Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg have joined the cast of "The Social Network," a flick based on local author Ben Mezrich's tell-all book about the founding of Facebook in a Harvard dorm. Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became the founding president of Facebook while Eisenberg has been cast as Mark Zuckerberg. Andrew Garfield stars as Eduardo Saverin, a former founder who had a fallout with Zuckerberg.
A clean-shaven Justin Timberlake was pictured ready to get down to business on the set of his new movie, The Social Network, yesterday in Los Angeles. The 28-year-old singer and actor says “I’ve been doing research about the film,” “I’m starting to creep on a little bit more and see what it’s all about.”
The film which is based on the lives of the founders of Facebook was written by Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War and The American President) and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club & The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).
The script follows founder Zuckerberg getting dumped at a Boston-area bar and ends with him adding his former girlfriend to his friend list on his multibillion-dollar social networking site. The story is based on Mezrich's latest book, "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal."
Zuckerberg launched Facebook in Cambridge of 2004 before he moved to a house in Palo Alto, California and opened his first office on the Left Coast in the summer. As Facebook lore suggests, he planned to return to Harvard in the fall of '04, but never did
Sorkin's 162-page script includes some supposed behind-the-scenes banter with ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendrera after filing a lawsuit in 2004 alledging the unauthorized use of ConnectU's source code.