Aaron Sorkin is one of a few screenwriters — hell, maybe the only screenwriter — to exert such a strong artistic presence on his scripts that it could be fairly said that he has creative ownership of the final product. The scribe, plenty famous in his own right for creating The West Wing and Sports Night (let’s not dwell on The Newsroom or Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip), packs his dense screenplays with enough trademark patter, linguistic backflips, and screwball antics to mark them as distinctly his. This fall’s Steve Jobs may have been directed by Danny Boyle, but the three-act play structure, meditations on the terrible burdens of being way smarter than everyone around you, and fence-swinging soliloquies are pure Sorkin.
Per Variety, Sorkin will now double down on the purity of his vision by cutting out the middle-man entirely and easing into the director’s chair for the first time on his next project, an adaptation of high-rolling poker champ Molly Bloom’s memoir, Molly’s Game. Sorkin has been vocal in the past about his choice to refrain from directing, explaining that there’s nobility in writing and direction shouldn’t be seen as a “next step” for him. But the extraordinary life of Molly Bloom apparently proved too good to pass up.
A top-tier skier since she learned to walk, Bloom advanced to national rankings and a near-perfect GPA at college. Her life took a hard left turn after she was rejected from the U.S. Olympic team and moved to Los Angeles. Looking for a handsome dollar, Bloom made a few questionable decisions and ended up running the most exclusive high-stakes poker game on the planet. She did so for eight years, until 17 FBI agents put the kibosh on her operation, guns-first.
Sorkin has spent the better part of his life on film sets, learning the ins and outs of the industry. We can surmise what his script will look like (the crystal ball reveals much walking and talking in his future), but how Sorkin will forge a visual signature remains a compelling question. He could start by hiring Jeff Cronenweth, the director of photography that lent Sorkin’s The Social Network script a look reflecting its technological chill. The man knows how to shoot a picture.
