If you aren’t one of its 500 million users, you’ve still heard of Facebook. This is likely the result of (a) your kids; (b) a creepy coworker who ‘friends’ you unexpectedly, (c) a perusal of the latest Time magazine, which has named the website’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, its Man of the Year; or (d) the recent spate of Facebook-focused media that followed from the publication of its creation story, The Accidental Billionaires, and its corresponding movie, The Social Network.
There are very few movies that outperform the book. This is one of them.
The author of the book, Ben Mezrich, writes exciting stories in the vein of The Hardy Boys of Nancy Drew: every (short) chapter ends with a cliffhanger; the dialogue is chipper, with zingers common; a sordid mystery is ultimately revealed. The light of fame first shone on Mezrich when he penned Bringing Down the House, the story of MIT-kids-come-millionaire-card-counters, which was also turned into a movie (21). He then jumped to the less successful Ugly Americans (the story of an American-boy-come-Asian-hedge-fund-king) and Rigged (a story I-read-but-it-was-so-bad-I-can’t-remember-what-it-was-about). His most famous turn, however, seems to be his most recent book on the founding of Facebook, where the infamous Mark Zuckerberg may or may not have stolen the idea for the social networking giant from the aforementioned Winklevii, may or may not have chosen success over friendship, and may or may not have done it all to bed Victoria’s Secret models.
Some of Mezrich’s earlier work can be a little like what I imagine crack feels like: you pick it up, you know it is killing your brain cells at a phenomenal pace, you can’t put it down, and you feel extremely guilty and sore when the high is done. Not so with this one. Mezrich seems to know that he has a good story here, yet fails to put forth his best in actually writing it. Where Bringing Down the House shows his ability to pace a novel, Accidental Billionaires is the equivalent of Mezrich saying “I know I have a good story, don’t bother me with questions of style.” He was never quite at the level of the New Journalists that he clearly aspires to, but, with this book, he’s not even trying.
More problematic, however, is that he is clearly fabricating when he claims widely that this, along with his other books, is a “true story”. This is a “non-fiction novel” only in its most bastardized form. There are numerous minor examples – for one, I can personally attest that the Winklevoss never were out on the Charles at four in the morning (none of us were!), and I am sure they would agree — the most obvious being that the basic premise of the book is that Zuckerberg invented Facebook to meet girls, which can hardly be true since someone who is worth an estimated $7 billion could snare himself a fair number of woman, but instead still has the same girlfriend he had before he invented the website. It may seem like quibbling over a high-school dating scene, but it strikes to the core of this supposedly “true” book, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t make this point.
Maybe I’m being too picky – and I’m not all that surprised. It’s like finding out Santa doesn’t exist: you have pretty much known it for years, but it still hurts when you finally understand it’s your parents simply forging signatures on Christmas gifts.
All this said – and understanding that the creation-myth of the movie is based on the falsified history of the book – the film is good. This is not just because of the good rowing scenes, which I enjoy for the obvious reason that I am “in” them, but because Aaron Sorkin has taken Mezrich’s half-hearted and half-cocked dialogue and turned it into something memorable. If anyone has seen Sorkin’s early work on the West Wing – the show idealistic college kids and liberals everywhere wept over in the years after Bush v. Gore – they know to what I refer. The lightening quick back-and-forth between characters, at its best when Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is jousting with opposing counsel, is like watching the conversation you wish you could have. I would not be shocked if an Oscar nod for adapted screenplay were in the cards for Sorkin here.
So see the movie. Skip the book (or use it to prop up a television stand, which it is currently doing in my sloped-floor apartment). Just take both with a large grain of salt.