Clooney and Sorkin Take The Challenge

Warner Bros. Pictures has set Aaron Sorkin to write The Challenge, a courtroom drama for George Clooney's Smoke House, reports Variety.

Clooney is producing with Smoke House partner Grant Heslov. Clooney may direct and hopes to play Navy lawyer Charles Swift in the drama about the effort by Swift and Georgetown U. law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, who'd been held at Guantanamo Bay for five years.

WB and Smoke House got started on the project over the summer by optioning Jonathan Mahler book "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power."

The trade adds that the courtroom drama wouldn't debate Hamdan's guilt or innocence but chart the dogged efforts of the two lawyers who sue the president because they feel the U.S. government has broken the law and violated the Constitution.