Where’s Aaron Sorkin Getting His Facebook Info?

By Neal 

So you’ve probably seen all the fuss that’s been made on the blogosphere the last few days about Aaron Sorkin getting himself a Facebook account so he can be better prepared to write the Facebook movie—which ordinarily would be of little interest to a blog that concerns itself with the book publishing industry, until Harvard alum mag 02138 declared that “the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie is also the Ben Mezrich Facebook movie.” It turns out Sony Pictures and Scott Rudin, the producers on Sorkin’s picture, may have also optioned the film rights to Face Off, the book Mezrich is writing about the origins of the ubiquitious social networking software.

This has already started a flurry of news items suggesting that Sorkin’s screenplay is an adaptation of Mezrich’s unpublished book—which remains to be seen. It is entirely possible, after all, that Sony and Rudin simply bought the rights to Face Off as a pre-emptive measure to avoid a lawsuit from an un-optioned Mezrich over his book being a source for Sorkin’s screenplay.

Either way, do they really think this thing’s going to be more entertaining than the script Jon Favreau wrote for the film version of Po Bronson‘s novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest?