20 Things You Didn't Know About The Social Network
16. Sorkin Read His Whole Script To Fincher In Under Two Hours
Aaron Sorkin is one of the best screenwriters in TV and film. What's more, you can tell when you're hearing one of his scripts pretty easily, as it's filled with rapid-fire dialogue, quotable monologues and especially in the case of the Social Network, darkly humorous undercurrent.
It's no wonder then that he won the Oscar, after masterfully adapting The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, into the script for The Social Network. However it could have been very different. The initial shooting script was deemed far too long by Sony, who believed that Sorkin's 162 page tome would result in a two-hour-and-42-minute run-time, if using the normal one-page-equals-one-minute Hollywood calculus.
Sorkin was subsequently told to cut it down to a more reasonable two hours, so he met up with Fincher, where the director broke out a stopwatch and told him: "Start reading."
Sorkin duly obliged and proceeded to read his entire script in exactly an hour and 59 minutes.
It's a testament to how good a writer Sorkin is and shows how he is able to write such fast paced dialogue so well: Because that's how he talks in real life.