. He’s sarcastic and condescending, despite the fact that his accusers are sitting across a table from him. In 2004, as things get hot and heavy between Eduardo and Jenny, Mark sees Erica at a bar and approaches her. He offers an insincere apology and brags about theFacebook. Erica’s still pissed about the many insulting blog posts Mark published about her. She sends him away acidly and unintentionally twists the knife by offering him good luck with his “video game.” Immediately, Mark announces to Eduardo that they must expand to additional schools — Columbia, Yale, and most importantly, Stanford. He hires Dustin to help program in exchange for 5% of the business (from Mark’s share) and brings in suitemate CHRIS to work on publicity — starting with planting an article in the Boston University student newspaper.
The deposition breaks for lunch. Mark doesn’t eat, so an associate, MARYLIN, offers Mark some food. He turns her down. She asks if he hates the Winklevosses, but Mark says he knows they’re only suing him because they can’t accept that life can be unfair. Back in 2004, Divya informs Tyler and Cameron that theFacebook is expanding. Their rage renewed, Tyler realizes they can get to him through the school — by stealing their “property,” he violated the rules of Harvard. Cameron and Tyler agree to meet with the president of Harvard.
In Palo Alto, California, currently broke Napster founder SEAN PARKER bangs a Stanford coed, then borrows her laptop to check his e-mail. When he sees theFacebook, his interest is piqued. He decides he needs to meet with Mark Zuckerberg. Back in Cambridge, Cameron and Tyler have their meeting with LARRY SUMMERS, the intimidating president of Harvard. He scoffs at their claims, stating that this is not a Harvard issue and he won’t lift a finger to help them. Over spring break, Mark and Eduardo take a trip to New York to lure prospective advertisers. Mark humiliates Eduardo with his evident disinterest (he wears worse-than-casual apparel — flip-flops, a hoodie, and track pants, and spends most meetings staring at the floor), but Mark comes alive when they meet with Sean Parker at a trendy restaurant. Despite his youth, Sean can work a room and talk up a storm. Mark already views Sean as something of a hero, so he hangs on every word. Eduardo thinks he’s pompous and mostly useless. Taking the social cue, Sean focuses on Mark and largely ignores Eduardo. As he leaves, Sean instructs them to drop the “the” from “theFacebook,” which Eduardo states in a deposition was the only good thing he did for the burgeoning company.
Soon enough, scandal erupts, driving a wedge into Mark and Eduardo’s already raw friendship. After so much time spent trying to convince Mark that Sean’s no good, an issue of Harvard’s student paper reports that Eduardo has been connected with “torturing animals.” (In reality, the Phoenix club forced Eduardo to spend a week caring for a chicken as part of his grueling initiation. Eduardo ignorantly fed the chicken some…chicken from the cafeteria, to the disgust and consternation of animal rights’ activists declaring “forced cannibalism.) Eduardo’s humiliated, and Mark’s lack of sympathy doesn’t help — especially in light of the fact that Mark has secretly used Facebook to cheat on a final exam. As this argument takes place, Dustin monitors the number of subscribers as it rolls over to 150,000. Mark announces his decision to go to Palo Alto for the summer, rent a house, and bring along interns. He asks Eduardo for money, but Eduardo’s angry — he sees this as Mark wanting to get too close to Sean. Mark won’t relent. The next night, he holds a “group interview” for interns — 60 students gathered around a CS classroom in a hacker drinking game. The first ones to jump through Mark’s hacking hoops get the internship slots. As an apology, Eduardo drops by and tells Mark he opened an $18,000 account for Mark’s summer plans. In the deposition, lawyers grill Eduardo on this point — why would someone so against the plans help Mark out? Eduardo wants to be a team player.
Mark, Dustin, and the interns move into a Palo Alto house, only to discover Sean and his girlfriend living across the street. Sean is enthusiastic about Mark’s plans. He shows Mark around Silicon Valley and actively tries to expand the rift between Mark and Eduardo (who is spending the summer at a New York internship). Sean convinces Mark that he hasn’t been thinking big enough — Mark wants to make a million-dollar company, but Sean thinks it can be a billion-dollar company. As a gesture of good faith, Sean makes plans to take Facebook global. In England, Cameron and Tyler take part in an international rowing race, narrowly losing to a Dutch crew. PRINCE ALBERT of Monaco hosts the awards ceremony; despite his royal stature and relative politeness, Tyler is angry and belligerent after the loss. Later, Cameron and Tyler review footage of the race with their father and Divya. Another man, KENWRIGHT, pops along to relate an amusing anecdote about a new website, Facebook, which his Cambridge-attending daughter is using to discuss the race results with her friends at universities all over England, in realtime. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya are appalled. Cameron finally agrees that it’s time to take legal action.
Sean is angry that he can’t get ahold of legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz — the man is flat-out ignoring him, which prevents him from making good on his many promises to Mark. Eduardo arrives at the Palo Alto house and is shocked — it’s a pig sty filled with novelty-sized bongs and half-naked women. He’s pissed that Mark didn’t pick up him at the airport, as promised. Mark apologizes and takes Eduardo away from the chaos so they can catch up. Eduardo gets pissed at Mark’s questions — asking things he should already know the answers to, like when and why Eduardo quit his internship, and that Jenny has become too needy and demanding for him to tolerate. Eduardo is horrified that Mark has let Sean set up meetings with venture capitalists without his knowledge. He returns to New York, angrily. Mark and Sean meet with venture capitalist PETER THIEL, who offers them $500,000 and questions them about Eduardo’s role in the company.
Jenny breaks into Eduardo’s New York sublet. She’s pissed that he didn’t call her the moment he got back, and that he ignored all her calls and text messages while she was gone. A phone call from Mark interrupts the fight. Mark’s pissed because Eduardo froze the bank account. Eduardo says he was trying to get Mark’s attention — and speaking of getting attention, Jenny angrily sets fire to a gift Eduardo brought back with him. Eduardo puts him on speaker phone while he takes care of the fire. Mark tells Eduardo freezing the account was childish, then tells him about the $500,000 investment from Thiel, so Eduardo needs to get back to Silicon Valley ASAP. Eduardo hangs up and dumps Jenny. At Facebook’s new Silicon Valley offices, lawyers walk Eduardo through his contracts. Because of the change in the corporate structure, Eduardo’s ownership stake has risen to 34.4% (instead of 30), which Eduardo helpfully explains will accommodate them on the off-chance they need to dilute the stock for new investors. In the future deposition, Eduardo is livid about having signed these contracts. Why? Because when Mark invited Eduardo back to Silicon Valley under the guise of business meetings, Facebook attorneys inform him that a new capital investment from Michael Moritz has diluted the shit out of the stock — because of the shady contracts Eduardo signed, his ownership stake went from 34.4% to 0.03% overnight.
Eduardo confronts Mark and Sean about this ambush, but Mark points out that Eduardo that he hasn’t been a part of the company for a long time (bear in mind this is the fall of 2004 — at the latest, six months after the site launched), so he deserved to get screwed. Eduardo accuses Mark of planting the “animal cruelty” story in the Harvard paper and announces his intention to sue Mark; more than anything, Eduardo is pissed that Mark would let himself lose his only friend over something as petty as the credit for founding the site. Security escorts Eduardo out of the office, just as the subscriber base hits a million. Sean flirts with an intern (ASHLEIGH), which leads him back to a sorority party, where Sean, Ashleigh, and another couple snort coke and attempt to have a foursome — hindered by Sean’s obsession with talking about himself and his plans for Facebook. He’s so distracting, it takes them too long to realize the cops have busted up the party. They manage to hide the coke — but not the fact that Ashleigh’s only 17. Sean is arrested. Out on bond, he explains the situation to Mark, who makes it clear that Sean’s outlived his usefulness. It’s easily implied that, just as Mark planted the animal cruelty story, he also called the cops on the party. Mark pulls open a box of brand new business cards, which say “I’m CEO…Bitch.”
In the deposition room, Marylin shakes Mark out of his fog. Everyone’s left. He asks her out to dinner, but she turns him down — because his team of lawyers will be pulling an all-nighter to draft a settlement agreement. Mark is disappointed about the settlement. He decides to stick around for a little while longer. He gets onto Facebook, finds Erica Albright’s profile, and adds a friend request. As he waits, staring at the screen, wanting a response, titles explain that the Winklevosses settled for $65 million, while Eduardo settled for an unknown amount and had his “co-founder” status restored on the Facebook masthead. It further explains that Facebook has a user base of 180 million in 60 countries and is valued at $15 billion, making Mark the youngest billionaire in the world.
Preamble to the actual script notes: I love a lot of what Aaron Sorkin does. He’s a writer with a great many flaws — wild fluctuations in consistency (as evidenced in the four seasons he served on The West Wing, with episodes ranging from superb to shit), an apparent disinterest in long-term story or character continuity (not an issue in a feature script), and, most frustratingly, a penchant for sanctimonious dialogue above all else. When he’s firing on all cylinders, he has done some truly brilliant work (see also: the West Wing episodes “17 People” or “Two Cathedrals,” or pretty much any episode of Sports Night), but when he’s not, it’s amazing how far down he can plunge. Did anyone other than me tune in for the full run of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? What a shit heap that show turned out to be — great pilot, great Christmas episode, all sandwiched by utter, utter dreck, easily the worst writing of his career.
So with two recent creative and commercial failures (the aforementioned Studio 60… and 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, which made some money and garnered a deserved Oscar nomination for Philip Seymour Hoffman but sucked some pretty major balls for many of the same reasons Studio 60… did*), I was eager to read this script to see if Sorkin had redeemed himself. Short answer: yes.
Slightly longer answer: whether he made the choice himself or not (I’m too lazy to look up if he wrote this on spec or was hired to write it), Sorkin made a wise decision in writing an apolitical script. Much as I enjoyed significant chunks of The West Wing, his personal politics started to invade every pore (especially after 9/11), which got preachy and annoying. This carried on to Studio 60… and, obviously, Charlie Wilson’s War — but now he’s back, baby, with the politically neutral story of Mark Zuckerberg’s quest for success. Although it’s not a straight-up biopic, reading this script alongside The Muppet Man is a terrific case study. Virtually everything The Muppet Man got wrong (passively nerdy subject, thin supporting characters, endless montages), The Social Network gets right, starting with motivation: Sorkin incorporates a bit of the old Adam Carolla philosophy that when guys stop getting laid, they start designing skyscrapers in showing Zuckerberg’s motivation — his desire for fame and power, under the misguided notion that this will lead to love from one special girl. Erica’s subsequent appearances hammer the point home, but she pops up infrequently enough for it to seem relatively subtle.
More importantly, Sorkin quickly and easily makes every character — from Mark and Eduardo to bit players like Peter Thiel and Marylin — into distinctive, flawed, fully dimensional characters. Much of this occurs through his usual strong dialogue — in fact, typical of a Sorkin script, dialogue drives much of the story and character development, The Social Network zips through surprisingly long scenes (the first scene alone is 9 1/8ths pages, all dialogue) and a mammoth 161 pages on the strength of Sorkin’s banter. Unlike certain other writers of stylized dialogue, Sorkin never hits a false note with these characters. He doesn’t get too cutesy or clever, and each character has a distinctive speaking rhythm and diction. That much is a bit of a surprise — much as I enjoy his previous work, one consistent and deserved criticism is that everybody sounds pretty much the same. Not anymore.
The story itself isn’t quite as strong as the characters or the dialogue. The structure is designed around the collapse of Mark’s friendship with Eduardo — instead of merely telling the tedious story of Facebook’s rise to prominence — which is a great idea implemented reasonably well, but in the end, other story threads (notably the scheming Winklevosses and the rise and fall of Sean) feel oddly superfluous. Fortunately, the characters are interesting enough for this not to frustrate me as much as it could. As is frequently the case in the docudrama/biopic genre, the story just kinda peters out in the third act, but Sorkin does provide some nice moments here and there, including satisfying resolutions to the main beats of the story (the total destruction of Mark’s friendship with Eduardo, and a nice moment taking Mark back to Erica).
As for the nitpicky stuff — I don’t have much of it, and usually the nitpicky stuff doesn’t bother me nearly as much when the rest of the script is solid. Still, Sorkin’s self-proclaimed ignorance about all things technology is evident in the early “Mark Zuckerberg: master hacker” scenes, and the story seems so well-suited to the screenplay treatment that I’ll speculate (with no evidence to back me up) that he took plenty of liberties with the true story. Finally, and perhaps the only nitpick that genuinely annoyed the shit out of me, Sorkin downplays the influence of Friendster and MySpace on Facebook. He has a well-written scene in which it suddenly dawns on Mark that he’s forgotten an important element of the site — relationship status. An important element that was already on MySpace, and you’re nuts if you think a direct competitor would not have paid enough attention to MySpace’s features to realize that. A later, not-quite-so-well-written scene shows Mark coming up with the “idea” for “the Wall” — another concept that, at least in its earliest incarnation, was identical to MySpace’s profile comment board. Little things like this make me wonder if Sorkin got little details wrong among the things I don’t know anything about, like Harvard’s elaborate social structure, but I dunno… It all goes back to the issue of verisimilitude. The Muppet Man bugged me because it felt extremely inauthentic — The Social Network, on the other hand, could very well be wall-to-wall bullshit, but it felt real.
Despite my nitpicks and its overall length, The Social Network is a quick, compelling read. With a polish to iron out the kinks, it’s easily ready to go, even though I sort of think the MySpace story is more compelling (especially with its now-tragic ending). Read Julia Angwin’s even-more-gripping book Stealing MySpace and see if you agree.
*I don’t want to leave this without something resembling a full explanation/mini-review, but I don’t want to pull too much focus away from The Social Network, so those of you wanting to know my opinion on Studio 60… and Charlie Wilson’s War, read on; those who could give a fuck, go back up to the review and just accept that these two pieces of work were flawed at best.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — The chemistry-free “will they or won’t they get back together?” relationship between Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson killed this show before it had a chance to start. Easily the weakest subplot in the pilot, investing so goddamn much time on what should be, at best, a romantic subplot did the show no favors. Add to that the frequent West Wing Lite political subplots, wildly unfunny examples of Perry’s allegedly brilliant sketch comedy (the show would have benefited more from not showing the sketches at all than from Sorkin hiring great people like Mark McKinney to help him out), and the same “I’ve changed my mind on who/what this character/storyline is” sloppy writing that plagued The West Wing’s first season all added up to a dismal series.
Charlie Wilson’s War — An interesting story, unfortunately told mostly through Sorkin’s unsubtle, sanctimonious political dialogue. Drawing the obvious parallels to contemporary foreign policy problems would have worked fine if Sorkin could just rein himself in a little bit. Honestly, though, a bigger problem came from the actors (Tom Hanks in hammy Ladykillers mode, Julia Roberts completely phoning it in) and Mike Nichols’s suspiciously lugubrious directing. I don’t want to go too deep with my philosophies about Sorkin’s writing, but it seems to live and die on the strength of his collaborators. When they get it, it can frequently turn out well despite flaws. When they don’t, it turns out like this. Still, bonus points for Philip Seymour Hoffman, the only one in a large cast of people I typically like who understood he was in a screwball satire instead of a pompous docudrama. [Back]
Posted by Stan on December 15, 2009 5:12 PM