Culture
A Reckoning on Union Square, Sorkin Brings Facebook Back to New York
Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong and Jeremy Allen White walk the carpet on Broadway as The Social Reckoning premieres days before it opens
On Sunday, on Broadway a block below Union Square, a multiplex did a job it rarely gets to do. The Regal Union Square is usually where the neighborhood goes to see whatever is playing. On October 4 it held the U.S. premiere of The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's return to Facebook, sixteen years after The Social Network made a Harvard dorm room look like a crime scene.
The guest list reads like a fall awards ballot. Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for Anora, plays the whistleblower Frances Haugen. Jeremy Allen White plays Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter she brought her documents to. Jeremy Strong takes over Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg. Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin and Bill Burr were there too, according to Deadline's report from the carpet, which noted that the New York night followed premiere screenings in London and Paris. Burr arrived with Nia Renée Hill, his former Old Dads co-star.
The film opens in theaters on Friday, October 9.
The People Who Lived It
The best picture of the night was not of a movie star alone. Madison and White posed with Haugen and Horwitz themselves, the real engineer and the real reporter whose 2021 investigation became known as the Facebook Files. Variety shared the moment on video. Madison wore a long silver gown. Haugen stood beside her, the woman she plays, close enough to compare.
It is a strange kind of mirror. Haugen was a Facebook engineer who leaked thousands of internal documents. Horwitz turned them into a series alleging the company put profit ahead of safety and kept its own research quiet. Now both of them can watch Hollywood stars say their lines, on a screen in the middle of Manhattan.
Haugen has not stopped thinking about the man at the center of it. She told CBS News that she sees much of Zuckerberg's life as a tragedy.
"Here's a person who rose to power when he was 19 years old, surrounded by yes-men for his entire adult life." Frances Haugen
Meta declined to comment on the film to CBS.
Sorkin and the Truth
Sorkin has been in conversation with himself about the first film for a while. In a CBS News interview published the morning of the premiere, he remembered Eisenberg telling him how teenage boys would come up asking him to sign business cards with Zuckerberg's famous profane job title on them. They had seen a hero where Sorkin and Eisenberg meant a tragic one. "Of course, I'm responsible," Sorkin said. "It wasn't my intention."
This time he says the subject is the reporting itself. He told AFP and a small group of journalists that this is a whistleblower story and a newspaper story. The plot turns on a single fight, Facebook's refusal to fact check political ads before the 2020 election. Sony even hired an outside law firm to review the script. Sorkin said the lawyers had few notes and did not change the film.
He also has a line about money that may outlive the movie. Explaining why money cannot be what drives Zuckerberg now, he told AFP that there is nothing you can buy for $120 billion that you couldn't buy for $119 billion.
The timing is very New York. Sorkin's first script, A Few Good Men, is coming back to Broadway just as this film opens. CBS asked him about its most famous line. He started by saying people can handle the truth, then reversed himself.
"Maybe we can't handle the truth." Aaron Sorkin
His reason was that a lie is often easier to believe than a fact.
A Zuckerberg With a Defense Attorney
The most interesting voice in the room may belong to the man playing the villain. Strong told David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour that he wrote to Zuckerberg before filming to say he was taking the part seriously. He also said he spent much of the shoot arguing on his character's behalf. "I was defending him a lot when we were making the film, to my director," Strong said, as Deadline reported. His hope, he said, is that the film is "a dialectic rather than a polemic."
That is the tension Sorkin likes best. People talking in rooms, words crashing into each other. He told CBS he is "very conscious of the music of the language," a habit he traces to childhood trips to the theater with his parents. A premiere on Broadway, even the multiplex end of it, suits him.
It has been a crowded fall for New York screens. Uptown at Lincoln Center, Jordan Firstman just brought Club Kid to the New York Film Festival. Down on 13th Street, the argument about Facebook gets a theater, a release date and a red carpet. The film opens Friday. The argument itself started long before, and it will still be going when the lights come up.