Anyone who still believes Hollywood’s ancient rule-of-thumb — that one page of a script equals one minute on screen — has never seen a film written by Aaron Sorkin. That is especially true with the movie which dominated the Golden Globes celebration of 2011, The Social Network. It was rumored that Sony executives, after reading the script, were reluctant to approve it for fear it would result in a four-hour movie. But that neglects Sorkin’s secret: If you have to pack an abundance of words into a limited time frame, the actors just have to talk faster.

And so they did. Even the start is a sprint. Streams of dialogue come at viewers, even before the iconic Columbia logo has faded from the screen. The opening scene, a loquacious chat in a student pub, feels as if the projectionist has messed up the speed. We can hardly follow the staccato back-and-forth between Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) and Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). In conversation with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Eisenberg revealed that they shot 50 takes of the opening sequence until it worked perfectly.
Eisenberg’s job was to familiarize us with the Zuckerberg of the film, a 19-year-old Harvard student who deliberately displays his IQ in every answer or question, while coming across as cold, arrogant, and so off-putting that Erica breaks up with him right there on the spot.
Insulted and looking for revenge, he returns to his dorm, writes an offensive post about Erica on his LiveJournal blog, and then creates the website “Facemash” (the anarchic roots of what later developed into Facebook), by hacking into college databases to grab photos of female students, then allowing site visitors to rate their attractiveness.

On the way to the company eventually becoming a worldwide phenomenon, there were all sorts of humiliations and alleged betrayals, triumphs and lawsuits, especially with the identical Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron (both played by Armie Hammer).
The Social Network became very successful at the box office (in its initial release it grossed $224 million on a budget of only $40 million) and was widely acclaimed by critics — as well as the voters of the HFPA.

Against a powerful slate of highly diverse films — Black Swan,The Fighter, The King’s Speechand Inception — it notched gold, winning Best Film – Drama; Best Director, for David Fincher; Best Screenplay, for Sorkin; and Best Original Score, for Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor.

The film’s lead and supporting actors, Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, were also nominated. Much has changed since the turbulent days of Facebook’s inception. If Sorkin, who based much of his script on the 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich, would again join forces with Fincher and Eisenberg for a sequel, they would certainly get an astronomical number of “likes” on Facebook.