Everything You Need to Know About the Social Network Movie

The Social Network, set to hit theaters on October 1, 2010, is a drama directed by David Fincher about the founding of the social networking Web site, Facebook. The film concentrates on the tumultuous first years of Facebook, focusing on founder Mark Zuckerberg, who lauched the site from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. It was written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted by Ben Mezrich’s 2009 nonfiction book The Accidental Billionaires.

Casting for the movie began in August 2009, with Jesse Eisenberg being the first actor announced to be attached to the project during the following month. Eisenberg stars as Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2009, he shared his excitement with the Baltimore Sun stating, "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.”

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 movie is told in a series of flashbacks recalled during a court hearing. The film begins on 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 Harvard’s online collection of student photos into a Web site where he and his friends rank the Harvard women as various farm animals.  His “Facebook” is so popular that it crashes the entire Harvard network within a half hour.

Zuckerberg then drops out of college and moves to California, where he teams up with Sean Parker, the co-founder of the music piracy site Napster, to build his Facebook. The movie focuses on the first turbulent years of Facebook, the global social networking site that is now considered a revolution in communication. Within six years of the creation of this social network, Zuckerberg is named the youngest billionaire in history. However, with a large amount of success comes responsibility as well as both legal and personal difficulties as the tag line of the movie reads, “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few 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 movie are 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 was leaked on the Internet, it became evident to Zuckerberg that he was not going to be portrayed in the most positive manner. 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 plot of the book/script unabashedly attack [Zuckerberg], but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer. At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is."

Zuckerberg has not been actively endorsing The Social Network and when asked about it he replied, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive." According to The Times Online site, critics who have seen the script for the movie say it portrays Zuckerberg as a “borderline-autistic conniver.”

The movie is being produced by Kevin Spacey, who told MTV it’s a “great story for people that 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. Their earlier film, Se7en, was a dark, violent, horror movie, which is exactly what Fincher is known for. Spacey told MTV News that The Social Network, however, will take a different approach and “probably be a lot funnier than people might expect it to be.”

Whether the film is true to real life or not, it’s sure to attract moviegoers when it makes it big-screen debut on October 1. Facebook users will without a doubt flock to theaters to watch it then report their reviews, positive and negative, via status update on their favorite social network.