West Wing creator
Aaron Sorkin isn’t just planning to return to television after a stint in the film world. He’s planning another series set behind the scenes of a television show.
Sorkin tells
TVGuideMagazine.com that – like his previous series
Sports Night (set around an ESPN-style sports news show) and
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (set around a
Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy show) – his next effort will take place backstage on yet another TV series.
"I'm going to be starting on a new TV series" when filming is done on the upcoming movie "The Social Network," the Sorkin-penned account of the founding of Facebook directed by David Fincher, he says. "It's going to be what turns out to be the third in the trilogy of TV shows that take place behind the scenes of a TV show, but this will be a different kind of TV show. That's all I can let out of the bag right now.”
Sorkin said he “hopes” to reunite on the project with at least some of the actors he’s worked with previously. “If you're a writer, when you're find an actor like
Josh Malina,
Felicity Huffman,
Brad Whitford,
Matt Perry,
Allison Janney,
Richard Schiff, all these great actors that I've worked with, you just want to stick them in your pocket and work with them forever, so I hope so.” He also expects to be working with director and longtime collaborator Tommy Schlamme “for sure.”
Sorkin is also excited by what he’s seeing on set on "T
Jesse EisenbergJesse Eisenberg and
Justin Timberlake. “I think it's not the movie that most people are expecting it to be when they hear it's a movie about Facebook,” he says. “It's not a movie about friending people or poking people or anything like that. It's how this website was invented in the dorm room of a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg [played by Eisenberg] and the really crazy year after that when the thing took off like a Hercules rocket and friends were betrayed and really how the whole thing was invented and a young man in way over his head. I also think that the movie is going to be a little funnier than people are expecting.”
As for working with Timberlake, Sorkin says he found the pop star-turner-actor a real treat on set. “All I knew about him going in is that he's a phenomenal talent. He always appeared to me to be a very nice guy. He is, it turns out, a very, very nice guy and an incredible professional. There's nothing diva-ish about him at all. It's very important to him that he be good in this movie. So he's incredibly easy to work with and he makes us laugh a lot.”