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net.wars: Beyond the zipline

When Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Sports Night) was signed to write the screenplay for a movie about Facebook, I think the general reaction was one of more or less bafflement. Sorkin has a great track record, sure, but how do you make a movie about a Web site, even if it's a social network? What are you going to show? People typing to each other?

Now that the movie is closer coming out (October 1 in the US) that we're beginning to see sneak peak trailers, and we can tell a lot more from the draft screenplay that's been floating around the Net. The copy I found is dated March 2009, and you can immediately tell it's the real thing: quality dialogue and construction, and the feel of real screenwriting expertise. Turns out, the way you write a screenplay about Facebook is to read the books, primarily the novelistic, not-so admired Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, along with other published material and look for the most dramatic bit of the story: the lawsuits eventually launched by the characters you're portraying. Through which, as a framing device, you can tell the story of the little social network that exploded. Or rather, Sorkin can. The script is a compelling read. (It's actually not clear to me that it can be improved by actually filming it.)

Judging from other commentaries, everyone seems to agree it's genuine, though there's no telling where in the production process that script was, how many later drafts there were, or how much it changed in filming and post-production.  There's also no telling who leaked it or why: if it was intentional it was a brilliant marketing move, since you could hardly ask for more word-of-mouth buzz.

If anyone wanted to design a moral lesson for the guy who keeps saying privacy is dead, it might be this: turn out your deepest secrets to portray you as a jerk who steals other people's ideas and codes them into the basis for a billion-dollar company, all because you want to stand out at Harvard and, most important, win the admiration of the girl who dumped you. Think the lonely pathos of the socially ostracized, often overlooked Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl crossed with the arrogant, obsessive intelligence of Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. (Two characters I actually like, but they shouldn't breed.)

Neither the book nor the script is that: they're about as factual as 1978's The Buddy Holly Story or any other Hollywood biopic. Mezrich, who likes to write books about young guys who get rich fast (you can see why; he's gotten several bestsellers out of this approach), had no help from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, What dialogue there is has been "re-created", and sources other than disaffected co-founder Eduardo Saverin are anonymous. Lacking sourcing (although of course the court testimony is public information), it's unclear how fictional the dramatization is. I'd have no problem with that if the characters weren't real people identified by their real names.

Places, too. Probably the real-life person/place/thing that comes off worst is Harvard, which in the book especially is practically a caricature of the way popular culture likes to depict it: filled with the rich, the dysfunctional, and the terminally arrogant who vie to join secretive, elite clubs that force them to take part in unsavoury hazing rituals. So much so that it was almost a surprise to read in Wikipedia that Mezrich actually went to Harvard.

Journalists and privacy advocates have written extensively about the consequences for today's teens of having their adolescent stupidities recorded permanently on Facebook or elsewhere, but Zuckerberg is already living with having his fratboy early days of 2004 documented and endlessly repeated. Of course one way to avoid having stupid teenaged shenanigans reported is not to engage in them, but let's face it: how many of us don't have something in our pasts we'd just as soon keep out of the public eye? And if you're that rich that young, you have more opportunities than most people to be a jerk.

But if the only stories people can come up with about Zuckerberg date from before he turned 21, two thoughts occur. First, that Zuckerberg has as much right as anybody to grow up into a mature human being whose early bad judgement should be forgiven. To cite two examples: the tennis player Andre Agassi was an obnoxious little snert at 18 and a statesman of the game at 30; at 30. Bill Gates was criticized for not doing enough for charity but now at 54 is one of the world's most generous philanthropists. It is, therefore, somewhat hypocritical to demand that Zuckerberg protect today's teens from their own online idiocy while constantly republishing his follies.

Second, that outsized, hyperspeed business success might actually have forced him to grow up rather quickly. Let's face it, it's hard to make an interesting movie out of the hard work of coding and building a company.

And a third: by joining the 500 million and counting who are using Facebook we are collectively giving Zuckerberg enough money not to care either way.