After pulling the plug on another dubious-sounding concept of a movie in “Moneyball,” Sony is set to embark upon another potential folly, as they are in “advanced talks” with David Fincher to direct a script by Aaron Sorkin about the creation of social networking site “Facebook.”
Update: Variety jumps into the fray, prolly annoyed that EW beat them to the punch, but they deliver the title of the film-to-be and it’s apparently called, “The Social Network.” All parties involved are aiming to get into production later this year.
Scott Rudin, Mike DeLuca and Kevin Spacey are producing this, which makes you wonder what kind of script Sorkin has penned. Invented in a Harvard dorm by student Mark Zuckerberg and friends, the site, for those of you who understandably have better things to do, was originally created only for college students, until illiterates and your mid-life crisis-having aunt got curious, opening it up to a world of douchebags who wanted to put up pictures of themselves performing ironic gang signs but found MySpace too “taxing.”
The script is top secret at this point, but Harvard is a big school with lots of hallways to walk and talk through, and it is a Sorkin script so… yeah. Ummm, raise your hands if you’re dying to see this film. Yeah, we thought so. Wouldn’t thousands of fans rather see “Torso” (aka The Eliot Ness project) “Heavy Metal,” and even that ‘Chef Movie‘ with Keanu Reeves? Perhaps proof that Hollywood pictures have weird ebbs and flows, and sometimes interest spikes and then dies within mere weeks. Look at Robert Rodriguez’s roller coaster ride of up-down projects for further examples.
Update: The film is apparently an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s upcoming book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” and while that’s probably it, there’s no real reporting to back up this assertion other than yeah, this totally makes sense. Apparently Ben Mezrich’s tweets allude to it as well. Rolling Stone has a good article on all of this from June, 2008.
The thesis of the article was: Mark Zuckerberg launched an online empire from his dorm room at Harvard. Now four fellow students say he stole their idea. So money, genius betrayal seems to say it all if you want to know what this one’s going to be all about. Kind of sounds like a quasi-modern “Wall Street” in many ways.