The first time I met Aaron Sorkin, I was on a press tour of local studios along with a bunch of my colleagues, culminating at Disney in Burbank. We'd been herded to the Sports Night set, where one of the press people asked a youngish-looking guy wearing jeans, an over-sized white dress shirt, and a loud, wide tie to take the first group through the set.
I didn't hear his name or, more likely, wasn't paying attention. Either way, he was exceptionally affable, with all the warmth and energy of a puppy. I could have sworn he was one of the set designers, he was so excited about the set.
"We use everything here," he told us proudly, pointing out the spot beneath the audience bleachers where Natalie, one of the show's characters, had her run-in with that nasty football player early in the first season. He was like a very articulate little boy showing off the fish he caught to his mom.
At the end of the tour, chairs were set up for the producers and cast members for a mini-press conference. And in Aaron Sorkin's chair was this youngish guy with the puppy-like affability.
This was Aaron Sorkin? The Aaron Sorkin, creator of Sports Night and The West Wing, who wrote The American President and A Few Good Men? Whose line, "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" has even entered the daily lexicon of people across this country? Current hotshot Hollywood genius? Yep.
Sorkin has remained unaffected by the hype probably because he is so very passionate about what he does.
"For me, it's the emotional attachment," he said. "I get very emotionally attached to the people I'm working with, and to the material that I'm working on."
Actor's Sensibility
Raised in Scarsdale, New York, Sorkin graduated from Syracuse University in 1983 with a B.F.A. in Theatre, intending to act. According to his NBC biography, he moved to New York City and performed with a children's theatre group, where he realized that what he really wanted to do was write.
So he wrote A Few Good Men, his first full-length play, and it not only ran on Broadway, it won the Outer Critics Circle Award. A second play, Making Movies, ran Off-Broadway and garnered a second Outer Critics Circle Award, this time for Outstanding American Playwright. Then Hollywood called. Sorkin adapted A Few Good Men for the screen in 1992 and the film was nominated for both Academy and Golden Globe Awards. He followed with Malice in 1993, and then The American President in 1995.
Sorkin's acting background shows when he talks about his writing. For example, asked about the character of the First Lady on The West Wing, Sorkin talked about her appearance in terms reminiscent of an acting coach.
"There'll be a reason for this character to come in," he said. "This woman will have an intention, and there'll be an obstacle to the intention, and she'll need to overcome it like any character in the show."
Actor Joshua Malina, who plays the fact-filled associate producer Jeremy Goodwin on Sports Night, said that Sorkin understands acting.
"He has a very good analytical mind for breaking down a scene," said Malina, who made his film debut in A Few Good Men and has worked for Sorkin many times. "He's a good actor himself."
And like good actors, Sorkin looks at his writing as a process of discovery.
"I don't like to answer a lot of questions before they need to be answered," he said about the character of President Josiah Bartlett in The West Wing. "In other words, if someone says, "Well, this president, where is he from and how did he get to be president? Was he in Congress? Was he a governor?' At the moment in the storytelling when I need to answer that question, that's when it's best to answer it. That's when you get the best delivery of it."
But that process of discovery can be a little hard on Sorkin's stomach. Sorkin writes up to the last second. Scripts for Sports Night are usually finished on Sunday night before the Monday morning read-through. Sorkin joked about calling actors on Sunday night, asking if they're available the next day for that week's episode. Television often mandates this shorter time-frame. But he will write to the last minute even with more lead time.
"In movies and plays, I take two years to write a really, really long first draft," he said. "Also, that time is spent not doing what any objective observer would call writing. It's walking around, What am I going to do? And finally, it's just fear that motivates you. You're late, the director is calling, the studio is calling, saying, "Where is it?' Because you spent most of that time trying to kind of guess what people want. What is it Rob Reiner is hoping for? What is it Michael Douglas wants to see? And you're just so late. I mean, time's up. You're so scared that you just think, I'm not going to be able to figure out what they want. I'm just going to have to do what I want to do and hope that they like it. And, of course, that was exactly what they wanted you to do. I mean, they hired you for a reason."
Malina said that Sorkin's last-minute style doesn't really affect his work on Sports Night.
"It doesn't bother me at all," he said. "I don't feel like we need to get the script way ahead."
Under the Wire
The Sports Night set is a little unusual in that the actors get two full days of rehearsal before the start of shooting on Wednesday. Also unusual is that there are very few changes made to the script once it is written. Sorkin, show director Thomas Schlamme, and the cast do the table read-through on Monday mornings, then the actors are on their feet almost immediately.
The set is built for a lot of camera movement and depth. In fact, a camera can be positioned at one end of the set and follow actors at the other end as they move from room to room.
"Obviously, it's a very staging-intensive show," Sorkin said. "At five o'clock [Monday], is a stumble-through, which is to say the actors know the staging and the sense of the scene."
The actors are completely off-book by the next morning and later that day Sorkin gets his chance to give notes. Not that he feels he needs to give many. He says that his actors, both on Sports Night and The West Wing, are more than competent, which frees him to just write the characters.
"These are all people who can hit an open jump shot," he said. "So my job is to get them the ball in an open court. They're going to score for you every time. I don't so much write for Robert Guillaume and Felicity Huffman as I write Isaac and Dana."
As to whether he's going to continue writing all the episodes for Sports Night-he cranked out all 22 episodes last season-as well as all the episodes for The West Wing, he doesn't really know. He expects to have help, and praises the writing staffs on both shows. He will do some work on each script, and feels very fortunate to be working with people like Schlamme, Tony Krantz of Imagine Television, and ER producer John Wells, who co-produces The West Wing with Sorkin.
"The three of them make it so that there's very little on my desk other than writing the shows," Sorkin said. But very little time for anything else.
"Well, there are worse problems in the world to have," he said about his schedule. "If we're talking about that, and a couple of hours less sleep in exchange for what I get back, it's a no-brainer. You take that deal and you run." BSW