Since news broke last August that Aaron Sorkin would be penning the screenplay, there have, ironically, been surprisingly few status updates on plans for the movie about Facebook. The initial news was shocking: Some of us thought it was all a silly joke. Film.com's Sacha Howells wondered if a musical on the Blackberry would be next, and NYmag.com created a faux "The Facebook Movie Slide Show," making fun of the whole thing.

But apparently it's no joke ... last week we got a little bite of what's to come -- well, only that the social networking empire will not be complying with The West Wing writer. According to CNNMoney.com, Facebook has issued letters to former employees requesting that they not speak to Aaron Sorkin or any moviemakers. Given all the controversy surrounding the start of the company -- as to whether Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin were truly the founders, and not another group of Harvard students who sued Facebook for recognition last year -- these letters aren't all that surprising.

Word in cyberspace is that Sorkin's screenplay is going to focus precisely on the scandalous story of the social networking empire's origins. It's going to be based on a tell-all tale about Zuckerberg's sudden rise to fame and fortune by Ben Mezrich (author of Bringing Down The House, the book about MIT students who are also card-counting whizzes, which then became the movie 21). Although Gawker reported that Mezrich's book proposal reduces Zuckerberg to a greedy horndog, anxious to create something that will make him popular and help him get laid, the author denies this claim in an interview with The Boston Herald up on his blog, and he says the story is more about the competition amongst computer science students in the Harvard dorms to create a social networking site. (On his blog, Mezrich also confirms that Sorkin will be adapting his book for the big screen.)

Here are more updates:

• The Untitled Facebook Movie has an IMDb page, upon which Thomas Schlamme is now listed as the director.

• Thomas Schlamme's resume is loaded with TV experience, most notably as the director for Sorkin's stellar shows (Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Sports Night, The West Wing), but he's alarmingly low on big-screen experience. But he did direct So I Married An Axe Murderer, which is actually perfect, as campy comedy may be just the kind of treatment this story needs.

• The most amount of updates and news on this whole thing can be found, of course, on Aaron Sorkin's Facebook page devoted to the movie, where there are over 10,000 members (and counting) and thousands of comments, votes of confidence, and plot, story arc, and casting suggestions from users.

Thoughts on Untitled Facebook Movie:

So, while the green light is shining, we're left wondering: Does making this movie make any sense? Sure, Aaron Sorkin is a class-A writer who has a knack for getting those behind-the-scenes stories right; sure, Shia LaBeouf or Michael Cera or any number of cute nerd-boy actors could play the parts of angsty Harvard computer-science majors who revolutionize socializing; sure, the story sounds interesting in a Shattered Glass meets WarGames meets Catch Me If You Can kind of way ... but isn't this all just a little premature?

Facebook was launched just five years ago, in 2004. The founder, president, and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, upon whom the story is based, is just 25 years old. Isn't this story still in progress? Of course, Facebook is the hottest of hot topics these days, as even this week's cover story ("Do You Own Facebook?) in New York magazine is devoted to the social networking phenomenon. But the buzz needs to cool down a bit before screenwriters write about it. It used to be that there needed to be some distance between a historical event and the eventual book deal describing it and/or inevitable Hollywood treatment of it.

Did Oliver Stone's too-early production of W. not teach us anything? And why are there plans to adapt a book that hasn't even been published yet? Come fall of 2009 the writing will be on the proverbial WALL: Only then will we know if Mezrich's tell-all will be a tale worth filming. Then again, with 200 million Facebook users and millions of potential ticket buyers, all the superpoking in the world probably won't convince Hollywood it's not.

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