For Sorkin, A Few Good...Striving Undergrads?

By Steven Zeitchik

We don't know exactly how many jokes will be attempted about Aaron Sorkin's Facebook movie (though we're betting that writing on walls will figure in a number of them). What we do know is that it seems like kind of a goofy idea.

First question in this transition of the "Studio 60" and "Sports Night" creator from television networks to social networks: the story. Young men creating successful Web sites does not immediately smack of the stuff of great drama; in fact, it does not immediately smack of the stuff of ordinary magazine articles (and we should know, we've tried to write a few of them). The acclaimed writer of "The West Wing" and "A Few Good Men" is known for, and skilled at, taking the taut social dynamics of an institution and showing its many complexities, contradictions and comedies. Entrepreneurs in a college dorm doesn't quite fit the pattern.

(Actually, when we first saw the story we thought the movie would be about characters interacting _on_ Facebook, which, for all its Quarterlife-ish ambitions, had much more of a How We Live Now kind of feel to it.)

The second fuzzy area involves marketing. Sure, there may be no better way to blow a postmodern 21st-century mind than by marketing a movie about Facebook _on_ Facebook. But Facebook is also the kind of tool that's so ubiquitous we've stopped wondering how it came to be and just accepted it as a fact of life. That could make a movie about it seem more urgent. Or it could make it seem like that much more of an afterthought. Are there are any popular sites, really, whose backstories we'd find interesting enough we'd like to see them given the film treatment? A biopic of Sergey Brin? A romantic comedy about the relationships of Chris DeWolfe?

But hey, Sorkin's pulled it off before. We just hope they'll find a snappy title that overcomes some of these problems -- something other than, say, Mark Zuckerberg's War.

Comments

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[Saul Lewinsky]

"Young men creating successful Web sites does not immediately smack of the stuff of great drama" - Really? Young entrepreneurs taking over the Ivy League is exactly the kind of world that Sorkin can thrive in - primarily that it motivates the witty-banter with characters that are elitist but anti-establishment. It will be interesting to see where his "research" takes him and the story but this is a perfect environment for the guy that made Sports Night, West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War, The American President, and Studio 60. Can't guarantee commercial success, but this is a great world for a Sorkin drama.

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[Bolinao Paradise Palace]

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[peoplemagazine lover]

Sorkin has made some great work in the past, I don't think he is pitting all that work without serious planning and research before. Lets not baptize a concept before it materializes as a 'goofy idea'.