"The Social Network" is a whodunit for the Internet age. Was the billion-dollar behemoth known as Facebook solely the idea of Mark Zuckerberg, a flip-flop-wearing hacker at Harvard? Or did he lie, cheat and steal his way toward Web glory, leaving wronged classmates in his egocentric wake?
That's the central question David Fincher explores in his new film, penned by Aaron Sorkin and starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. The film delivers no easy answers, just a riveting, two-hour ride showcasing the creative energy and energetic backstabbing of young entrepreneurs in Cambridge and Silicon Valley.
MTV News friended the production early on, following every casting development and trailer release since the project was announced. Before you hit the theater this weekend, point and click your way toward total information awareness with MTV News' "Social Network" cheat sheet.
Friending Hollywood
Word leaked in June of last year that Fincher was circling the rather-straightforward project, a curious move for a director known for such a distinct visual style. What would a guy who brought Tyler Durden of "Fight Club" and John Doe of "Seven" to the screen do with a nerd from the Ivy League?
By the next month, there was still no official announcement about Fincher's involvement, and when we asked producer Kevin Spacey about his helming duties, Spacey responded, "I think we are close to announcing a director." September came, Fincher had signed on, and the search was on for the actor to play Zuckerberg. Names that cropped up on the Web included Eisenberg, Michael Cera and Paul Rust, but the role eventually went to Eisenberg (who'd previously issued MTV News a non-denial denial of his involvement. Justin Timberlake came aboard at the same time, followed by Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara and Max Minghella.
"I just made a tape, probably 20 pages of dialogue, and sent in the tape because I live in New York City and they were casting in California," Eisenberg told us in January about the casting process. "Then they called me for a meeting. It was fairly painless."
Removing Privacy Settings
By that point, filming was already under way. The first official look at the film didn't arrive until June, delivering the memorable tagline, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." The first teaser trailer dropped days later and contained not a single frame from the actual movie, just voice-overs and all-caps words like "punk" and "genius." As odd as it sounds, the trailer was as perfect as a teaser trailer can be. A second teaser popped up the next month: still with no film footage but with similarly intense voice-overs and imagery from Facebook pages themselves.
Not until the middle of July did we get our first glimpse of real "Social Network" footage. Set to a choral take on Radiohead's "Creep," the trailer gave us snappy dialogue, looks at Harvard's boozy social life and the backstabbing that began even before Facebook went online.
Status Updates
As the film's October release date approached, the cast began to speak more openly about the production. "Why actors love working with [Fincher] and why I loved working with him is because you try a scene in 200 different ways; you know he is able to edit together several different performances for each role," Eisenberg told us. "We would be often doing half the scene 60 times one way, then 60 times a little more engaged."
Timberlake spoke with us about how the film is potentially divisive. His personal experience was that some of his friends sided with Zuckerberg's version of events, while others agreed with his adversaries. "But one of my friends specifically said ... 'I don't 100 percent agree with any of the characters, but I don't disagree with any of them,' " Timberlake said. "Life is life. Things happen sloppily."
Life can also be cruel, which is why, even after making a movie so intimately tied to Internet culture, Eisenberg avoids reading about himself online at all costs. "I know that I'm written about online — we're all written about online," he told us. "It's incredibly painful to read it, so I stay off of it. People can write things that are terribly cruel because of the anonymity of the Internet."
Check out everything we've got on "The Social Network."
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