Aaron Sorkin explains why Donald Trump is never mentioned in The Social Reckoning
Aaron Sorkin has insisted he was "never asked" not to mention Donald Trump by name in The Social Reckoning but didn't want to make the focus of the film political.
Aaron Sorkin has insisted he was "never asked" not to mention Donald Trump by name in The Social Reckoning.
The 65-year-old filmmaker's latest movie features a recreation of the 2021 United States Capitol riot, which followed supporters of then-president Donald Trump protesting the certification of Joe Biden's election victory, but the former Apprentice star isn't namechecked at all, something which the writer explained was a deliberate move because politics isn't the focus of the film.
He told Vanity Fair magazine: “I want to be clear: I was never asked to do that, to not mention Trump by name.
“I turned in the script and a day or two later met with [Sony Pictures chair] Tom Rothman, who was full speed ahead on it. And I promised him, unprovoked, that we would not see any Trump signage, no ‘Make America Great Again.’
“The movie is about Facebook’s role and the rise of divisiveness, extremism, and hyper-partisanship in the country. It is not a red-blue thing, even though, obviously, it will be felt that way.”
The Social Reckoning tells the story of how whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) disclosed tens of thousands of documents revealing that Facebook was aware of its harmful societal effects and the role the site played in spreading misinformation, including content that was linked to political violence.
Some reshoots on the movie have taken place after the release of the trailer, but Aaron insisted that wasn't in response to mixed reactions to the footage, but simply a desire to "make it better".
He said: "We weren’t correcting anything. There are two kinds of reshoots: one is the ‘Oh, we’re in trouble. We need to reshoot this.’ And that usually happens on $150 million superhero movies. The other kinds of reshoots are ‘Oh, we really like this movie. It’s good. Let’s make it better.’"
One change that was made was a scene in which a Facebook senior official originally said: “I don’t know what that b**** thinks she’s doing.”
Aaron explained: “The lawyer said, ‘Unless you can show me that at one point a senior Facebook executive referred to an ex-employee as a b****, you can’t do that.’ So it was that.”
The West Wing creator noted that the studio "had a real concern for secrecy" so test screenings of The Social Reckoning were limited to “70 people on the studio lot, all of them Sony employees.”
He added: “It is not a great polling sample.”
