Facebook Founder Not Friending Film

Zuckerberg says Sorkin's script has his motives wrong

Boy billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is not happy about the way he's portrayed in a much-buzzed-about movie chronicling the creation of Facebook.

“The Social Network,” David Fincher’s thriller from Sony, gives a hardly flattering treatment to Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old who founded Facebook while a student at Harvard. Producer Scott Rudin told The New York Times that two Facebook execs saw the movie "and they do not like it."

Zuckerberg told WaxWord in Sun Valley more than a month ago that the movie, due out Oct. 1, got his motives for starting the site all wrong.

“I started Facebook to improve the world, and make it a more transparent place,” he said. “This movie portrays me as someone who built Facebook so I could meet girls.”

Facebook negotiated for months with Sony to get them to rely on an authorized history of the company written by New York Times writer David Kirkpatrick, instead of the account by Ben Mezrich, who wrote “The Accidental Billionaires,” according to The Wrap. Aaron Sorkin, the man behind TV's "The West Wing," wound up writing the screenplay.

“In Mr. Sorkin’s telling, Mr. Zuckerberg is not so much villain as antihero, a flawed human being whose deep need for acceptance becomes the driving force behind a website that offers the illusion of it,” wrote the Times.

Facebook looked into legal action, but ultimately decided to ignore the film, wrote the Times.

“We would have cooperated with them if they could have made a movie that was the real story,” Zuckerberg said.


Selected Reading
: The New York Times, TheWrap.com, TheSocialNetwork.com.

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