The divide between Hollywood and Silicon Valley grew even wider this weekend with a backlash online and in new media circles against Sony’s critically beloved and thus far successful drama about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “The Social Network.
In a lead story on the tech blog Venturebeat, the headline told the story: “Hollywood Gets It Wrong,” it read, over a still from the movie.
Audiences didn’t seem to care, flocking to see the film starring Jesse Eisenberg whipping off snarky-smart dialogue from Aaron Sorkin, and giving the movie an estimated $23 million.
Read also: Box Office: At $23M, 'Social Network' on Target, but Below Hype
At a Redwood City panel about the film after a screening on Friday, an early Facebook employee Matt Cohler came down even harder on the film, describing it as a “Hollywood fairy tale.”
The portrayal of the company and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is “just wrong,” Cohler said, citing the film’s depiction of the Harvard student as needing to get girls, and desperately seeking a way to connect despite his own anti-social quirks.
But that’s not the only complaint that’s being leveled at the movie, which has been enthusiastically embraced by highbrow critics from Roger Ebert to Manohla Dargis.
The movie “is not interested in the concept of social networking or the actual usage of Facebook,” wrote Huffington Post contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas. “The film represents the biggest culmination yet of old media's disdain and misreading of new media.”
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Wrote new media blogger Jeff Jarvis: “The Social Network makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It says the internet is not a revolution, but the creation of a few odd machine-men -- it's the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.”: (Jeff Jarvis: The Antisocial Movie)
So what’s going on here? The debate demonstrates the enduring, if not widening divide between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Inside the industry, many feel that Hollywood has thrown its best talent at the Zeitgeist, and has come up with a story that, by the film community’s standards, succeeds brilliantly: a mainstream movie that’s well written, well directed and well acted; and marketed with savvy by a big studio wearing Oscar ambitions on its sleeve.
Read also: Academy Likes 'Social Network,' But -- 'Too Many A—holes' to Win?
But the movie treats Facebook itself as a MacGuffin rather than the revolution in human communication that it is. In the end, “The Social Network” is nothing more than a sharply written drama about an intellectual property lawsuit.
It could just as easily have been about the Edsel – except that movie already got made.
On one level, the movie was sure to suffer the slings and arrows of people who know Mark Zuckerberg and complain that it’s not an accurate depiction of a man Sony’s marketing department has dubbed a “Punk Genius Billionaire.”
