the social network

Facebook Founders Call The Social Network ‘Fiction’

Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerberg.

Last month, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz said The Social Network, the film about Facebook’s apparently dramatic origins opening the New York Film Festival in September, “emphasizes things that didn’t matter” to the founders in reality. The Times reports today that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues “have been locked in a tense standoff with [The Social Network’s] filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals.”

Zuckerberg says the Aaron Sorkin–penned film, loosely based on journalist Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, is “fiction.” But Zuckerberg’s colleagues, at one point, actually negotiated with the filmmakers, anyway:

“[Producer Scott Rudin] described months of backdoor contacts during which he tried to ease relations with Mr. Zuckerberg by letting colleagues of the Facebook chief read the script, and even by accommodating them with small changes. Facebook had insisted on bigger changes, which the producers declined to make.”

One scene still up for grabs involves breasts and cocaine!

“As of this week, Mr. Rudin said, one remaining question was to what extent the finished film would include a scene that depicted Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who was heavily involved with Facebook’s early history, delivering his dialogue while a pair of teenage girls offer partygoers lines of cocaine from bared breasts.”

Yeah, we’re going to guess that scene made the cut. Anyway, these people are complaining about being depicted as nerds turned sexy, tech-y party boys? That’s the best way for fiction to embellish your mundane life, and it’s certainly not the worst thing anyone’s said about Mark Zuckerberg. Just take the label, guys!

Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired [NYT via Gawker]

Facebook Founders Call The Social Network ‘Fiction’