Can Sorkin pull off Facebook, the movie?

“In what seems to be the worst idea in the history of television,” said Stan Schroeder in the social networking news site Mashable, West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin says he has signed on to write a movie about Facebook. It’s unclear whether he wants to focus on the social networking site's creators or its users, but either would amount to a boring hour and a half in a theater.

Anyone who can make “arcane public policy debates seem like the stuff of high drama,” said Portfolio.com’s Tech Observer blog, at least has a shot at doing the same for “the programming nerds who launched Facebook from a Harvard dorm room. Don’t forget that “the story of Facebook's origins is one of back-stabbing, betrayal, and ultimately, mind-boggling wealth.”

Sorkin has quite a track record, said Daniel Ionescu in a PC World blog, but by his own admission, he has so little knowledge “about the wicked ways of Facebook” that he had to start his own page to figure out how it works. To simplify things, he might focus on Mark Zuckerberg, who found Facebook in 2004 with Harvard buddies Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

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No matter what approach Sorkin takes, said Steven Zeitchik in The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog, this is a “goofy” idea. “Young men creating successful Web sites does not immediately smack of the stuff of great drama.” Sorkin could pull it off—he’s done it before—but not before he hears a lot of jokes at his own expense.