Tag: Mark Zuckerberg
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Working on Zuck’s “likability”
Over at The Envelope, Claudia Eller and Jessica Guynn are wondering the same thing I was when I watched Scott Rudin accept his Golden Globe for Best Picture Sunday night: “Rudin’s thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Co. at the Golden Globes suggest that the production’s and company’s relations have improved. But have they?”They write:
Rudin’s comments would suggest that Zuckerberg and his associates at the popular social networking site had done an about-face after having earlier gone on a public campaign saying the film’s portrayal of Facebook’s founder as a soulless, hyper-ambitious entrepreneur who betrayed his Harvard classmates was “fiction.”
But officials at Facebook refused to say Monday whether Rudin’s words reflected a change in the relationship or a rapprochement with the filmmakers, with whom they refused to cooperate during the making of the movie.
I’ll offer my opinion: the new mandate on “The Social Network” may well be to work on the “likability” of Zuckerberg.
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Seven years to the day
Sony’s campaign for “The Social Network” sure is moving along swimmingly. As if the critics’ groups didn’t give the film enough of a headwind going into the voting frame of phase one, the film is hitting DVD and Blu-ray January 11, a scant three months after theatrical release and right in the middle of the buzz maelstrom.Of course, it’s all by design, and a DVD release party being held at Spago in Beverly Hills Thursday night, press naturally invited en masse, will keep the good word spreading. An Oscar run is all about timing, and so far, this one has it in spades.
There’s something else that’s key to that date, though. Film writer William Goss alerted me over the weekend to the fact that, on January 11, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began this epic, defining journey when he bought the domain (“thefacebook.com”) that would become, after a slight tweak, the most-visited website on the internet. Coincidence?
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12/16 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: TIME mag as a cog in the PR wheel, Miramax strikes deal with Weinsetin, 2010
• Steve Pond calls TIME Magazine’s (somewhat dubious) selection of Mark Zuckerberg as Person of the Year “the niftiest bit of Oscar promotion anybody has gotten this year.” [The Odds]• Sophia Savage spotlights the standout performances of 2010. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Newly acquired Miramax strikes a sequel deal with The Weinstein Company. [Deadline]
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TIME fuels the ‘Social Network’ fire
You’ve probably heard by now that Mark Zuckerberg has been named TIME magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year, a selection that couldn’t dovetail any more neatly with “The Social Network”‘s currently roaring Oscar campaign if the film’s publicists had engineered it themselves.After all, what’s really being acknowledged here: Zuckerberg’s own achievements over the year, or the raised public profile granted him by the success of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s biopic? The time to laud Zuckerberg for the creation of Facebook, no longer the hippest social network on the block, was surely several years ago; this is a testament to the media influence wielded by a single movie.
In turn, the film gets to borrow a measure of the prestige and currency associated with this annual honor: how often can an Oscar contender claim to be about the reigning Person of the Year? Academy voters concerned with the capital-I Importance of their choices can hardly ask for more than that. Well done, everybody.
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10/19 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Steinfeld’s ‘Grit,’ Zuckerberg on accuracy of ‘Social Network,’ Poland’s barbs for de Abreu
• Anthony Breznican chats briefly with “True Grit” star Hailee Steinfeld. [USA Today]• Sasha Stone on seat-seeking and saving in the grand theater of Oscar season. [Awards Daily]
• Mark Zuckberg says the framing device for “The Social Network” is inaccurate. He just likes building things, okay? [Thompson on Hollywood]
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10/4 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: On Gekko and Zuckerberg, Oscar season on Twitter, clamoring for ‘Social’ reactions
• Peter Lattman sits down with “Inside Job” director Charles Ferguson. [Dealbook]• A.O. Scott on the drive and determination of Gordon Gekko and Mark Zuckerberg. [New York Times]
• Scott Feinberg puts together a massive, comprehensive list of Oscar contenders and pundits on Twitter. Follow away! [ScottFeinberg.com]
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9/28 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Stuart passes, Zuckerberg gets a comic book, ‘Back to the Future’ celebrates an anniversary
• Gloria Stuart dies at 100. [Associated Press]• Mark Zuckerberg: the comic book. [Hollywood Reporter]
• AMC Theatres will take 40 cities across the U.S. “Back to the Future” for the film’s 25th anniversary. [Script to Screen]
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OSCAR TALK: Ep. 33 — ‘Social Network’ front-running, Gibson persona non grata and why ‘The Fighter?’
Welcome to Oscar Talk.In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, a one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change on route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.
There isn’t a whole lot to discuss this week though there are a number of forced stories out there which kind of prove the point. I’m up in Berkeley talking to Anne down in LA so, as the New York fest kicks off tonight, let’s see what’s on the docket today…
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Zuckerberg times his generosity well
The official line may be that beleaguered Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t really on board with “The Social Network” — even if the Twitterverse yesterday was abuzz with rumors that he attended a screening in his Sunday best — but whatever his attitude to David Fincher’s film about his rise to fortune, the 26 year-old billionaire is certainly helping out in the publicity stakes.The New York Times reports that Zuckerberg will appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” tomorrow to announce a $100 million donation to the Newark public schools system:
The $100 million for Newark is the initial gift to start a foundation for education financed by Mr. Zuckerberg. This would be by far the largest publicly known gift by Mr. Zuckerberg, whose fortune Forbes magazine estimated last year at $2 billion … The gift is many times larger than any the system has received, officials said — an extraordinary sum not only for a district with an $800 million annual operating budget, but also for any publicly financed government agency. It is not yet clear how the money would be used, or over what period.
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‘Waiting for Superman’ does Oprah
I offered up my thoughts on Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman” back when the film played the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. My position is that the film, however emotional, doesn’t necessarily tell us anything we don’t already know and plays loose and fast with facts in order to slightly sensationalize the issue.All of that said, if it’s not quite there as a piece of art, it is extremely successful and commendable as a piece of activism. And who in their right mind would argue with its message?
The film opens in limited release tomorrow and got a big boost from Oprah Winfrey earlier this week when she brought Guggenheim, D.C. school district chancellor Michelle Rhee (who features prominently in the film) and recent tag-along Bill Gates onto the show to spread the message to an obviously gigantic audience in her farewell season. (Interestingly enough, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg will announce his intentions to donate $100 million to New Jersey public schools on tomorrow’s show — talk about image spin/control.)
Check out a clip from the episode after the jump (Oprah at her giveaway best) and do try to see the film when it comes your way.
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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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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.