Facebook’s co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moscovitz have both expressed some measure of disapproval where the highly anticipated film The Social Network is concerned..
Moscovitz published a frank assessment of the upcoming movie tonight on a Q&A site, saying the trailers seemed “a lot more exciting” than the actual goings-on during Facebook’s earlier days.
(Interesting side note: The Q&A site linked above is Quora, a startup made by several former Facebook employees. It’s a small world after all — especially in Silicon Valley.)
Zuckerberg, currently Facebook’s CEO, had some negative comments about the film when he took the stage at the D conference last month, saying he wished the movie had not been made. Moscovitz wasn’t completely down on the movie; however, his mostly sarcastic comments did belabor the point that the film is anything but historically accurate — at least from his perspective.
“It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter,” he wrote — “things that didn’t matter” referring to a breach of contract/IP theft lawsuit brought by fellow Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2004.
Calling the movie a “dramatization of history,” Moscovitz continued to write, “A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.”
When it comes to the film’s portrayal of Zuckerberg, Moscovitz is at once cautiously pessimistic and fawning.
“The plot of the book/script unabashedly attack him, but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is.”
Moscovitz currently heads up Asana, a Silicon Valley startup who counts a few Facebook and Google heavy-hitters among its staff. When not drinking and carousing with coeds, they build project management software.
What do you think of the trailers so far? How would you feel if someone made a movie about you and your company? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
