My friend Elliott, currently ferrying people around Denver for the Obama campaign sent me a Facebook message the other day linking to THIS Onion article, titled: “Aaron Sorkin Announces New ‘West Wing’ Animated Series At SorCon.” Elliott’s comment was: “You know what’s sad? If this were real, I’d watch it.”
Good news for Elliott today, though it’s probably weird news for everyone else. Aaron Sorkin is going to be writing a Facebook movie for producer Scott Rudin, he’s joined Facebook and even started his own Facebook Movie group, where he introduces himself and the project like this:
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.)
Some of you might be familiar with some things I’ve written. I’m the author of two Broadway plays–A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention, five feature films–A Few Good Men, The American President, Malice, Charlie Wilson’s War and The Trial of the Chicago 7 which is in pre-production, and three television series–Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the first four seasons of The West Wing.
It’s not some crazy, Vulture was able to get Scott Rudin to confirm that this movie is real.
This is kind of weird, because I don’t really know what the movie is going to be about, and neither does Sorkin, as he’s collecting ideas via the Facebook Group. Granted, none of the user-submitted ideas really have the zing of a Sorkin concept, but Sorkin concepts look boring on page anyway (i.e. “the President falls in love with a woman, and I take a lot of drugs to finish the script”). Though certain people are way more into trying to get their ideas heard, like the poor soul who goes to an Art and Design High School who wrote:
A facebook story……perhaps u can do one about the creation of facebook and then a boy who is totally unrelated to facebook visiting his grandfather, finds out that his grandfather is the creator of facebook and he must stop people from shutting the program down.
No thank you, sir, thanks for playing, but we think you’d enjoy the movie (and play) Proof more than you’d enjoy a Facebook movie. Next:
Aaron,
I like a lot of your work, but I think your best bet would be to change your mind on this and run as far from the project as you can. It cannot be better than “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which had a very small target audience and even those of us in the IT field know that PoSV sucked. While there may be drama on this site, it’s not the type that will translate well into a movie…nor a TV series since the characters in the drama will have to be constantly different.
If you do follow through with it, you will really need to get a good handle on some of the technology that’s used. Not being “Internet savvy” will kill you on this project…even with research assistants.
If you still follow through, good luck….I suspect you’ll need it.
–Kev.
Sorry Kev, Scott Rudin cares not for your opinion, though it seems to be a bit more valid, especially the part where you wish him luck and tell him he needs to learn abut how the internet is run. Oh, and the part where you tell him to RUN. RUN AWAY FROM A FACEBOOK MOVIE!
Because the world was totally fine without a film about social networking.
Who knows when we’ll see some results from the movie end of this project, but – until then – we’ll keep browsing through the fanboy interaction looking for gems that don’t needlessly mourn Studio 6 on the Sunset Strip.
Can all screenwriters start their own Facebook page where they announce what they are writing and let people bullshit about it? Because I think that would be great.
