Next month,Hollywood will unleash The Social Network,a biting tale of the Silicon Valley giant and its founder. Now Facebook must decide whether to bite back. After fretting for months over how to respond,the company appears to have decided that its best bet is to largely ignore the movie and hope that audiences do the same that The Social Network will be another failed attempt to bottle a generation,like Less Than Zero,and not culturally defining,as it aspires to be. Behind the scenes,however,Zuckerberg and his colleagues have been locked in a tense standoff with the filmmakers,who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals,then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for friends the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages that they will never really have. Zuckerberg,at 26 a billionaire,and his associates are wary of damage from a picture whose story begins with the intimacy of a date night at Harvard seven years ago and depicts the birth of a web phenomenon in his dorm room. By his account,and that of many others,much in the film is simply not true. It is based on a fictionalised book once described by its publicist not as reportage but as big juicy fun. Its crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power, said Chris Hughes,a Facebook co-founder who left in 2007 to join the Obama presidential campaign. Thats not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that. Scott Rudin,a producer of The Social Network,said Facebook executives Elliot Schrage,the vice-president of communications,and Sheryl Sandberg,the chief operating officer,saw the movie a while ago,and they do not like it. Rudin described months of backdoor contacts during which he tried to ease relations with Zuckerberg by letting colleagues of the Facebook chief read the script,and even by accommodating them with small changes. Facebook had insisted on bigger changes,which the producers declined to make. Zuckerberg,in a recent onstage interview,said: Honestly,I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least try to get it right. The movie is fiction. But Rudin said the movie was about conflicting truths. There is no such thing as truth, Rudin said. In a statement,Facebook acknowledged that its a sign of Facebooks impact that were the subject of a movie even one thats fiction. The Social Network is being rushed into awards contention by a pair of Hollywoods most powerful filmmakers,the director and the writer . The two worked without acquiring rights from Zuckerberg and other subjects,relying instead on the journalist Ben Mezrichs book,The Accidental Billionaires,and on the legal protection provided to free speech,along with Rudins diplomacy. The book drew heavily on interviews with Eduardo Saverin,a co-founder of Facebook and a former friend of Zuckerbergs,who later felt that he was unfairly sidelined. Among the undisputed facts in Sorkins script is that Zuckerberg,as a 19-year-old college student,became involved in the creation of an online social network that grew from a few hundred users in 2004 to half a billion. The film,which is set for release by Colombia Pictures on October 1,clearly aspires to importance. Want a perfect body,want a perfect soul, chants a chorus of voices over the part of the movie trailer that shows Zuckerberg,portrayed by ,rising to prominence like an Internet Sammy Glick.
