Oscars: Aaron Sorkin says after Egypt, he’s come around on Facebook
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Maybe Facebook is useful after all. That was the message at the Oscars from ‘The Social Network’ scribe Aaron Sorkin, who this season was quoted numerous times as saying he doesn’t use Facebook and doesn’t know much about it, despite writing a film about its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
‘I’ve been cranky about the Internet,’ Sorkin told reporters backstage at the Academy Awards after winning the prize for adapted screenplay. ‘Somewhere along the way I’ve turned into my grandfather. And I’ve got some good reasons. But when you see what happened in Cairo and other examples of social-network tools mobilizing people for great causes, you want to thank the Mark Zuckerbergs that are out there for doing that.’ (Facebook was used by some key organizers of the Egyptian uprising that ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak.)
Sorkin has in the past compared Facebook to a carburetor -- he has said he knows it’s in there but ‘wouldn’t know the first thing about finding it.’
But Sorkin also says that writing a movie like this has upped the ante for him personally. ‘I’ll be very candid with you. Since the movie came out and got the cultural and critical reaction, I’ve been hyper-aware the thing I write next is the movie I write after ‘The Social Network.’ ‘
--Steven Zeitchik
