Facebook film is true story, say twins
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- two of the central characters portrayed in "The Social Network" -- say the film accurately portrays Facebook's birth, the focus of a legal dispute in which they are involved.
The 29-year-old identical twins, who are suing the Internet site on claims they came up with the idea for Facebook while students at Harvard University, said on Saturday they were pleased with the way they were portrayed in the Hollywood film. The film is in UAE cinemas now.
"It does a great job of capturing the factual events of the 18 months of the founding of Facebook. It is a true story," Cameron said in an interview.
Yet they never met with film writer Aaron Sorkin or Ben Mezrich, who wrote the book on which it was based. "We were basically bystanders. We were hoping for the best. And we were relieved when we saw the movie," Cameron said.
The movie intersperses scenes of depositions taken for lawsuits by the Winklevoss twins as well as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's former best friend and network co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
Those lawsuits resulted in undisclosed settlements. But the twins have taken up legal action again, saying they were given misinformation about Facebook's value and that relevant documents were withheld.
The 6'5" twins were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday to prepare for a Sunday race in the Head of the Charles rowing festival along the Charles River, which divides Boston and Cambridge. Each year several hundreds thousand spectators gather along the river, making it one of the world's most-watched competitions.
The two men have made their mark rowing a two-man boat, finishing sixth place in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. That didn't make them celebrities, but the release of "The Social Network" did. The twins did not get Facebook accounts until 2008. They said they signed up after they were in the Olympics so they could stay in touch with friends they had met in Beijing.
It portrays Facebook boss Zuckerberg as a socially awkward computer genius whom the Winklevoss twins hire to complete construction of a social networking website.
In the movie, Zuckerberg takes the job, but turns around and creates his own site, which he originally dubs "The Facebook."
But last week Zuckerberg hit out at makers of the film, which depicts him as a ruthless young man who founded the social networking website to meet pretty young women. David Fincher’s Oscar-tipped film also casts the young entrepreneur as a social climber, a view Zuckerberg roundly rejected when speaking to an audience at Stanford University in California recently.
"The whole framing of the movie is I'm with this girl (who doesn't exist in real life) ... who dumps me ... which has happened in real life, a lot," he said, as reported by The Guardian newspaper. "And basically the framing is that the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls, or wanted to get into clubs. "They [the film's creators] just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things," he added, although he said the makers did get his wardrobe right. "It's interesting the stuff that they focused on getting right – like every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," he said.
A pivotal moment in the film is his rejection by an character called Erica Albright, who Zuckerberg said was invented, adding that he had been with current girlfriend Priscilla Chan since before the advent of Facebook. He had thus far chosen to stay silent.