'West Wing' writer set to make Facebook: the movie

When Mark Zuckerberg's social networking website Facebook became a global phenomenon, he famously remarked that his journey from dishevelled Harvard undergraduate to billionaire media mogul would make a good Hollywood movie.

That prospect just got a step closer after Aaron Sorkin, the writer behind The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War and A Few Good Men, revealed that he's started work on a screenplay for Facebook: the movie.

News of the project leaked out after Sorkin, a notorious technophobe, instructed an assistant to open a Facebook account for him to help with research. "I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented," it read. "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)."

Although Sony confirmed the film was "in development," it declined to elaborate further, possibly because it emerged that Mr Zuckerberg was unaware of the project.

Further details were hard to come by last night, as Mr Sorkin suddenly withdrew public access to his own Facebook page. Before that however, he had written: "I have very strong feelings about the internet and its effect on our national culture, but frankly those feelings are being countered by the sophistication, kindness, curiosity and wit of the posts in this site."