Was anyone else sort of unmoved back in 2010 when they found out a movie was coming out about the guy who created Facebook?
Sure, you were on Facebook, to stay in touch with old friends, remember birthdays and share what you were up to with what was perhaps at first a carefully curated list of people that eventually turned into friends-of-friends and other algorithmically linked strangers.
But who cared how the sausage was made?
Well, as it turned out, The Social Network—based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires—was as gripping as any thriller, enhanced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Oscar-winning score and anchored by Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an ingenious but socially stunted visionary with an axe to grind for the girl who dumped him at Harvard.
The David Fincher-directed film isn’t exactly true crime, though the action—Academy Awards also went to the editing and Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay—includes the litigation that ensnarled Facebook’s origin story. But the movie definitely has that aura about it, as if we’re watching something rather sinister unfold as the social media website takes off.
Which, we were.
To be fair, you don’t create a world-changing product—or become a billionaire, for that matter—without possessing certain attributes, including a level of patience, perseverance, magnetism and confidence-brimming-on-mania that most people tapping away at their keyboards just don’t have. And the fast-paced tech world, financed by deep-pocketed venture capitalists and boasting a language all its own (IPOs, angel investors, unicorns, SPACs, etc.) can’t help but attract big personalities.
Or quietly determined types, who have an idea and will stop at nothing to get it off the ground.
The Social Network wasn’t the first epic about tech bros—the 1999 cable movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley, starring Anthony Michael Hall and Noah Wyle, respectively, as O.G. disruptors Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, was deemed a “wildly entertaining geek tragedy” by Variety—but it set the template, first, for dueling all-star Jobs biopics and a slew of content set in that world, and for the current glut of ripped-from-the-headlines TV and film projects about big ideas and the distinctively flawed people who have them.
