Chapter 203: If there is any similarity, it's purely an asshole
If it wasn't for the bright red eye-catching signage at the entrance, Lin Mingyang would have a hard time connecting the plain gray building in front of him with Facebook's headquarters. Because of its incredible growth rate, Facebook's original old headquarters had become overcrowded, and since last year, Mark Zuckerberg had begun to look for a new headquarters, and the company had later relocated to its current location in Palo Alto, a city near San Francisco in the United States.
Mark Zuckerberg, who had been waiting in the lobby, greeted him and the two had a "close" hug in front of the company.
"Felix, I'm really glad you came over!" After separating their bodies, Mark eagerly led Lin Mingyang on a tour of the company, saying as he walked, "It seems like we haven't seen each other in over a year, right?"
Lin Ming Yang laughed, "Isn't that what you created Facebook for, people can know how each other are doing without having to meet!"
"Watching a movie and meeting an actor in person, that feeling is definitely different." Mark Zuckerberg also laughed, "Is everyone else in the dormitory okay?"
Lin Mingyang shrugged, "Same old same old!"
The two talked and soon arrived in a large room with no isolators or spacious walls, Facebook had nearly 900 employees and most of them worked here. The entire environment of the office was like a dormitory, with rows of desks and computers placed together, giving Lin Mingyang the feeling of a giant internet café, but Mark believed that this office environment helped to inspire the company's spirit of openness.
"Over there is our recreation center, which has a variety of games to choose from, downstairs is a basketball court, and when the weather is nice, we can barbecue over there or hold concerts..." Mark kept introducing some of the very interesting settings in the Facebook headquarters to Lin Mingyang, and they When they appeared, many people in the large room stopped what they were doing and cast curious gazes at them.
The working environment of Facebook's headquarters was very different from that of those large companies Lin Mingyang had seen before, the average age of the entire company's employees was no more than thirty years old, and the entire company exuded a feeling of difference.
The breath of trendy culture had infiltrated every corner of the building, and even the names of many of the office conference rooms were from current buzzwords. And Mark Zuckerberg's own office actually had a refrigerator, and when he pulled it open Lin Mingyang glanced inside, and he found a wide array of various types of foodstuffs, as well as whole beers.
"I only have instant coffee and beer here, which do you want?" Mark stood in front of the refrigerator and hesitated for a while before finally deciding to let Lin Ming Yang choose for himself.
Lin Mingyang looked around the entire office and didn't find a water dispenser and said, "I'd have to have hot water to brew my coffee if I want to drink it too!"
"Sorry, how did I forget about this!" Mark grinned broadly and slapped his head, finally throwing a can of beer to Lin Mingyang, "Better drink this then!"
Lin Ming Yang drank the beer while looking around at Mark's uniquely styled office space, "Your office gives me a familiar feeling, but I always feel as if something is missing."
"Much like our old dorm room right?" Mark gulped down half a bottle of beer and burped before saying, "There's just one bed missing, in fact I spend all my time here except for sleeping."
"You guy..." shook Lin Ming Yang's head before taking a seat on the sofa, "This time I came to find you, mainly to talk to you about something."
"Something to do with Facebook?" Mark's expression immediately became serious, he was a person who separated work from play.
Lin Mingyang saw through the worries in Mark Zuckerberg's heart with a glance, "The matter is not as serious as you think, it will have some relation with Facebook, but more mainly with you!"
"Related to me?" Mark was puzzled in his heart, he was originally worried that Lin Mingyang was asking about the company's affairs as a shareholder, but Lin Mingyang used no intention in this regard.
"Have you read this book?" Lin Mingyang pulled out a book from his satchel and dropped it on Mark's desk.
"You know I don't like this kind of inspirational biographies, especially depicting business matters, those are all bullshit..." Mark casually grabbed the book, glanced at the title and had no desire to read on.
"But this book is about you!" Lin Mingyang added, "To be precise this is a biography about you!"
Mark's eyes went wide, "But I haven't published a biography at all..." he looked at the book in his hand magically and oddly, both the book and the author it was signed by felt incomparably unfamiliar to him.
"Looks like this guy really didn't interview you!" Mark's reaction was not out of Lin Mingyang's expectation, "But you can treat this book as a novel, many of the plots about you in it don't exist, but the author's level of storytelling is still quite good."
"How did this happen?" Mark leaned against the edge of the desk, holding the book in his hand, his eyes full of doubt, "You didn't come just to tell me about this, did you?"
"Now that you know about it, what are you going to do next, ignore it or sue that author?"
Mark looked a little taken aback by this biography that came out of nowhere, he shook his head and couldn't decide in his mind for a while.
Lin Ming Yang stood up from the sofa, then patted Mark's shoulder and said, "Now that you know about this matter, I will support you no matter what decision you make... I know that you're afraid you don't have the heart to read this novel right now, but you still have to turn it over, there's a photo wedged in there, and that's the main reason I'm here to find you today. "
Mark spread the book open with a sense of disbelief, and sure enough, he found a photograph inside. As he pulled out the photo, he only glanced towards it and his expression became grave.
"Who is this person in the photo? How do I feel..."
"Looks a lot like you right?" Lin Mingyang finished the latter words for him, "His name is Jesse Eisenberg, and his current identity is an actor."
"Then is there a purpose for you to show me this?" Mark wasn't interested in this guy whose looks were a bit similar to his own, instead he was curious about Lin Ming Yang's intentions for doing so.
"I have to thank the author of the book you're holding for this, he's the one who gave me the idea to make a biopic movie of the whole process of you founding Facebook!"
Mark raised the photo in his hand, "This guy is what you prepared for me?"
Lin Mingyang clinked his beer with the one in Mark's hand, "I wonder if you're still satisfied with this 'double'?"
Anyone else who made such a request, Mark would have every reason to refuse him, only Lin Ming Yang made it impossible for him to do so. But being unable to refuse didn't mean that he couldn't bargain, Mark clasped his hands, "What can I get out of this?"
Lin Mingyang threw out the "cake" is very tempting: "This is a free opportunity to do publicity for Facebook. I know that Facebook has become a fashionable culture among young people, and has even become an indispensable part of their lives, and this movie will show people how you and Facebook have grown up, so that more people will identify with you and the concept of Facebook."
"But I don't think there's anything special about the real me, so I'm curious...what kind of image will you portray me as in the movie?" Mark pointed to the copy of the novel he'd tossed aside, "Make something up like the author of that one?"
Lin Mingyang explained, "In order to pursue dramatization and get more moviegoers to buy tickets and walk into the cinema, I'll make appropriate alterations to reality. The conversations that appear in the drama may have taken place over a long period of time and in different places, but I will compress them together. And for the basic facts, I will make purposeful choices or even exaggerate them and then use them as key plot points in the movie."
"May I give a few examples?" Mark made a very solid request.
"Of course!" Lin Mingyang nodded, "I'll fictionalize an ex-girlfriend for you in the film...would you mind such an arrangement?"
Mark shrugged his shoulders, indicating that it didn't matter.
"What about Priscilla?"
Mark hesitated, "That... I'm not so sure!"
"As long as you don't mind, I'll personally explain this matter to your girlfriend!" Lin Ming Yang nodded and continued, "The story started out like this, your ex-girlfriend dumped you, and then you created a website called 'FaceMash' while drinking beer, allowing everyone to vote on the avatars of the girls on Harvard's campus and rank them humanely, and for a while the Harvard campus network was paralyzed..."
Mark defended, "But the fact is that the site I made ended up with only 450 registered users and only 220,000 clicks on the poll, far from paralyzing the Harvard campus network, and I only published the girls' pictures, I didn't compare their avatars to animals' avatars... "
Lin Mingyang doesn't deny his claim, "That's what I call an exaggeration of an episode."
"And then?"
"Do you remember the Winklevoss brothers?"
"You're going to write them in too?" Mark's face finally turned a little hard as he asked, without irony, "And what about me, scumbag, a shameful plagiarist?"
"This is a biographical movie, and there is no avoiding the matter about you and the Winklevoss brothers, and I will show this matter from an objective point of view. You are, in my movie, simply employed by the Winklevoss brothers, you delayed the development of their project, and behind your back you were developing your own, and eventually you founded Facebook."
The expression on Mark's face was still unnatural when Lin Ming Yang brought up the old story. In reality the final solution was for Mark and the Winklevoss brothers to reach an out-of-court understanding, this happened before Lin Ming Yang entered Harvard, and the dispute between the two sides happened after Lin Ming Yang injected capital into Facebook, at that time Lin Ming Yang didn't make a judgment of right and wrong on this matter, he just spent 5 million dollars to help Mark smooth out the trouble.
For Lin Mingyang, it does not matter what is right or wrong, but the controversy about this matter has always existed, the real situation is only clear in Mark's own heart. In fact, as early as two years before the birth of Facebook, Stanford campus has been a social networking site called "ClubNexus" and the same mechanism as Facebook - that is, although Mark finally acquiesced to the compensation of the other side of the fact, but obviously this idea is not a good idea. Although Mark eventually agreed to compensate the other side of the fact, but it is clear that this idea is not the first Winklevoss brothers.
"Since you're even planning to write in the Winklevoss Brothers, you mustn't have left out Saverin, I know you've always had a good relationship with him, so you're planning to put in a good word for him in the movie, right?" Mark had guessed Lin Ming Yang's next step by this time.
"In this movie, Saverin ended up leaving the company because he disagreed with you, that's all." Lin Ming Yang knew that the relationship between Mark and Saverin had broken down completely, so he didn't want to irritate Mark too much on this matter.
Lin Mingyang sympathized with Saverin, but he was on Mark's side when it came to the board of directors' resolution concerning whether Saverin would continue to stay in Facebook's management. Because Saverin once brought Facebook's development into the wrong direction and privately froze the company's bank accounts, bringing about a great negative impact.
So far, has left the management of Facebook Saverin still holds 5% of the company's shares, worth 2.5 billion U.S. dollars, is the third largest individual shareholders of Facebook, but in the book "pure coincidence of the billionaire", Mark is depicted as a deliberate negative role, and the main source of material for the book, it is the self-professed loser of the power struggle Saverin.
Overall, Lin Mingyang constructs his story from a relatively fair and objective standpoint, so even though Mark is dissatisfied with certain episodes in his story, he can't find a reason to object.
After receiving Mark's approval, Lin Mingyang began to work on the script. In theory, a story about a computer geek like Mark, where most of the scenes take place in a college dormitory or classroom, and the main character sits in front of a computer all day long writing passwords and is a girl insulator, it's hard to tell an interesting story with such a story base. But the strange thing is, Lin Mingyang really wrote this story of geek entrepreneurship in such a way that it is not detached from reality, but also appealing in a colorful way.
Lin Ming Yang did not follow the traditional method of writing a biography to compile this story. Mark's legendary entrepreneurial story is just a background, what Lin Ming Yang really wants to show is the inner heart of a genius who is forever lonely and adrift, this vision with a few ironies and sadness, will be although it is about Mark Zuckerberg's story, but which is integrated into Lin Ming Yang's own understanding of success.
In the story Mark creates the facebook empire, establishes a super club that requires no invitations, and creates a huge social network that helps people get closer in the virtual world, yet he himself is a man without a social life.
He doesn't have the means to build long lasting solid relationships with anyone, whether it be love or friendship, he doesn't care that much about money, but he also doesn't admit defeat easily because deep down he believes he is the only one on top of the world.
Instead of being Mark's biography, this story is more like Lin Mingyang's own inner monologue. After success, loneliness becomes a necessity. Lin Mingyang felt this deeply, although he occasionally fantasized about making a change, but that only made him more at a loss.
In the construction of several important characters in the script, Lin Mingyang has also incorporated his own views on different classes. The Winklevoss brothers in the play are well off, tall, handsome, and the upper class of the Harvard campus. Compared to Mark's geekiness, their "gentlemanly behavior" seems outdated and ridiculous, and their status as athletes also implies that they are a group of people with "developed limbs and simple minds".
They belong to the past, and Lin Mingyang has deliberately left some kind of lingering traces of the pre-modern era on their bodies, just as they are engaged in rowing, which represents an ancient tradition. Although they try to catch up with new trends and come up with original ideas for Facebook, they are doomed to be eliminated, as if they cannot return to their old ways.
And while Saverin is not perfect in Lin Mingyang's writing, he is more representative of the normality of the times than Mark.
In Lin Mingyang's opinion, Saverin is a representative of the modern man, accurate and steady as a clock. While Mark would take desperate risks and succeed or fail, Saverin would pave the way back and forth. He does things meticulously, always in the middle of the road, and even if he doesn't make it big, he will make it small. Before Facebook's success, Mark sat on the bench while Saverin had been the new favorite in Harvard's social circle, his family not as prominent as the Winklevoss brothers, but upper-middle class, as evidenced by his generosity to Mark's early career. He was more able to fit into the mainstream than Mark, and if he hadn't become close friends with Mark, he would have kept going steadily like this, becoming an average success rather than a famous failure.
Besides Saverin, the other important character in the story is Lin Mingyang himself. If Saverin is the embodiment of modern personality in the story, then Lin Mingyang's own writing is the typical representative of the lawless postmodern personality. His passion, his madness, his unruly ... kinds of anti-traditional and anti-authority behavior make Mark feel like a fellow traveler.
In the process of shaping the character of "self" in the story, Lin Mingyang uses metaphorical techniques to incorporate his reflection on his own life. He deliberately depicts his social life as a post-modern floating state, having a night of passion with a girl he met in passing, and mingling with a beautiful model... All these amplified and exaggerated expressions allude to Lin Mingyang's own real life state.
He didn't even consider what kind of impact the movie would have on him if it was made in this way.