The scene: A messy Harvard dorm room. A young, drunken student chugs beer at his computer.His handsome, dark-haired best friend wanders in.
"I need you," the first young man says.
"I'm here for you," his friend replies earnestly.
"No, I need the algorithm you wrote to rank chess players."
"Are you OK?" the friend asks.
"We're ranking girls," the drunk at the computer answers.
And so Facebook was born — at least according to The Social Network, the Oscar-nominated film that took American theaters by storm last fall.
That drunk at the computer, of course, was Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's brash, oft-criticized founder. His handsome friend, played by heartthrob Andrew Garfield, was none other than Eduardo Saverin.
The lesser-known half of Facebook's founding duo has had a breakout year thanks to The Social Network, a film largely based on Saverin's version of the website's founding — and his acrimonious split with Zuckerberg — as told to author Ben Mezrich.
Long before Saverin was fighting Zuckerberg for Facebook's billions, he was growing up in the Magic City, the son of Brazilian immigrants from São Paulo. Before heading to Harvard, Saverin cut his teeth at Miami's Gulliver Prep.
Now everyone knows the rest of his story: founding the business end of Facebook, getting screwed out of his shares by the devious Zuckerberg, and eventually getting the last laugh by winning an estimated billion-dollar court verdict against Facebook and literally writing the book on the website's incredible inside history.
Not a bad year for a local kid.