In Contention

Tag: Ben Mezrich

  • Boyle and Beaufoy and werewolves, oh my

    The best part of this evening for me wasn’t Aaron Sorkin and Ben Mezrich winning an award for “the best adaptation of the printed word into film” (for a work that is debatable as an adaptation in the first place).  It was probably talking with finalist Simon Beaufoy about his latest script.

    Some of this has made the rounds in the UK, but apparently it’s a werewolves-in-gangland-LA script adapted from an epic poem, “Sharp Teeth,” about same from Toby Barlow.  Seriously.  Picture “Boyz N the Hood” where Doughboy and his crew turn into savage dogs at night.  And it’s a potential project for Danny Boyle to direct.

    Beaufoy told me about ride-alongs he has taken with LAPD officers in Compton and Watts in the way of preparation.  As a screenwriter, he says he prefers to observe quietly, but the cops he was riding with would insist, quite comically (as he describes it), on perpetrators spending a couple of minutes chatting with him at every bust.

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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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  • 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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