When asked in several interviews last week if he wants Mark Zuckerberg to see ‘The Social Network,’ screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said he’d never want a movie made about himself at 19.

Why not?

‘Are you serious?’ the Syracuse University alumnus answered in an e-mail from Berlin, where he was promoting the film. ‘Is M-Street still there? Are there still women attending the school? Did 19-year-old guys stop being morons? And did the drama department students suddenly become cool?’

But Sorkin’s script is, in essence, about his own college experience and his road to fame. Among other things, it’s a story of the human need to feel accepted and significant, and the inevitable setbacks that arise.

‘It seems pretty clear that he has exaggerated a lot of qualities about himself — he actually is writing about himself as a young man,’ said Geri Clark, one of Sorkin’s former professors, based on the previews she’s seen. ‘We can only write ourselves, but he has a lot of stuff for somebody who is very intelligent, who feels a great deal of pressure to find out how to be the next big thing, and he, like Mark, was successful at it.’

Sorkin constructed the character without interaction with Zuckerberg or his company. The film gives credit to Ben Mezrich’s ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ which also attempts to tell the Facebook creation tale, but Sorkin had access to people close to Zuckerberg, his Harvard blog and cartons of legal documents from the Facebook lawsuits, he said.

‘But the most important thing in making Mark someone who, despite his flaws that may turn you off, we ultimately do care about as a movie character, was finding the parts of myself that are like Mark,’ Sorkin said. ‘I have to have affection for the character, and I have to defend him.’

Sorkin’s Zuckerberg longs for the exclusiveness of Harvard’s high-class fraternities and approval from the girl he let get away — Facebook’s Helen of Troy — the face that launched 500 million members.

‘I’m awkward, too,’ Sorkin said. ‘Nobody’s going to mistake me for Puffy when it comes to the ladies. Like most people, I’ve felt like I’m on the outside looking in, like there’s a great party I haven’t been invited to and that somehow I’ll never make it to the cool kids’ table.’

But this lack of access makes Zuckerberg’s character angry, he added. ‘I tend to only be angry when I watch Syracuse play football.’

Sorkin’s professors remember his popularity, at least within the drama department.

‘He was talented, he was smart, he was attractive. The prettiest and most talented girl in the department was his girlfriend,’ Clark said.

The couple starred together in a Syracuse Stage production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ (Sorkin played Young Scrooge), but the relationship wavered. Timothy Davis-Reed, an SU drama professor who was a year behind Sorkin when they were students, doesn’t remember him ever having a steady girlfriend at school, or relating well to girls.

Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is also driven by Harvard’s social standings. ‘Everyone is inventing something at Harvard,’ the university’s president says in the film. At SU, Sorkin was surrounded by a cloud of competitive musical theater majors, many of whom made their way to film and on Broadway, said Davis-Reed, who has appeared in the three television shows Sorkin penned — ‘The West Wing,’ ‘Sports Night’ and ‘Studio 60.’ 

‘We’re all sort of thinking we’re going to conquer the world,’ Davis-Reed said. ‘It just turned out he was right.’

Before he started writing, Sorkin aspired to be an actor. He flunked the foundational ‘Core’ curriculum students must pass before they perform, including a playwriting component.

‘The problem was that the class met at 8:30 in the morning, and from time to time the weather’s not very good in the city of Syracuse, and all this going to class and reading was having a negative effect on my social life in general and my sleeping in particular,’ Sorkin said in a 1997 convocation to the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

‘At one point, being quizzed on ‘Death of a Salesman,’ a play I had not read, I gave an answer that indicated I wasn’t aware that at the end of the play, the salesman dies.’ Sorkin would later meet playwright Arthur Miller and eventually lecture about ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Miller’s behalf when he caught the flu.

‘It hasn’t happened a lot, but Aaron is one of the few handful that said, ‘You know what, I’m coming back,” Jim Clark, a drama professor and Geri’s husband, said of students who fail and must retake Core.

His senior year, peers elected Sorkin the musical theater major’s representative to the faculty. Not all faculty members loved him, though. He had a smart mouth, Geri Clark said. It wasn’t malicious, but some of the faculty felt slow while talking to him.

‘He had a smart, quick mouth, and he was fun to have around, and he was a pretty good actor, too,’ she said.

Sorkin received few callbacks for theater auditions after graduating in 1983. Bored touring with a children’s theater company, he began tapping out what would become ‘Removing All Doubt,’ a play about post-college life.

‘Initially, he didn’t think he was going to be a writer, he just thought he was writing a play that had a good part for him in it,’ said Davis-Reed, who was Sorkin’s roommate at the time. ‘Anything that would happen in his life, he would sort of fold into the play, whether he needed it or not.’

Friends urged him to focus on writing, and it eventually eclipsed his acting aspirations. (Sorkin has a few lines in ‘The Social Network,’ though, as an ad executive Zuckerberg falls asleep in front of.)

Just six years after graduation, ‘A Few Good Men’ debuted on Broadway. Sorkin won the Outer Critics Circle Award as Outstanding American Playwright, which launched his stardom and led to a slew of other plays, TV shows and films he’d write.

Clark sees Sorkin’s most recent film as an exploration of fame. One of the most contended scenes portrays Napster co-founder Sean Parker prepping to snort cocaine off an intern’s chest.

‘It’s about him investigating, you know, the tragic qualities of his own life and what fame has cost him,’ Clark said. Sorkin has publicly discussed his struggles with cocaine, both recently in the press and in 2004 with SU’s drama students.

‘Because that’s all he knows about,’ Clark continued. ‘I mean, he knows facts about Mark Zuckerberg, but he doesn’t know him. He can’t. All of us have a really hard time just knowing ourselves.’

At the end of the film, Zuckerberg sits alone, refreshing his Facebook homepage. It spotlights his loneliness, his desire for friends. But it also presents the most significant difference between him and the screenwriter: Sorkin doesn’t want an account.

 

bmdavies@syr.edu

Sorkin’s SU shout-outs

‘Jabberwock’ is part of an e-mail address in ‘The Social Network.’ It’s an ode to SU’s Jabberwocky Cafe, a campus coffeehouse in the ‘80s, and Sorkin’s high school mascot. 

‘Sen. Storch, Sen. Clark, Sen. Wagner, Sen. Sabo and the other senator from Indiana,’ is a line from the film ‘The American President.’ The senators are named after Sorkin’s SU professors.

Published on October 5, 2010 at 12:00 pm