SCREENPLAY BY: AARON SORKIN
SCREENPLAY

PREMISE:
Aaron Sorkin pens the academy award winning for best adapted screenplay based on a novel called The Accidental Billionaires based on the creation of the biggest social networking site to hit the internet generation, FACEBOOK.

ANALYSIS:

CHARACTERIZATION:
Any book on screenwriting, any screenwriting teacher at a film school, any current screenwriter that would charge you 200 bucks to go to one of their seminars will tell you exactly what I’m about to tell you for free. The heart of any script is a character to root for. If you don’t have a character to love to love, love to hate, love that you hate to love them your screenplay is dead in the water. The script for The Social Network did not suffer from that. Right from FADE IN Sorkin gives us one simple conversation to let us in on the type of guy Mark Zuckerberg is, pompous, egotistical without a real reason to be yet, and doesn’t realize how much of a douche bag he is until people let him in on it.

Zuckerberg makes an “antagonist” out of pretty much every secondary character in the script based on how he reacts with them. The thing to know about writing characters in screenplays is that you have the description to introduce them and you want to keep that as short as possible but at the same time revealing as much that’s relevant as you can, Sorkin nailed that in this script.

All he had to do to give me the perfect idea of who the Winklevoss twins were and how they operated was describing them as two men who “stepped out of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad.” Descriptions like that speak volumes. He also gave little tidbits of information regarding the characters deep seated motivations that we didn’t necessarily see in the finished film, descriptions like “the wheels began to turn in Zuckerberg’s head” they were informative but didn’t take up too much space on the page (a taboo in the screenwriting world). He gave not only the main characters but secondary characters who were in one scene (the head of the university) a life of their own. Something to strive for and Sorkin achieved it.

STORY DEVELOPMENT:
I found the idea of a movie centered around the creation of Facebook to be the most ridiculous concept I ever heard. Then the film finally came out. Boy was I wrong. Sorkin knew how to tell a story and this bad boy read like a novel I couldn’t put down. The main areas that kept me most hooked was the foreshadowing Sorkin threw in that Zuckerberg might cheat his best friend Eduardo Saverin in a big way. Not in dialogue, but in descriptions, in the facial features of a character. This was purely a man vs. man story, with Sean Parker (the creator of napster and devil on Zuckerberg’s shoulder) coming along and causing a rift if you will between Zuckerberg and his best friend, pretty much the only person who doesn’t hate him. This guy is making the biggest company in the world throughout the whole movie and still there’s enough drama to keep you reading and that is the mark of a good writer. Never have I been so happy to be proven wrong on my preconceived notions of a film.

DIALOGUE:
Incidentally my favorite aspect of this script. Many people will tell you that dialogue is the hardest aspect of a screenplay to write, I would have to agree it is where I have the most trouble, Sorkin didn’t seem to have much of a problem. His dialogue is short and to the point but it serves the plot, it serves the characters, and it served me well. One of the things I noticed that made me chuckle in Sorkin’s writing was that a lot of us probably wouldn’t understand the technical mumbo jumbo spewing out of Zuckerberg’s mouth through the whole story. A concept he even put into dialogue in the form of Eduardo the “CFO.”

EDUARDO: “Their hacking.”

MARK: “All behind a Pix Firewall Emulator. But here’s the beauty.”

EDUARDO: “You know I didn’t understand what you just said, right?”

MARK: “I do know that.”

Witty dialogue like this is going on through the whole script so trust me boredom will not ensue. Bottom line the dialogue did it’s job. It was witty, clever, hard to understand at times, made me love the characters, made me hate the characters. What more could you ask for?

GRADE:
If I was deciding whether this bad boy would be green lit I’d give it an EXCELLENT, it made a decent story out of the most important contribution to the internet generation. Sorkin wrote a wonderful script filled with rich characters, beautiful descriptions, and great dialogue which the components made to write a script to that will get attention. Definitely recommend reading it.