Posted 4:52 PM by Blah blah

Aaron Sorkin Interview

Fast-talking Aaron Sorkin recently came on Charlie Rose, my favorite interview show on TV, period. (I wrote here about my love for Charlie Rose.) If you are curious about writing solid gold drama for TV or movies, study him. He is a master at writing vivid, highly intelligent, ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue. For me, he's a writing god.

He created the Emmy-winning TV show, The West Wing, and wrote the excellent screenplays for A Few Good Men (read it) and The American President (read it).
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Profile of Sorkin (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 7, 2000):
"Someone accused me of writing as if I'm perpetually on a first date with a girl I really want to have a second date with," Sorkin says.

He doesn't dispute it. Both "Sports Night" and "The West Wing" have an ingratiating eagerness that's not unlike a splash of Hai Karate: A little goes a long way.

"For me, the (writing) experience is very much like a date," Sorkin says. "It's not unusual that I'm really funny here and really smart here and maybe showing some anger over here so she sees maybe I have this dark side. I want it to have been worth it for everyone to sit through it for however long I ask them to."...

[Sorkin] smokes cigarettes as fast as he talks and has the overall demeanor of someone on the Juan Valdez All-Caffeine Diet. But you'd be buzzed too if you were the main man, the principal writer, on two network TV shows. For those keeping score, that's 44 episodes in a span of 36 weeks, September to May.

The only other person doing that right now is David E. Kelley, with "The Practice" and "Ally McBeal."

Last summer, Sorkin said he spoke with Kelley and learned that Kelley is a Zenlike master of personal discipline. Sorkin recalls, "He said, 'Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I write 'Ally McBeal,' Thursday, Friday, Saturday I write 'The Practice,' Sunday I'm with my wife and kids.' And I thought, I have a real schedule, too. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I freak out cuz I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Thursday I start yelling at people because I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Friday I go, 'Ohmigod, there's going to be a half hour of dead air on ABC next week,' and then it finally gets done."
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Interview with him on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Listen to his Charlie Rose interview. (RealPlayer) He discusses how he can write fake intelligent-sounding talk about stuff he knows little about! Talks about his drug arrest at the airport.

From transcript of Charlie Rose interview (October 2, 2002):
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Charlie Rose: Can you argue to your motion picture brethren that there's every bit as good a writing on television today in the best dramas than there is in film?

Aaron Sorkin: I would take myself out of the equation, because I'm biased, and tell you that my motion picture brethren by and large would have no argument with that statement. That certainly recently, while the quality of television has really gone up, something's happened to movies. We can all list the exceptions. There have been terrific films this year and last year and the year before. But the more studios depend on the opening weekend being everything, the less it becomes important to have a good movie; what you need is a good ad campaign. And that's what I think, what we're seeing more of these days....

CR: You started out as a playwright.

AS: Yeah, I still am.

CR: There was something even before "A Few Good Men."

AS: I had this one act in a basement here in town that got a lot of attention. And then "A Few Good Men" and another play. But it was "A Few Good Men" that took me to Hollywood to do the screenplay adaptation, and I was just going to stay there for ten minutes while I did the screenplay adaptation, but I stayed there for that and another movie and another movie after that. And then two TV series--there was one before this called "Sports Night."

CR: Good writing again.

AS: Thanks very much. I love movies because they're big and they're American, and they're two hours and twenty minutes long--

CR: "The American President" was a big movie.

AS: Right. There are no commercials, and you have the entire language available to you, which is what's nice about them. What's nice about television is that you have a continuing relationship with the thing that you write. You know, with a movie, you're done writing the screenplay and you kind of--you're not really necessary on the set, but you hang out there anyway cause you can't tear yourself away, so you eat a lot of donuts at craft service and then it's another three months in post-production. You enjoy the milk and cookies during premiere week and, you know, then it's done. And with this--What this is is summer stock with a lot of money....

CR: Okay, well, I want to get at one of those at least. Okay, it is this notion that you wrote "A Few Good Men;" you are not a 50-year-old ex-Marine. People see you write about things and it's almost things that you're not that interested in, but you can infuse them with a powerful sense of reality and powerful writing that makes the lines, you know, stand up and shout.

AS: Yeah.

CR: Now, what's that about? I mean, that was one point that seemed to me to have some reality. Does it or not?

AS: It does. There's a bit of a Chauncey Gardner thing going on with me, I think, and it's--When I was ramping up to my thirteenth birthday--believe me, I'm not going to drag you through my entire life here--I have no religious training at all; I'm Jewish but never went to Hebrew school. But in the seventh grade, nearly every Saturday I was going to a friend's bar mitzvah. And I was just beginning to develop kind of my love of theatre. And this was great theatre. These people were up there, and there was a robe, and they were singing and speaking, and there was an audience, and they were getting--you get a pat on the back. So it's about six weeks before my birthday where there was just going to be, you know, the boys in my family had big parties on their thirteenth birthday. And I opened up a local phone book and called a local rabbi and said, "Rabbi, I'm going to be thirteen in six weeks, so I want you to teach me the Torah." He said, "It's going to take me a lot more than six weeks." And I said, "No, no, no. You don't understand, If you just say it into a tape recorder, I've got a very good ear, and I can learn it phonetically." And he pointed out that's hardly the reason for doing it.

CR: Good for him.

AS: And I'm mentioning this because I grew up surrounded by people a lot smarter than I am. Whether it was--

CR: Are you sure?

AS: I'm certain. Whether it was at my dinner table or at a poker game--my friends.

CR: You were the least smart person in the room?

AS: By far. I was the person terribly interested in doing the drama club productions. These were all the people headed for Harvard and Yale and Princeton. And have since graduated from there and have gone on to do extraordinary things.

CR: They've gone on to work for you is where it's going.

AS: And I, just like with learning the Torah phonetically, I began to just learn the sound of intelligence, what that sounded like.

CR: This is great.

AS: And that's how I would write. This is happening that I'm developing--

CR: So you actually learned the courtroom drama from the idea of how--?

AS: Well, with the courtroom drama with "A Few Good Men," I had a small window in. My sister at the time was a lawyer with the Navy Judge Advocate General's court. So I'd ask her to give me things, to give me pamphlets--nothing confidential at all. To give me any pieces of paper that had the jargon of this place on it. And I would really start to fall in love with phrases and the sound of things, and I'd want to put this into the scene. I also loved, from a very young age--my parents took me to the theatre all the time when I was a little kid. And they took me--They didn't take me to little kid plays; they took me to plays I had no business being at, like "Championship Season" when I was eleven years old, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" when I was twelve. And I didn't--

CR: Those are pretty good plays.

AS: Those are great plays.

CR: A couple of Pulitzer Prizes, I think.

AS: Yes, but an eleven-year-old doesn't know what "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is about. But what I loved was the sound of dialogue; it was like symphony music to me. It was just terrific. And I wanted to make that. And so I phonetically create the sound on "The West Wing" of people who are much more politically sophisticated than I am. I look for a point of friction. You've got to have--for drama, two people have to disagree on something--and I---

CR: But do you know politics?

AS: No. No, I don't know politics at all.

CR: Do you watch poliltics? I mean, have you ever seen C-SPAN?

AS: Oh, sure, sure. And I watch--there are shows that I think are terrific, like "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang" and all those shows because they're--

CR: Bill O'Reilly.

AS: Yeah. They're drama. People are disagreeing, and it's interesting to me. And when people are talking about something, it isn't so much their position that I'm trying to imitate as the way they're presenting it. I'm just trying to phonetically recreate the sound of political sophistication and knowing what you're talking about. And oftentimes in things that I've written, whether it's "A Few Good Men" or I wrote a movie called "Malice" or "The American President" or "Sports Night" or "The West Wing," there'll be a quick passage that will go by and somebody--the studio or the producer--someone will say, "Gee, no one's going to know what these two people are talking about." I'll say, "It's not actually important that they do. What's important is that the audience say, 'Wow! These guys really know what they're talking about. That's interesting.'" And that's what I try to do.