Originally posted April 2010
WATCH THE NEW TRAILER!! The Social Network will make its world premiere as the opening night film of the New York Film Festival on September 24th. It opens nationwide on October 1st.
Jessie Eisenerberg and Justin Timberlake star in in The Social Network (due out October 15, 2010) which chronicles the many different claims to Facebook. “The Facebook movie” (as it’s being loosely called) is produced and adapted by West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich‘s book The Accidental Billionaires who also wrote Bringing down the House (about the famous Vegas/MIT card-counting ring which came to the big screen as 21 and starred Kevin Spacey, who is also executive producing the Facebook movie).
David Fincher directed this little gem, who also directed Alien (Sigourney Weaver), Se7en (Brad Pitt) and Fight Club (yes, also Brad Pitt).
The heavyweight ensemble will keep this flick in the top tiers whereas other equally time-appropriate corporate scandal films of their era like Pirates of Silicon Valley and Barbarians at the Gates fell short for lack of Hollywood heavy-weight involvement, and put them straight to video.
Also producing the upcoming Facebook movie are Mike De Luca, Scott Rudin and Aaron Sorkin whose screenplay, we hear will include more content from other interviews conducted with people not included in Mezrich’s book.
Andrew Garfield who was just announced (7/02/10) to take over as Peter Parker for Tobey Maguire in the upcoming Spiderman film, due out in 2012,
will play Eduardo Saverin (another co-founder of Facebook with settled claim to the throne). Andrew also happens to have been born in LA, which makes him an LA native !
As of the original post date of the article (4/30/10) Deadline Hollywood, Variety and Sony Pictures itself have not put out anything on the scandal of the decade but I am watching with baited breath.
This movie has all the right components:
- AFFLUENCE: The affluent Winklevoss twins from Harvard who’s father helped them fight for their financial stake to the Facebook empire, yielding them a $65 Million settlement
- OLD WISE GURU & YOUNG NEW PADOWAN: Sean Parker, the God-father of music hacking who co-founded Napster and was brought to justice in the 90s, returns as the wise mentor to young Mark Zuckerberg, who taught him how to unravel his start-up from classmate claims by making it bigger better and incorporating. *Sean, who the world should know, is the most interesting person to watch in this movie for sure, why else would JT pick to play? After Napster, Sean Parker also co-founded contact sharing software company Plaxo, and then helped Zuckerberg to do new rounds of financing and used his expertise and savvy to propel the site from a cool new video game into Facebook, Inc., of which his fee included becoming “Founding President”. Sean Parker is now at the Founders Fund, a venture capital fund that specializes in social networking start-ups.
- CHAINING OF THE GUARDS: Mark Zuckerberg is to Bill Gates as your PC is to Facebook mobile.
- POWER TO THE POEPLE: The power struggle between consumers and big business has changed dramatically – moving your life online means you become savvy to other options, lower prices and hundreds of vendor reviews listed everywhere instead of marketing pricing schemes, psychological-based corporate advertising, and lengthy phone calls to the Better Business Bureau.
- RIDICULOUSLY GOOD-LOOKING CAST: Justin Timberlake plays Facebook Inc. & Napster founder Sean Parker, Armie Hammer (Poppy Lifton’s accomplice who duped Serena last season on Gossip Girl) & Josh Pence (V magazine model, and an *LA native ~ SAMO High ’00) play real life twins Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss *(world class rowing champions for Harvard U, Oxford and the US Olympic team who invented an early concept for what later became Facebook, called ConnectU), Jessie Eisenberg who plays Mark Zuckerberg, and new-comer Andrew Garfield is super hot and plays Eduardo Saverin (a third Facebook co-founder claimer with a settled lawsuit with Mark).
I am friendly with the Winklevoss twins and they sent me a cute picture for this story of them both at Oxford “matriculation” a couple years ago, which is an amazing ceremony only had in English schools that celebrates the entry of new classmen.
The Facebook Movie will take audiences through four undergraduate years at Harvard University, the Facebook offices in Palo Alto, the 2008 Chinese Olympics where the Wilnklevoss twins compete for the US Rowing Team and “the Boat Race” in London, their version of the Super Bowl, where Prince Albert of Monaco attends to watch Oxford face off against Cambridge University. (The 2010 race was this past weekend, where the Winklevoss twins competed for Oxford, tho Cambridge won, boo.)
The Winklevoss twins, Cameron specifically, now runs a Manhattan social calendar site called Guest of a Guest - that is a more journalistic approach to ConnectU and Facebook’s intent but still links it all together for certain crowds in NY, and now LA. To me, a $65 Million settlement spells out their right to the claim and I excited to see the portrayed on the big screen. Ironically – Cameron and his brother Tyler had a launch party for the west coast edition to their site in LA this weekend that brought the two Hollywood actors who have now wrapped playing them in this film – Josh Pence and Armie Hammer. You can photos of them all together – quite a sight! – at this link: http://la.guestofaguest.com/movies/the-faces-of-the-facebook-movie/
IMAGES FROM THE FILM:
Here are 10 more reasons to get excited about this film out October 15th, 2010:
- Pirates of Silicon Valley, part 2 with Mark Zuckerberg as the Bill Gates 2.0
- Barbarians at the Login page – Five claims to the social networking giant
- Tale of a bunch of cute Harvard boys who all stumbled onto the next new thing at the same time
- The Winklevoss twins competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics with the US Rowing Team – not in the movie but very impressive – they’re Olympics heros and you should support them
- A deeper look at Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle who turned Facebook from the “new Friendster” into an advertising, marketing, emailing, IM-ing, photo-sharing machine
- V magazine model Josh Pence plays Cameron
- Gossip Girl con man Armie Hammer plays Tyler
- Prince Albert of Monaco is portrayed in one of the scenes which I am guessing is in a boat race scene
- Cute “first time” scenes between Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg) and his Harvard girlfriend (?Rashida?)
- Kevin Spacey X Justin Timberlake X Aaron Sorkin X David Fincher = AMAZING
Andrew Garfield was just announced (7/02/10) to take over as Peter Parker for Tobey Maguire, in the upcoming Spiderman film, due out in 2012. Andrew also happens to have been born in LA, which makes him an LA native!
CAST & CREDITS:
Title: “The Social Network” but being referred to as “The Facebook Movie”
Plot: Zuckerberg vs the Winklevoss Twins vs another co-founder from Harvard named Eduardo vs the brains from Napster Sean Parker that pulled Facebook, and Mark, out of the sandbox and into Palo Alto
Director: David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Alien)
Producer: Kevin Spacey, Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin, Aaron Sorkin
Script: Aaron Sorkin (West Wing)
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Jesse Eisenberg … Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder of Facebook, former employee at ConnectU)
Justin Timberlake … Sean Parker (former Napster co-founder, and current Facebook, Inc. Founder)
Armie Hammer … Cameron Winklevoss (co-founder of ConnectU – an early version of Facebook for the Ivy League)
Josh Pence … Tyler Winklevoss (co-founder of ConnectU – an early version of Facebook for the Ivy League)
John Hayden … Mr. Winklevoss, their dad and backer of his son’s brainstorm for the first Facebook at Harvard, called ConnectU, which Mark Zuckerberg was hired to code
James Shanklin … Prince Albert (of Monaco who is in some of the Winklevoss boat race scenes)
Andrew Garfield … Eduardo Saverin (another co-founder of Facebook with settled claim to the throne)
Joseph Mazzello … Dustin Moskovitz
Rashida Jones (LA NATIVE) … plays the girlfriend of Mark or Edward, not sure which
Malese Jow (Vampire Diaries) … Alice, another girlfriend, not sure who’s will update one day, soon
Buy the book on Amo:
http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Facebook-Betrayal/dp/0385529376
POWER FLOW IN CONSUMER AMERICA:
- In the 70s we had the Pirates of Silicon Valley with the infamous early computer adopters Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who changed the world by taking computers out of obscurity and putting them into every home in America.
- In the 80s we met The Barbarians at the Gates - the new Wall Street became all about M&A and the infamous KKR boys Henry Kravis, George Roberts, and Jerome Kohlberg defined a new capitalism that turned America into a monopoly-driven kingdom for 2 decades.
- In the 90s we had the tech crunch and internet start-ups. A new set up Kings took the helm and American business moved online with AOL, Amazon and Napster. Everything became either cheap, easy or free and the previous structures became to change.
- In the 2000s, online social networks were born and American society & culture moved online. Social lives, scrapbooks, dating, and email were trumped by Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, changing the consumer process forever and giving America serfdom their own voice.
