By Scott Brown | Wired October 2010
In early October, with much fanfare and an eye on the Oscars, Sony Pictures is releasing The Social Network, its liberally dramatized, completely unauthorized, and (its makers hasten to add) thoroughly researched Facebook origin story. In this telling, Zuckerberg (played by 27-year-old Jesse Eisenberg) is no mere code monkey with a fondness for dead languages and flip-flops. He’s a tragic archetype right out of Sinclair Lewis: the driven, wounded trickster-genius accused of stealing a million-dollar idea and throwing his friends under the bus, all in an attempt to summit the American dream. The filmmakers — Hollywood A-listers, all — can’t be accused of thinking small. Justin Timberlake, who plays Mephistophelean Napster cofounder and Facebook partner Sean Parker, calls the story arc “very Greek.” Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, compares his version of Zuckerberg to Shakespeare’s Richard III, saying of his protagonist, “Give him a hunchback and a clubfoot and you’re pretty close.” As for the film’s acclaimed director, David Fincher: He jokes that he’s made “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies.”