Trends Hut

Hollywood’s portrayal of Harvard College as the ruthless hunting ground of unethical social climbers in the Facebook film “The Social Network” may titillate the rest of the world, but to denizens of the ivied halls . . . it looks a little cartoonish.

“The only part that I can remember is the guys wearing red coats,” Hena Haines, a sophomore from Georgia, said after seeing the trailer. She said she thinks “The Social Network” will give outsiders a warped impression of social life on campus.

“It’s way, way overdramatized,” said junior Olga Zinoveva, 20, who also said she had seen the preview - as did almost every student approached on campus yesterday.

“The Social Network,” which hits theaters Friday, is a fictionalized account of the birth pangs of Facebook, which was started at Harvard while its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was an undergraduate there.

In the movie, Zuckerberg is portrayed as a status-conscious egomaniac, driven by a desire to be accepted among the campus elite.

At an over-capacity advance screening Wednesday night on campus, it was the party scenes set in “final clubs” - the University’s no longer so secret all-male societies - that reportedly drew the most laughter from the crowd. Another source of yuks were the shots of buildings that don’t exist at Harvard - the film was shot at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Harvard generally forbids Hollywood filming on campus.

Meanwhile, some students are irked by what they see as an inaccurate portrayal of people and a social scene they know.

“It sort of annoys me, to be honest,” said Alex Fuller, 22, who graduated in June. “It’s too close to home.”