In Contention

Tag: Aaron Sorkin

  • ‘127 Hours,’ ‘Social Network’ up for Hollywood fest honors

    The press release, in part:

    The 14th Annual Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards, presented by Starz, are pleased to announce that producers Danny Boyle and Christian Colson will be honored with the “Hollywood Producer Award,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin will get the “Hollywood Screenwriter Award,” and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall will be honored with the “Hollywood Editor Award” at the festival’s Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony…

    “We are honored to recognize these exceptionally talented artists for their outstanding work and creative vision at this year’s Hollywood Awards Gala,” said [founder Carlos] de Abreu.

    Full list of honorees announced thus far after the jump.

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  • 9/24 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Franco nearly flunks, ‘Rabbit Hole’ sets a date, no one edits Oliver Stone

    • All-time greatest Oliver Stone line: “I like mirror. I wrote Scarface. Go fuck yourself.” [Vulture]

    • Potential Oscar nominee James Franco got a “D” in his NYU acting class. [Showbiz 411]

    • Read Tim Burton’s poem about Johnny Depp, circa 1991. [Cinematical]

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  • Sorkin empathizes with the nerds

    Boy, the publicity machine is well-oiled around “The Social Network.” After profiles of Mark Zuckerberg (rumored to have been at a screening of the film last night), Sean Parker and a giant spread in New York Magazine, Aaron Sorkin gets his moment in the sun, alone, in this major W Magazine piece.

    It’s a fascinating portrait of a writer, really digging into who this guy is, his process, his addictions, his hang-ups.  Most fascinating, perhaps, is what he has to say about his Los Angeles home, which he says feels more like a hotel room and isn’t really his style, but he’d rather not appear to be a poser trying to live in Westchester.  Really vibrant characterization from the always on-it Lora Hirschberg.

    Like I said when I offered up my thoughts on the film, Sorkin is the real star of this show.  I expect he might be holding his fair share of trophies by season’s end.

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  • Could Sorkin’s ‘Social Network’ be considered original?

    I’ve been hearing for a while now that Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The Social Network,” credited in the film as an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” (covered by Guy in Page to Screen here), could conceivably be considered an original work by the Academy.

    The first clue was the fact that Sorkin and Mezrich were writing their material separately.  My understanding was Mezrich would send Sorkin pages and they would compare ideas and notes, but Sorkin was not working from a published work and was not “adapting” it into a screenplay.  It kind of recalls the manner in which Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke worked on “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

    I’ve got a few calls out to some folks to firm this up, but I’m thinking more and more that the case may be perfectly made for an original screenplay classification.  Meanwhile there’s a big, fat (as always, amazing) Mark Harris piece in New York Magazine that deals in some detail with all of this.  But, well, it’s still just a little unclear.

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  • Schemers trying to control their little worlds

    It’s intriguing that two of the most press shy entrepreneurs of the internet age – Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker – have suddenly participated in two dense magazine profiles this month.  It’s almost as if there was a film depicting key moments in their lives set for imminent release and they want to set the record straight.  Oh…

    Really, though, I was struck reading this Vanity Fair profile of Parker that the character described is perhaps a bit more interesting than the more simplistic character Aaron Sorkin wrote in “The Social Network.” In the film, Parker is portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a paranoid, mean-spirited misfit.  A misfit (and party animal) he may be, but Parker is lauded in the piece as a “higher being,” “generous” and “loyal,” and frankly comes off as something of a saint.

    The writer does mention that Parker reached out to potential sources to smooth out his image, but even still, the accounts of generosity become a bit too consistent to ignore.  Parker works well as an antagonistic figure in the film, mind you, but I think an instance of some of this would have added a nice layer of depth to the character.  After all, Zuckerberg sure is dealt with in complex hues, and is all the more fascinating for it.

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  • Fincher’s ‘Social Network’ nails human frailty

    The best films are rarely about just one thing, but rather that one thing as reflected through a variety of narrative prisms.  And there is something to be said about a film that manages to distill an era while profoundly conveying a character study within.

    David Fincher’s “The Social Network” may be the quintessential story of young Machiavellian entrepreneurship in an age of streamlined communication, but it is also a story of the social disconnect that can be as galvanizing as any other source of ambition…for better or worse.  The Mark Zuckerberg of Fincher’s film uses the sting of that disconnect to spark a fire of creativity, and the film very much concerns itself with the gauntlet of his motivation.  (The New Yorker’s profile, culled from rare extensive interviews with the 26-year-old billionaire, is a wonderful primer for the dramatization.)

    In some sense, the film could be viewed as a distant cousin of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” both presenting protagonists flawed by their own aggressive drive.  But while Nina is a tragic figure of self-destruction, Zuckerberg is a tragic figure of self-alienation.

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  • Defriending ‘The Social Network’

    With David Fincher’s “The Social Network” already accruing positive buzz ahead of its New York Film Festival premiere next month, its handlers would do well to pre-empt the inevitable pushback over matters of factual accuracy — complaints that have already dogged the film’s sloppy source book, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” (discussed at length in Page to Screen here).

    No one will (or should) be seeing “The Social Network” for an exhaustive journalistic essay on the origins of Facebook. Rather, what we’re hoping for from writer Aaron Sorkin is a tangy interpretation of the facts that reaches for broader truths about the social-networking generation; dramatic flexibility, then, is the order of the day. Needless to say, the powers behind Facebook, including founder (and “Social Network” protagonist) Mark Zuckerberg, don’t quite see things that way. This recent New York Times piece goes into the friction between them and the film’s producers.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich

    (NOTE: This week’s Page to Screen text is the source material for David Fincher’s upcoming film “The Social Network.”)

    If, with its short, sketchy chapters and preponderance of surface-level description, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” resembles less a work of literary non-fiction than a treatment for a more substantially developed screenplay, that’s probably precisely what the author intended: after all, the movie rights to Mezrich’s thin, gossipy account of the birth of Facebook were snapped up well before he’d even finished writing it.

    Mezrich has turned this trick before: his 2003 bestseller “Bringing Down the House,” the story of a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who managed to swindle millions out of top Las Vegas casinos, was recently turned into a reasonably profitable (if rapidly forgotten) film, “21.” Mezrich’s work certainly commands more respect from Hollywood than it does from literary critics.

    A former sci-fi author, Mezrich delights in fudging (and often blatantly fabricating) the facts in his non-fiction work: a disclaimer at the start of “The Accidental Billionaires” acknowledges that numerous “conversations and scenes [have been] recreated and compressed,” verbs that sound decidedly euphemistic by the time the writer is casually describing the interior thoughts of people he admits to never having met. (Mark Zuckerberg, the young Facebook founder at the center of Mezrich’s story, refused any meetings or interviews with the author, giving this already skimpily researched volume a distinctly lopsided perspective.)

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  • Fincher/Sorkin = Lumet/Chayefsky?

    Steep, STEEP praise for David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, director and writer of the upcoming “The Social Network.” The praise comes from New York Film Festival director Richard Pena in announcing the film as the opener of this year’s fest.

    From Thompson on Hollywood:

    [The film] powerfully captures the spirit of its time…David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin are a director/writer team, like Lumet and Chayefsky before them, that make this movie not only of the moment, but reflective of larger cultural issues as well, and confirm their position at forefront of contemporary cinema.

    Now, I’m not saying Fincher and Sorkin aren’t worthy of that.  I haven’t seen “The Social Network,” after all.  But I sure wouldn’t want to be in their shoes having to rise to the level of that compliment.  But then again, I consider “Network” to be the best screenplay ever written.  Hey, how about that?  “The Social NETWORK.”

    Anyway, the new trailer, also from Thompson, after the jump.

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  • Aaron Sorkin on why he wanted to write ‘The Social Network’

  • 7/13 Web Round-up

    (from left) Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer• Gael Garcia Bernal: activist. [Daily Telegraph]

    • Phil de Semlyen chats it up with Bruno. [Empire]

    • Michael Powell goes deep on “Golden Age” survivor Andrew Sarris. [New York Times]

    • Mike Jones profiles the child actors of Harry Potter, wonders if their fame can last beyond Hogwarts. [The independent]

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