Aaron Sorkin says the "Social Reckoning" reshoots that followed a mixed-reaction trailer had "nothing to do" with the backlash, that the film's test audiences were 70 Sony employees on the studio lot, and that a Sony lawyer forced a rewrite of a line containing the word "bitch," per Variety.
The Facebook Files follow-up opens October 9. In a Vanity Fair interview, Sorkin sorted the reshoots into two kinds. One kind happens to a $150 million superhero movie that is in trouble. The other kind happens when a studio loves its film so much it buys the director three extra days of shooting. Sony's chairman asked if there was anything he would change, Sorkin said he would rewrite the whole thing, and two scenes happened. The checkbook was opened, and the trailer backlash was never on the table.
Then there is the line that became a legal question. A senior Facebook official in the film says, in Sorkin's account, "I don't know what that bitch thinks she's doing." The outside lawyers told the writer that the word needed proof, as in, produce a real Facebook executive who once called a former employee a bitch. No proof, no line. A movie about the Facebook Files now runs a dialogue department with a bar association.
The test screenings were 70 people each, all of them Sony employees, all of them on the studio lot, which Sorkin calls "not a great polling sample." And before anyone asked him, he says he promised the studio chair, unprovoked, that the film would show no political signage and no hats, so a movie that recreates January 6 stays, on his say-so, not a red-blue thing. The director edited himself before the lawyers got there.
Quality control. A co-writing lawyer. A focus group made of HR. By October 9, the most discussed line in the film will be the one that got cut.
YOUR TURN: What is the most ridiculous thing a studio lawyer has made a writer cut, and what replacement line did they get?
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