(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.)
We’ve reached the mid-way point of 2008, a year that truly seems to be speeding along (or is it just me?). That means it’s time to assess what’s come down the pike over the last six months as our contributors make their picks for the best and worst cinematic offerings of the year so far.