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Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Social Network

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The Social Network is a 2010 drama about the founding of the social networking websiteFacebook and the resulting lawsuits. The film was directed by David Fincher and features anensemble cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song,Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello, and Rooney Mara.
Aaron Sorkin adapted his screenplay from Ben Mezrich's 2009 nonfiction book The Accidental Billionaires. Sorkin also makes a cameo appearance as a would-be investor. Neither founderMark Zuckerberg nor any other member of the Facebook team were involved with the project, although Eduardo Saverin was a consultant for Mezrich's story.[3] The film was released in theUnited States by Columbia Pictures on October 1, 2010 to critical acclaim.
The film won the award for Best Motion Picture – Drama at the 68th Golden Globe Awards on January 16, 2011.[4] The film also won the awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score, making it the film with the most wins of the night


Plot

In 2003, Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) has the idea to create a website to rate the attractiveness of female Harvard undergraduates after his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) breaks up with him. Mark hacks into the databases of various residence halls, downloads pictures and names of female students and, in a few hours, using an algorithmfor ranking chess players supplied by his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), he creates a website called "FaceMash", where male students can interactively choose which of two girls presented at a time is more attractive.
Mark is punished with six months of academic probation after the traffic to the site brings down parts of Harvard's network, and becomes vilified among most of Harvard's female community. However, the popularity of "FaceMash" and the fact that he created it in one night, while drunk, brings him to the attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer), identical twinsand members of Harvard's rowing team, and their business partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). As a result, he gains a job working for the Winklevoss twins as the programmer of their website, Harvard Connection.
Soon afterwards, Mark approaches Eduardo and tells him of his idea for what he calls "Thefacebook", an online social networking website exclusive to Harvard University students. He explains this would let people share personal and social information securely. Eduardo agrees to help Mark, providing $1,000 to help start the site. They distribute the link to Eduardo's connections at the Phoenix S-K final club, and it quickly becomes popular throughout the student body. When they learn of Thefacebook, the Winklevoss twins and Narendra believe that Zuckerberg had stolen their idea while simultaneously stalling on their website. Tyler and Divya want to sue Mark for intellectual property theft, but Cameron convinces them they can settle the matter as "Harvard gentlemen" without resorting to the courts.
At a visiting lecture by Bill Gates, fellow Harvard University student Christy Lee (Brenda Song) introduces herself and her best friend Alice Cantwel (Malese Jow) to Eduardo and Mark. She asks that the boys "Facebook us"; their use of this phrase impresses both of them. Christy invites them to a bar, where she and Eduardo have sex in the restroom. Mark later runs into Erica, who is not aware of The Facebook's existence because she is not a Harvard University student. Stung by this, Mark decides to expand the site to more schools.
As The Facebook grows in popularity, they expand to other schools in the Northeastern United States, while the Winklevoss twins and Narendra become angrier at seeing "their idea" advance without them. Cameron refuses to sue them, instead accusing Mark of violating the Harvard student Code of Conduct. Through their father's connections they arrange a meeting with Harvard President Larry Summers, who is dismissive and sees no potential value in either a disciplinary action or in Thefacebook website itself.
Through Christy, now Eduardo's girlfriend, Eduardo and Mark arrange a meeting with Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). When Christy, Mark, and Eduardo meet Sean Parker, Eduardo becomes skeptical of Parker, noting his problematic personal and professional history. Christy also notes that Eduardo seems jealous of Parker, and attempts to calm him in order to avoid causing a scene. Mark, however, is impressed with Parker, who presents a vision for Facebook similar to his own. Although no deals are reached, in a parting comment, Parker suggests that they drop "The" from Thefacebook, to make it simply "Facebook". Eduardo later characterizes this as Parker's biggest contribution to the project.
At Parker's suggestion, Mark moves the company's base of operation to Palo Alto, while Eduardo remains in New York seeking advertising support. When Eduardo visits from New York, he is angered to find that Parker is living at the house they have rented and is making business decisions for Facebook. After an argument with Mark, Eduardo freezes the company's bank account and returns to New York. Upon returning, Christy argues with Eduardo about his Facebook profile, which still lists him as "single". When Christy questions Eduardo about why he has not changed his Facebook profile, he tells her he does not know how to, further infuriating Christy because she believes he is lying. She cites his profile as evidence he cheated on her with promiscuous women in Silicon Valley and subsequently sets fire to a scarf he has given to her as a gift. While Eduardo extinguishes the fire, Mark reveals on the phone that they have secured money from an angel investor through Parker's contacts. As a result of Christy's arson attempt, Eduardo ends his relationship with her.
Meanwhile in England, while competing in the Henley Royal Regatta for Harvard, the Winklevoss twins discover that Facebook has expanded to a number of universities there. They decide to sue. Meanwhile, Eduardo discovers that the deal he signed with Parker's investors has allowed them to dilute his share of the company from thirty-four percent to three hundredths of a percent, while maintaining the ownership percentage of all other parties. He confronts his erstwhile friend Mark and announces his intention to sue him. Later that night, during a party celebrating Facebook's 1 millionth member, Parker and a number of Facebook interns are arrested for possession of cocaine.
The framing device throughout the film shows Mark testifying in depositions in two lawsuits: one filed by the Winklevoss twins, and the other filed by Eduardo. In the final scene, Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a junior lawyer for the defense informs Mark they will be settling with Eduardo, since the sordid details of Facebook's founding and Mark's personality will make a jury highly unsympathetic. The film ends with Mark sending a friend request to his former girlfriend Erica on Facebook, and refreshing the page every few seconds waiting for a response.

[edit]Cast

[edit]Production

[edit]Casting

Casting began in early August 2009, and open auditions were held in various states. Jesse Eisenberg was first announced to be attached to the project in September 2009.[8] (Coincidentally, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer, Zuckerberg revealed that Eisenberg's cousin, Eric Fisher, was a Facebook product designer.) Several days later, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfieldwere confirmed to portray the roles of Sean Parker and Eduardo Saverin. In October 2009, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer,Shelby Young, and Josh Pence were cast.[9] Max Minghella and Dakota Johnson were also confirmed to star in the film.[9] In a 2009 interview with The Baltimore Sun, Eisenberg said, "Even though I've gotten to be in some wonderful movies, this character seems so much more overtly insensitive in so many ways that seem more real to me in the best way. I don't often get cast as insensitive people, so it feels very comfortable: fresh and exciting, as if you never have to worry about the audience. Not that I worry about the audience anyway - it should be just the furthest thing from your mind. The Social Network is the biggest relief I've ever had in a movie."[10]

[edit]Filming

Filming for The Social Network began in October 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[11] Scenes were filmed around the campuses of two Massachusetts prep schools, Phillips Academy and Milton Academy.[12] Additional scenes were filmed on the campus of Wheelock College, which was set up to be Harvard's campus.[13] (Harvard has turned down most requests for on-location filming ever since the filming of Love Story (1970), which caused significant physical damage to the campus.[14]) Filming took place on the Keyser and Wyman quadrangles in theHomewood campus of Johns Hopkins University from November 2–4,[15] which also doubled for Harvard in the film.[16] The first scene in the film, where Zuckerberg is with his girlfriend, took 99 takes to finish.[3] The film was shot on the Red One digital cinema camera at 4K resolution.[17] The rowing scenes with the Winklevoss brothers were filmed at Community Rowing Inc. in Newton, MA[18] and Henley Royal Regatta.[19] Although a significant portion of the latter half of the film is set in Silicon Valley, the filmmakers opted to shoot those scenes inLos Angeles and Pasadena. Miniature faking process was used in a sequence showing a rowing event at the Henley Royal Regatta.
Armie Hammer, who portrayed the Winklevoss twins, acted alongside a body double while his scenes were filmed. His face was later digitally grafted onto the face of the double during post-production.[20] Hammer states that director David Fincher "likes to push himself and likes to push technology" and is "one of the most technologically minded guys I've ever seen."[20]

[edit]Soundtrack

Main article: The Social Network (soundtrack)
On June 1, 2010, it was announced that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross would score the film.[21] The soundtrack was released September 28 in various formats under the Null Corporation label.[22] Leading up to the release of the soundtrack, a free 5-track EP was made available for download.[23] The White Stripes' song "Ball and Biscuit" can be heard in the opening of the film and the Beatles' song "Baby, You're a Rich Man" concludes the film. Neither song appears on the soundtrack. Trent Reznor won the award for best original soundtrack at the 2011 Golden Globe awards.[24]
The movie itself contains 18 songs,[25] some of which are not found on the soundtrack. These include songs from The Beatles, Bob Marley,10cc, Gluecifer, and The White Stripes.
The background song used in the club scene (in California) is performed by Dennis de Laat, and is called "Sound of Violence (Main Mix)".[26]It does not appear on the soundtrack.

[edit]Marketing

The first theatrical poster was released on June 18, 2010.[27] The film's first teaser trailer was released on June 25, 2010.[28] The second teaser was released on July 8.[29] The full length theatrical trailer debuted on July 15, 2010, which plays an edited version of the song "Creep", originally by Radiohead, covered by the Belgian choir group Scala & Kolacny Brothers.[30][31] The trailer was then shown in theaters, prior to the films Inception, Dinner for Schmucks, Salt, Easy A, The Virginity Hit and The Other Guys.[32] Another song used in a trailer for TV featured an instrumental version of the song "Go Do" from the album Go by Jonsi.[citation needed]

[edit]Reception and response

[edit]Response by the principals (film and Facebook)

The film's script was leaked on the Internet in July 2009.[33][34] In November 2009, executive producer Kevin Spacey said, "The Social Network is probably going to be a lot funnier than people might expect it to be."[35] The Cardinal Courier stated that the film was about "greed, obsession, unpredictability and sex" and asked "although there are over 500 million Facebook users, does this mean Facebook can become a profitable blockbuster movie?"[36] At the D8 conference hosted by D: All Things Digital on June 2, 2010, host Kara Swisher told Zuckerberg she knew he was not happy with The Social Network being based on him, to which he replied, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive."[37] Zuckerberg stated to Oprah Winfrey that the drama and partying of the film is mostly fiction, explaining "this is my life, so I know it's not so dramatic," and that he spent most of the past six years focusing, working hard, and coding Facebook.[38] Speaking to an audience at Stanford University, Zuckerberg stated that the film portrayed his motivations for creating Facebook inaccurately; instead of an effort to "get girls", he says he created the site because he enjoys "building things".[39] However, he added that the film accurately depicted his real-life wardrobe, saying, "It's interesting the stuff that they focused on getting right – like every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own."[39]
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz called the film a "dramatization of history ... it is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn't matter," he said. According to Moskovitz:
A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I'm just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.... The plot of the book/script unabashedly attacked [Zuckerberg], but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is.[40]
Mark Zuckerberg, creator ofFacebook.
Screenwriter Sorkin has stated that, "I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"[41]
Much of the negative response to The Social Network has come from technology writers, some of whom saw the film as an attack on new technologies and those responsible for them.[citation needed]Journalist Jeff Jarvis acknowledged the film was "well-crafted" but called it "the anti-social movie", objecting to Sorkin's decision to change various events and characters for dramatic effect, and dismissing it as "the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see."[42]Technology broadcaster Leo Laporte concurred, calling the film "anti-geek and misogynistic".[43]Sorkin responded to the allegations of misogyny by asserting that all the female characters depicted in the film were real and accurately portrayed for the sake of making a realistic film.[44]
Andrew Clark of The Guardian wrote that "there's something insidious about this genre of [docudrama] scriptwriting," wondering if "a 26-year-old businessman really deserves to have his name dragged through the mud in a murky mixture of fact and imagination for the general entertainment of the movie-viewing public?" Clark added, "I'm not sure whether Mark Zuckerberg is a punk, a genius or both. But I won't be seeing The Social Network to find out."[45]
Several noteworthy tech journalists and bloggers voiced their opinions of how the film portrays its real-life characters. Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore, blogging for CNN, said: "If the Facebook founder [Zuckerberg] is concerned about being represented as anything but a genius with an industrious work ethic, he can breathe a sigh of relief."[46] Jessi Hempel, a technology writer for Fortune who says she's known Zuckerberg "for a long time", wrote of the film:
The real-life Zuckerberg was maniacally focused on building a web site that could potentially connect everyone on the planet…By contrast, in the film he seems more obsessed with achieving the largesse that bad boy Sean Parker, an original Napster founder, portrays when he arrives to meet Zuckerberg at a New York restaurant.[47]
Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig wrote in The New Republic that Sorkin's screenplay doesn’t acknowledge the "real villain" of the story:
The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because "our idea was stolen!") of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can't know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other "property"? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the "idea" of a social network is not a patent. It wasn't justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.[48]
In an onstage discussion with The Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington, during Advertising Week 2010 in New York, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said she had seen the film and it was "very Hollywood" and mainly "fiction". "In real life, he [Zuckerberg] was just sitting around with his friends in front of his computer, ordering pizza," she declared. "Who wants to go see that for two hours?"[49]
Indian American Divya Narendra said that he was "initially surprised" to see himself portrayed by the non-Indian actor Max Minghella but also admitted that the actor did a "good job in pushing the dialogue forward and creating a sense of urgency in what was a very frustrating period."[50]

[edit]Critical response

The Social Network received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 261 reviews, with an average score of 9/10 and a critical consensus of: "Impeccably scripted, beautifully directed, and filled with fine performances, The Social Network is a riveting, ambitious example of modern filmmaking at its finest." It has a 100% among "Top Critics".[51] The film also holds a score of 95 based on 42 reviews on Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim" and making it one of the site's highest rated movies of all time.[52] Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, giving it four stars wrote: "David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive."[53] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, gave the film his first full four star rating of the year and said: "The Social Networkis the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade."[54] The Harvard Crimson review called it "flawless" and gave it five stars.[55] Quentin Tarantino listed The Social Network as one of his favorite 20 movies of the year, second to Toy Story 3.[56]
Some reviewers pointed out that the film plays loosely with the facts behind Facebook's founding. Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journalpraised the film as exhilarating but noted: "The biographical part takes liberties with its subject. Aaron Sorkin based his supersmart and superbly funny screenplay on a contentious book, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, so everything that's seen isn't necessarily to be believed."[57]
The film won the "Hollywood Ensemble Award" from the Hollywood Awards.[58][59]

[edit]Box office




During its opening weekend in the United States, the film debuted at number-one, grossing $22.4 million in 2,771 theaters.[60] The film retained the top spot in its second weekend, dropping only 31.2%,[60] breaking Inception's 32.0% record as the smallest second weekend drop for any number-one film of 2010, while being the third smallest overall behind Secretariat's 25.1% drop and Tooth Fairy's 28.6% drop. As of January 15, 2011, the film has grossed $94 million in the United States and $108 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $200 million

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