The Social Network

Cracking Yarns has a good review of The Social Network, with the goal of examining the screenwriting - Sorkin has broken a lot of rules for this script but somehow it works.  Creative Screenwriting's podcast (Sorkin interviewed by Jeff Goldsmith) was also very interesting.

The screenwriter for something like this has a real problem - reality is messy, in events and timings, in personality and desire, in character and choice, in the big issues that a movement of moments instantiates.  To smooth this out, Sorkin has created a Zuckerberg who is looking for, starving for, good female company, but who has only hard-edged intelligence to offer for it. The film is full of cheap sex with women with little or no value to the project, serving to emphasise both the want (sex) and the need (connection into the feminine half of the world).  The film has been condemned for its treatment of women.

The other thing that was untidy from a screenplay perspective was the late introduction of Sean Parker and California. Might a scene showing the software guys' investment in the dream of silicon valley have smoothed this transition?  Would that smoothness have detracted from the sense of losing our footing that the new world of California suggested? For me, I think the Silicon Valley Dreamland setup could have loaded and integrated this new world.

The Social Network is a very good movie, and a sign that Hollywood still knows, and can produce, a deep story.