Coming soon: Facebook the movie?*
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*(Post updated at 4:35 p.m. with confirmation from Sony Pictures.)
Is Aaron Sorkin getting his geek on?
The famous technophobe and Hollywood scribe apparently is trading the ‘West Wing’ and ‘Studio 60’ corridors for the graffiti-scrawled, software developer-mobbed corridors of social networking upstart Facebook.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company says it has not signed on to a Sorkin film about its inception, but New York Magazine reports that it has confirmed that Sorkin started a Facebook group (well, he says, his assistant did that) to gather color for a Facebook film he is writing for Sony and producer Scott Rudin.
Late this afternoon, a Sony Pictures spokesman confirmed that Sorkin was working on a movie about Facebook but wouldn’t discuss any of the details. Through a publicist, Sorkin declined to comment.
Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker says: ‘We are routinely approached by writers and filmmakers interested in telling the Facebook story or the stories of the more than 100 million people who use Facebook to share and make the world more open and connected. At this point, we have not agreed to cooperate with any film project, but we are flattered by the interest.’
The Facebook group (where Sorkin groupies have already congregated to write on Sorkin’s wall) was first unearthed by Defamer.
Sorkin’s Facebook group page reads:
Welcome. I’m Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name — which I find more flattering than creepy — but this is me. I don’t know how I can prove that but feel free to test me. I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)
(An earlier, apparently un-spellchecked version of that Facebook post said the movie was about ‘Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz — three sophmores at Harvard who, in order to meet girls, invented Facebook.’)
So what will a movie about the messy beginnings of Facebook be called? ‘A Few Good Founders’? Or ‘Face Off,’ complete with tense courtroom scenes from the legal battle over the company’s creation? (Note to Sorkin: Aaron Greenspan -- who attended Harvard with the founders, claims he came up with the idea for Facebook and recently penned a book on the subject -- would like to share his two cents). And just who will they find to play Mark Zuckerberg, the official Facebook founder and chief executive?
Poke me when you know.
-- Jessica Guynn