“I watch the show Entourage and I think, ‘Wow, that looks really cool. I wish I could be part of that life.’ Not only am I part of that life, I’m on Entourage playing myself. And I still feel like I’m on the outside looking in!” – Aaron Sorkin
“I write for people who if they weren’t reading my book, they wouldn’t be reading another book. They would be watching TV.” – Ben Mezrich (author of The Accidental Billionaires)
There is already a ton of praise and gushing out there on the “film of the year,” The Social Network. While watching the film, I kept thinking about how this film was a real representation of the human web – aka Six Degrees of Separation. Let’s play –
When we last saw our hero – Aaron Sorkin – he was being run out of television by those pesky folks on the internet. But that is okay because his agent had a plan. He sent Sorkin the outline of a book being written about the founding of Facebook. The rights to this project were controlled by:
Scott Rudin. The Uber-producer. The Evil Boss himself . Of course Rudin owned the rights – Rudin has been quoted as saying: “If you’re going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you’ve got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you’re living in…” The book was being written by:
Ben Mezrich. The man who brought us Bringing Down the House, Busting Vegas, Rigged. John Gonzalez wrote a fantastic profile of Mezrich for Boston Magazine . Read the article if you are interested in the Mezrich phenomena. He is the ultimate insider/outsider – Harvard (insider) Geek (outsider) who writes these books about insiders (MIT/Harvard/Ivy League types)/outsiders (Geeks) who make the pages of Maxim magazine come to life. They access this world by being smarter than the system—they live the fantasy by exploiting that same system. Mezrich’s books (and I have read all the “non-fiction” books—we can discuss why in another post) are the ultimate jack-off material for those who believe that $ Won is twice as sweet as $ Earned. Another fan of these tomes is:
Kevin Spacey. Kevin Spacey played the role of the blackjack svengali in the film version of Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House (Called 21 as a movie). You can even read Spacey helping to sell this newest book The Accidental Billionaires on Amazon . . . Oh yeah – Spacey is an executive producer of The Social Network (Not that we want to go backwards, but one of my favorite Kevin Spacey performances is in the insider Hollywood film Swimming with Sharks – rumor has it that Spacey’s “boss from hell” in the film is based on Scott Rudin). But one of the films that brought Kevin Spacey to the attention of the masses was in a little film called Se7en. This film was directed by:
David Fincher. What to say about yet another one of the genius video-turned-feature directors… I don’t feel I have much to add to all that has been written about his work on The Social Network. I found his work to be really strong and I think he made great use of the talented team he assembled.
The Social Network opens with Rooney Mara playing Zuckerburg’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend & ultimate plot device. She is part of both the Rooney AND the Mara family. She is the great-granddaughter of Steelers founder Art Rooney Sr. and Giants founder Tim Mara and she was just cast in Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Dakota Johnson plays the girl in the Stanford panties found in bed when we are introduced to Napster co-founder Sean Parker – played by Justin Timberlake (how much more insider can you get than Mr. SexyBack?). Johnson is Tippi Hedren’s granddaughter (and yes, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson). Max Minghella, who plays one of the Harvard Connection partners suing Mark Zuckerberg, is the son of director Anthony Minghella. The other partners in Harvard Connection, the twins Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss, are both played by Armie Hammer who is the great-grandson of oil-tycoon and philanthropist Armand Hammer. Rashida Jones (who plays the 2nd year law associate on Zuckerberg’s defense team) is the daughter of Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton… there may be even more…
Which brings me back to Sorkin – who also makes a cameo appearance in the film. Not playing himself, like he did in Entourage, but as a potential investor in Facebook . . . it’s surprising he didn’t quote himself in his script: “I feel that socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality tv is to reality.”
What a tangled web we weave…
If you want you can play too – start with the Facebook application of Six Degrees:
An Encounter 