Mark Zuckerberg on What Hollywood Doesn't Get About Silicon Valley

They're driven to create also (characters, plots).

I'd say one difference is, it's easy to hold a steady job as a programmer, but as a writer you have to really work the business side. It does change the emphasis sometimes from creating to selling.

For movies, it's a matter of making the story entertaining for the larger swath of people who (by definition) don't all geek out about the same things.

E.g. I'm a geek. I'm a gamer. I can't even get up the motivation to netflix King of Kong, let alone watch it all the way through. I understand and respect that those guys geek out over Donkey Kong. But that doesn't hold my interest.

Hollywood would have as much luck trying to make people understand the joy of hacking as we hackers have in trying to make people understand privacy and security.

I do?

Everyone likes to think they are a beautiful and unique little snowflake. Nobody likes the reality that they aren't.

I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."

I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer.

Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.

Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit.

If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.

And on the other hand, Facebook succeeding or not is by definition it having an effect on its audience - if people like it enough to keep using it, it'll work. So if anything it's probably more like making a movie than a technical hack.

I think you're drawing a distinction in motivations (audience/no audience) that doesn't really fit. If we're talking about the best of both industries, I think they both work on each type of project.

There's a lot Sorkin does that just shouldn't work. His dialogue is extremely lengthy and, in the case of The West Wing and Sports Night, he completely threw out the idea of using internal (team) conflict to drive the narrative, choosing unity instead. His President of the United States was extraordinarily idealistic and principled, even under fire.

This is a long way of saying I think Sorkin does it this way to amuse himself. He creates things he, himself, would like. He certainly feels an obligation to his audience, as the parent comment mentioned, but overall he writes the characters and dialogue in a way that gives him pleasure.

edit: Even going so far as to inject the idea of taking pleasure from writing things well into his scribe characters: Danny and Casey in Sports Night, Toby, Sam, President Bartlet and Will on the West Wing.

Likewise, most people who love making movies do it because they love making it. A lot of those movies never get audiences. Just like a lot of software projects never see the light of day. But some do.

There are, of course, uncreative money-grubbing people in Hollywood... just like in the tech world.

>>Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone.

Hollywood's not everyone. There are thriving filmmaking communities in just about every large city on earth. They don't all have the same mass appeal as Hollywood vehicles, just as small town startups rarely have the same appeal as Silicon Valley companies, but they're there, and they're vibrant. Furthermore, the very definition of avant-garde cinema is, to some degree, "let's do this just do this just to do it".

>>There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there.

It's called independent film, and the number of participants has skyrocketed in the last decade. Sure, they fantasize about it becoming a major hit like Paranormal Activity, just as every startup founder and his iguana fantasizes about being Google. But that doesn't mean they aren't making movies just cos they like making them.

Sorkin writes: "It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard."

This page is obligatory reading on this debate (previously posted to HN): http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-...

Now, I'm not saying what did or did not drive Zuckerberg - but Sorkin, who wrote the Zuckerberg character, thought the character was motivated by revenge.

"We just like to build things" excuse sounded so lame it's unbelievable it came from a person who supposedly studied psychology.

The characters' motives as presented in the movie might be fabrication or speculation (depending on your view of the true story) but they still make for a better and more tense story (imho).