From Forbes

Justin Timberlake claims he brought sexy back. That’s questionable, but his fictional portrayal of Sean Parker, the President of Facebook, in the forthcoming movie about the site’s founding, The Social Network, could make entrepreneurship sexy.

Entrepreneurs turned billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates may be glorified by the media at large and biographers but no major director nor screenwriter has attempted to turn such a story into a major film. There’s no “Bill Gates at the Gates” or “Googling Larry Page and Sergey Brin.”

Now there’s The Social Network. Although the script is said to be a largely fictionalized account of Facebook’s birth, it will give millions of people a touchstone to connect Facebook, the website used almost daily by an estimated 500 million people, to a Harvard undergraduate’s dormroom brainstorm.   The idea of creating something out of nothing is central to entrepreneurship, and new disruptive billion dollar marketplaces can arise from the productive discontent of an angsty college student.

So even if, as the New York Times says, the film does little to explain Silicon Valley or the business of Facebook:

The movie deals heavily with themes familiar to Hollywood, like friendship and betrayal, but makes little effort to explain Silicon Valley or the Facebook phenomenon.

Any glamorization of Facebook’s founding might entice young people into dreaming up ideas for high-growth businesses. While more new businesses were launched in 2009 than in the past 14 years, young people, ages 20-34, started fewer businesses (about 24 per 100,000 people) than the population overall (about 34 per 100,000) in 2009, according to the Kauffman Foundation’s Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.

So with all the ideas out there to turn entrepreneurs into rockstars in the US, along the lines of an MIT professor’s recent push for an Entrepreneurs Walk of Fame to give top Boston entrepreneurs Hollywood style stars outside Kendall Square in Boston,  The Social Network could do the most to glamorize the idea of creating a new business.

Whether or not The Social Network wins critical acclaim when it hits theaters in October, building a mystique around entrepreneurship could be the film’s legacy.

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