Facebook Movie Adds David Fincher as a Friend

Published by Jeff Leins on: June 23rd, 2009

In August 2008, Aaron Sorkin made an announcement on his Facebook page he was writing a film script about the invention of the largest social networking website.  The news got stranger when Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men) was on board to produce for Columbia Pictures.

Now the studio has lured top directing talent for the movie, tentatively titled The Social Network.  The trades are reporting David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, and Se7en) is in talks to helm the feature.  If he signs the deal, he could be shooting this by the end of the year.  Fincher’s addition would mean an Oscar-nominated director working from a script by an Emmy-award winning writer from an Oscar winning producer.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his computer science classmates at Harvard in 2004 and has grown into a network of over 200 million users worldwide.  By the way, you can “become a fan” of News in Film right here on Facebook.

Update: Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions is also helping make this movie happen. The film is an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, the story of Facebook. Mezrich and Spacey met when adapting “Bringing Down the House” into the Vegas card counting movie 21.  The book isn’t available until July 14, 2009, but the description is included below:
Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.