Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time at the end to discuss what it means that the defining social network of our era was founded, according to its most celebrated version, by a man who desperately wanted to be let in somewhere.

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BEN MEZRICH AND THE BOOK: NARRATIVE NON-FICTION ON THE FASTEST COMPANY IN HISTORY
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  1. The Accidental Billionaires: Narrative Non-Fiction as a Genre
    Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book is narrative non-fiction in a specific and sometimes controversial mode: it reconstructs scenes, invents dialogue, imagines interior states, and tells its story with the pacing and texture of a novel while claiming the factual authority of journalism. Mezrich spoke primarily to Eduardo Saverin and worked from his perspective; Zuckerberg declined to cooperate. Did the book feel like journalism, biography, or a novel that happened to be about real people? And does knowing that Mezrich’s primary source was the person who sued Zuckerberg change how you read its portrait of the Facebook founding?
  2. Sorkin’s Adaptation: From Book to Screenplay in Six Months
    Sorkin has said he read Mezrich’s book over a weekend and wrote the screenplay in six months, and that what attracted him was not the technology story but the human story: friendship, betrayal, exclusion, and the specific way that enormous success can leave the people around it diminished. He also did his own research and departed substantially from Mezrich in characterization and emphasis. Did the film feel like an adaptation of The Accidental Billionaires, or like a Sorkin film that used the book as a launching pad? And is there a meaningful difference between those two things when the source is itself a reconstruction rather than a documentary account?
  3. What the Book Emphasizes That the Film Doesn’t
    Mezrich’s book gives more space to the technical development of Facebook — the coding, the server decisions, the specific problems of scaling a social network, the business decisions in the early months. Sorkin’s film is almost entirely uninterested in the technology itself, treating it as background to the human drama. Did the film’s indifference to the technical story feel like the right choice for a drama about human beings, or like a significant omission from the story of how Facebook was actually built? And does either version give you a real understanding of what made Facebook different from what came before it?
  4. The Reliability Problem: A Story About Contested Events Told Through Contested Sources
    The Facebook founding is genuinely disputed — Zuckerberg, Saverin, the Winklevoss twins, and Sean Parker all have different accounts of what happened, who contributed what, and who owed what to whom. Mezrich worked primarily from Saverin’s perspective; Sorkin incorporated multiple depositions; the real events remain partially unresolvable. Did either version acknowledge this unreliability honestly, or did each present its version of events with more certainty than the available evidence warrants? And is a film or book about genuinely disputed events obligated to signal its own uncertainty?

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CHARACTERS: THE GENIUS, THE FRIEND, AND THE PEOPLE IN THE WAY
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  1. Casting Call from the Deposition Room
    When Jesse Eisenberg appeared as Mark Zuckerberg — fast, precise, socially opaque, the most intelligent person in every room and the least able to benefit from it — did your sense of the real Zuckerberg, or Mezrich’s Zuckerberg, say yes, this is him, or hold something in reserve? Same question for Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, and Armie Hammer as the Winklevoss twins. Who felt most like the figure the book described, and who became the definitive screen version?
  2. Mark Zuckerberg: The Sorkin Character Who May or May Not Be the Real Person
    Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is one of cinema’s great character inventions: a man of extraordinary intelligence whose social intelligence is so deficient that he cannot understand why what he does destroys his relationships. The real Zuckerberg has said the film is fictionally inaccurate and personally unfair. Sorkin has said he was writing a character, not a biography. Did the film’s Zuckerberg feel like a plausible person, a compelling fictional character, or both simultaneously? And does the question of whether this is the “real” Zuckerberg matter, or has the film’s version become its own cultural fact?
  3. Eduardo Saverin: The Friend the Film Needs
    Saverin is the film’s emotional center — the person whose betrayal organizes the story’s moral weight, whose friendship with Zuckerberg is the human stakes, and whose lawsuit frames the entire narrative. Mezrich worked primarily from Saverin’s account. Did the film give Eduardo sufficient complexity to feel like a full person rather than primarily the victim of the story — someone whose own choices and limitations contributed to what happened to him? And which version — Mezrich’s Saverin-centric account or the film’s more even-handed one — made Eduardo feel most like a genuinely sympathetic figure?
  4. Sean Parker: The Villain Who Makes Things Happen
    Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker is one of the film’s most seductive performances — a man of genuine vision and genuine destructiveness, whose influence on Zuckerberg is partly enabling and partly corrupting, and whose lifestyle is both aspirational and cautionary. Did the film give Parker enough complexity to feel like more than a plot function? And is Parker, in both versions, the story’s true antagonist — or is the story more interesting when there is no true antagonist, only a series of people with competing legitimate grievances?
  5. The Winklevoss Twins: The Villains Who Aren’t Quite
    The Winklevoss twins — Harvard rowers, Olympians, entitled in a specific and visible way, convinced that Zuckerberg stole their idea — are the film’s great comic set piece and its most pointed class commentary. Did the film manage to make the twins both ridiculous and partly right simultaneously? And is the twins’ complaint — that Zuckerberg stole their idea — actually as clearly wrong as the film’s comic framing suggests, or does either version leave the intellectual property question genuinely more ambiguous than the tone implies?

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SORKIN AND FINCHER: TWO SENSIBILITIES, ONE FILM
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  1. Aaron Sorkin’s Screenplay: The Best of His Career?
    Sorkin’s screenplay is widely considered one of the finest of the 2000s — the overlapping dialogue, the speed, the way the deposition structure allows the film to move between past and present, the specific quality of wit applied to genuine moral seriousness. Did the screenplay feel like the right formal approach for this material, or did Sorkin’s characteristic dialogue style occasionally make characters feel more articulate about their own situations than any real person could be? And is there a tension between Sorkin’s theatrical instinct for perfectly constructed speeches and Fincher’s more cinematic interest in what people aren’t saying?
  2. David Fincher’s Direction: Cold Precision in Service of Hot Emotion
    Fincher’s visual approach is characteristically cool and precise — the frames composed with an engineer’s attention, the performances calibrated to millimeter accuracy, the whole film organized around the specific quality of institutional light: depositions, offices, dorm rooms. Did this coldness feel like the right visual environment for a story about a man who experiences the world through a certain emotional coldness? And where did Fincher’s precision serve Sorkin’s emotional material most effectively?
  3. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Score: The Sound of Digital Alienation
    The score — electronic, synthetic, simultaneously cold and urgent — is one of the film’s most discussed formal achievements. It gives the film a specific temporal quality: the sound of something happening very fast that will matter for a very long time. Did the score feel like the right sonic argument for a film about the digital age’s founding mythology? And is there a specific cue — the opening sequence, the rowing scene, the final image — where the score made the film feel most like the version of itself it was reaching for?
  4. The Deposition Structure: Non-Linear Storytelling as Moral Argument
    The film uses two deposition settings — the Winklevoss lawsuit and the Saverin lawsuit — as a framing device that allows it to move through time non-linearly, contextualizing each past action with its future consequences. This structure is the film’s primary formal argument: everything Mark does in 2003 and 2004 is shown to us from the perspective of what it eventually costs him. Did the deposition structure feel like a meaningful formal choice, or like a thriller device that the story might have managed without? And how does the structure change the story’s moral architecture?

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THE IDEAS UNDERNEATH: WHAT THE FILM IS ACTUALLY ABOUT
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  1. Exclusion and Its Engines: The Film’s Deepest Argument
    Sorkin has said the film is about a man who wanted to be let in somewhere and built the most exclusive club in the world instead — a billion members who are still, somehow, on the outside looking in. Did the film make this argument feel as central as Sorkin intended? And is there a reading of Facebook’s history in which Zuckerberg’s personal experience of exclusion is genuinely constitutive of the platform’s design — where the product and its creator’s wound are the same thing?
  2. Friendship, Loyalty, and What Success Does to Both
    The film is fundamentally a story about what happens to a friendship when one person becomes extraordinarily successful, and the other doesn’t, and about the specific betrayals that the pursuit of success seems to require. Did either version make the Zuckerberg-Saverin friendship feel real enough that its destruction felt like a genuine loss rather than a narrative inevitability? And which version — Mezrich’s Saverin-centric book or the film’s more bilateral portrait — made the friendship’s destruction feel most clearly like the story’s true subject?
  3. The Billion-Dollar Lawsuit as a Story About Ideas and Ownership
    The film’s legal framework raises a question it never quite answers: who owns an idea? The Winklevosses had an idea that Zuckerberg improved beyond recognition. Saverin provided capital and early structure. Parker provided vision and connections. Zuckerberg built it. Did either version make the question of intellectual property and creative ownership feel genuinely difficult — not just legally but morally? And is there a version of the Facebook founding in which everyone is partly right?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHOSE VERSION OF THE FOUNDING IS MORE TRUE?
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  1. What Mezrich’s Book Gives You That the Film Can’t
    Mezrich’s narrative non-fiction gives you reconstructed interiority — what he imagines Saverin felt, what the atmosphere in the room was, the texture of specific moments as Saverin recalled them. Did the film compress any elements of the book’s Saverin-centric account in ways you noticed? Name one thing Mezrich’s reconstruction gave you that the film’s more even-handed account set aside.
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Better Than the Book Described
    Name one moment where Fincher’s direction gave you something Mezrich’s prose couldn’t: the deposition sequences, the opening Erica scene, Eisenberg’s specific performance of Zuckerberg’s particular social register, the final image of Mark refreshing the page. Which cinematic moment felt like the ideal version of what this story needed?
  3. The Final Image: Refreshing the Page
    The film ends with Mark refreshing Erica’s Facebook page, waiting for her to accept his friend request. Did this final image feel like the right ending — the billion-dollar success reduced to the original longing, the man who built the world’s largest social network waiting to be accepted by one person? And is this ending Sorkin’s invention or something suggested by Mezrich, and does the difference matter?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW MUCH OF THE FOUNDING SURVIVED THE TELLING?
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  1. A Film That Became More Famous Than Its Source
    The Social Network is one of the clearest cases of a film that completely eclipsed its source — Mezrich’s book sold well but is primarily remembered now as the source material for the film. Does the film deserve this dominance? And is there something The Accidental Billionaires gives you — Saverin’s perspective, the technical texture, the sense of the specific moment in which Facebook was built — that the film’s greater artistry has made harder to access?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the book, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Narrative Non-Fiction Reconstruction of a Disputed Series of Events; Best Screenplay That Turned a Business Story Into a Tragedy About Friendship; Best Use of a Non-Linear Deposition Structure as a Moral Argument; Best Performance of Social Intelligence’s Absence as a Character Trait; Best Final Image That Reframes Everything That Came Before It.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — book or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Saverin’s perspective on the founding? If they want Sorkin’s screenplay as a formal achievement? If they’re interested in the actual business and technical history of Facebook’s early days? And is there a case that reading the book first is actually essential — that knowing how Mezrich constructed the story makes Sorkin’s departures from it feel more deliberate and more pointed?
  4. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “a Sorkin-Fincher original drama that used a narrative non-fiction book as a launching pad for a film about something much larger than Facebook,” where does The Social Network land? And the question Sorkin keeps asking: if you built something used by a billion people, and in doing so lost the one friendship that mattered, and if that friendship was the thing you were trying to prove yourself worthy of all along — was it worth it? And did either version give you an answer, or just Mark Zuckerberg’s face, waiting for a response that doesn’t come?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your network.