- "The Social Network" has prompted internet users to make their own overdramatic trailers
- YouTube, Twitter, eBay and MySpace have gotten "The Social Network" treatment
- There are six simple steps to producing your own fake tech-movie trailer
Editor's Note: Damon Brown is a Northern California-based freelance writer and author of books, including "Damon Brown's Simple Guide to the iPad" and "Porn & Pong: How 'Grand Theft Auto,' 'Tomb Raider' and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture."
David Fincher's "The Social Network" is already looking cheesy (Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker? Really?), but it hasn't prevented others from making the Facebook movie's overdramatic trailer seem even more absurd.
A great example is "The Video Website," a mini-"documentary" that lampoons the birth of YouTube and its founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley.
At one point, a distraught Chen says, "This is happening faster than any of us ever imagined. We don't have enough videos of adorable laughing babies!" In another scene, Hurley disarms antagonists by showing them a video of a sneezing baby panda.
Equally entertaining is the "The Twit Network," a nearly shot-by-shot parody of the trailer for Fincher's Facebook movie. Its best lines include, "I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall," "If Twitter was as useless and as boring as you say, someone would have tweeted it" and "What is the fail whale? Why does it keep appearing?"
In a week the YouTube clip has attracted more than 400,000 views.
Yes, eBay ("I'm talking about putting all the boring experience of a yard sale and putting it online!") and MySpace (Tom: "What? I have no friends? Try I have 12 million friends!") have gotten "The Social Network" treatment, too.
Want to make your own "The Social Network" parody? The formula works like this:
1. Pick a tech startup that went big
2. Gather all your hipster friends
3. Tell them they are great actors
4. Give them booze
5. Find creepy choral music
6. Roll your Flip cam
It's surprising that there hasn't been a Google movie-trailer parody yet. Maybe that's because a real Google movie would actually be something of substance.
As for "The Social Network," which dramatizes Mark Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook as a Harvard student, we'll have to see if it lives up to the hype when it hits theaters on October 1.
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