When Aaron Sorkin won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay,  I couldn’t help but agree with the sentiments of @jeffarvis,  who tweeted that Sorkin’s script was “intellectually dishonest”.  I agree. Unless you look at Sorkin’s expressed  disdain for  the Internet culture and perhaps replace “dishonest” with “bound by the traditional media culture”.  That’s a best case scenario for me for Sorkin,  whose “The West Wing” series  was one of my all time favorite TV Shows (and I’m a proud owner of all 7 seasons on DVD). @davewiner also expressed similar feelings of being shortchanged by the lack of a real story of Facebook. 

The script for The Social Network was similar in many ways to that of The West Wing.  Fast paced,  witty,  and told a good story (even though that story was burdened by Sorkin’s slanted mythology of the Internet culture).  I laughed during the movie on several occasions.  I rented it to watch again after seeing it in its first week at the theater.

But I came away really frustrated with the lack of a feasible vision for Facebook as expressed  by its  characters.  Zuckerburg is nothing like the character Jesse Eisenberg gave us.  And of  course,  that was never the aim.  Eisenberg was ,  as I understand it,  prevented from contacting Zuckerburg.  They weren’t interested in the real Mark Zuckerberg,  only the script that they had in mind (that Sorkin had in mind).  I now find myself interested in reading “The Accidental Billionaires” , the book on which the Sorkin script was based by Ben Mezrich , whose  story is based on what was told to him by Eduardo Saverin,  the original Facebook partner with Zuckerberg.  (Update:  After reading some of the reviews  of Amazon, it seems that the book had already taken the direction of anti-geekdom that comes through so clearly and obviously in The Social Network. Example:  “Now, the story about the founding of a website will not excite most readers, so Mezrich tries to sex it up with stories of lavish parties and groupies” from here .  )

So if you want an actual history of Facebook,  this ain’t  it.  This is basically about the legal battles,  with a few inane snippets  of the “building of Facebook” thrown in.  Nowhere is the philosophy and vision that made this the huge success that it was.  If other Social Network startups were like this,  all of them would be super strong,  and we  wouldn’t have the dominance of “The Facebook” (at least the perceived dominance,  like naming the movie  about Facebook “The Social Network”,  as if  Facebook embodies the Social Network.  I could imagine some good arguments for this,  but in the end,  there is SO MUCH more).  But  the success and growth and phenomenon of Facebook has a much richer story than “geeks hunched over their computers” (as Anne Hathaway put it in her remarks to Jesse Eisisenbeg as she introduced the nomination and the clips from The Social Network. Eisenberg didn’t exactly look like he enjoyed being attributed the role of “giving hope to geeks hunched over  their computers”).

Who do we have  in Hollywood that could pull off an accurate story that also captured the vision of these young guys  who built a networking system that harnessed a “social graph” that energized  the populace?  I’d certainly be  interested in seeing the building of such a story.