Aaron Sorkin's New Movie Is About Facebook? KTHXBAI

Aaron Sorkin has made a career of showing us the behind-the-scenes sausage-making of everything from TV sports in Sports Night to the White House in The West Wing to late-night sketch comedy in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I'm a huge fan of two-thirds of those shows (I'll let you guess), but Sorkin recently signed up for a Facebook account to announce that his next movie is going to be about ... Facebook.

Just ... what the. What the hell?

I'm still convinced this might be a hoax, fishing in the gullible (which, I guess, includes me). And it's working. There are currently just shy of 5,000 members of the "Aaron Sorkin and the Facebook Movie" group, and more than 500 Wall posts, mostly along the lines of "May I audition for a major role in this?" and "By the way, could you pressure Warner Brothers to release The American President in anamorphic wide screen?" (Oh, and "facebook is the new Paris Hilton, OMG, they should bring out a facebook perfume and write a book. YES!!!!!!!!!!!!")

Here's a quote from Sorkin's page: "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." Great planning. Decide to write a movie about something, and then find out what it is. That would be like me writing a TV miniseries about playing the sousaphone, since I don't really know what a sousaphone is.

This opens up a whole galaxy of things Aaron Sorkin could make movies about, like switching from dial-up to broadband. Seriously, wasn't that cool? Or buying a cell phone. It's totally like being a secret agent. We're all Dick Tracy! Or hey, why not email? Sign Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan up for AOL and let the magic flow! I've even got an idea for a title.

Sorkin is a great writer with an obviously solid track record, but this seems so tin-eared, so out of touch, like he was paging through the Tech section of the New York Times and said, "Hey, this thing seems to be pretty hip with the kids! Where's my wax tablet and stylus? I need to write that down."

Hearing that it was Sony who'd apparently sought out Sorkin for the project, my corporate hooker Spidey-sense started tingling -- does Sony own Facebook? Is this just really sinister product placement? (Turns out Facebook is still privately owned, but Sony did sign a big advertising deal with Facebook Ads.)

On the other hand, it could be a ploy for ticket sales. Facebook has 100 million users, all of whom have to be at least a little bit narcissistic, sort of by definition (lighten up, I'm on there too), who'll all think the movie is a little bit about them. Let's call the average ticket price $7, and there goes the Titanic box office record.

Fine, I'm being cynical. But come on, he's asking for it. At the bottom of his page he writes, "if anyone has any Facebook stories I think they might be helpful." Come on, did this work with Sports Night? "Dear ESPN: I've decided to write about this whole "sports television" thing, but I don't know anything about sports, or television. Thoughts? Oh, and I can't pay you."

One Wall post did make me laugh out loud:

please put casey mccall and dan rydell in the movie.
. . .
if you actually do that, we all know who suggested it.
me.
on the facebook.
i would like a creative producer credit.
thanks.

If by way of some pact with Satan this actually makes it to a movie screen, check the credits: I'm betting a whole lot of people will be expecting a shout-out. But I can't believe it'll ever get there. Either the whole thing is a hoax, or saner minds will prevail and it'll get canned as fast as a seventies movie about CB radios.

Aw, crap.

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