Bartlet4America News Archive

A Few Good Stories

By PARIS BARCLAY
The Advocate

Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, talks to director Paris Barclay about the battle between politics and drama—and gays in the Bartlet White House

Aaron Sorkin’s office is not far from my own on the Warner Bros. lot, and whenever I stop by, I think, Man, his office is really nice. Not big, but a comfortable writer’s den: booky and woody and leathery—with a Macintosh G4 atop his desk. I’m jealous. He gets to write the best show on television, week in and week out. Oh, well...

On this visit, Sorkin comes in, warm and upbeat as always, and although I know he’s facing a deadline for the current episode, he doesn’t act like it. He’s comfortable and casual and pleases me to no end by actually smoking throughout the interview (I happen to be a junkie for secondhand smoke). Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Fire away, Aaron!

Barclay: Here’s my favorite question: During the Clinton administration, The West Wing was always the parallel administration. Now that it’s Bush time, is it the alternative universe?

Sorkin: Maybe. I was asked the question plenty of times in the months leading up to the election: What would happen to the show if Bush were elected? My honest feeling is, you know, this is fiction. I think its success or failure depends on the same things that the success or failure of other television shows depend on. Real-life events really won’t affect it that much. But I’m not sure whether that’s true or not. I know that when Martin Sheen was asked the question, “What will happen to the show if Bush is elected president?” Martin’s answer was, “Well, I certainly hope we’ll be an ungodly pain in the ass.”

Here’s my theory on The West Wing: I see it functioning as what I call the voice of the loyal opposition, which is people who are patriotic but believe that there are different ways of looking at issues, and giving them a voice. The same way All in the Family and other Norman Lear shows were the voice of the loyal opposition during Nixon and Ford.

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I like thinking of it as loyal opposition. I like thinking of it as loyal opposition even when there was a Democrat in the White House. We’ve done as many episodes about weak-willed Democrats feeding their own causes. In other words, the Democrats have been the enemy just as much as the Republicans have been the enemy on this show. If there’s an enemy on this show, it’s a lack of conviction, a lack of compassion. So I think we can keep that up no matter who is in office.

Do you think you might actually have a real political voice, though? Because All in the Family and even Steven Bochco’s shows in the ’80s and ’90s had a real influence on public policy and issues of importance to the country.

Yeah, and they did it really well. The reason I’m uncomfortable answering that question is, it feels like something so out of my depth. I’m a fiction writer and a scriptwriter. All I’m trying to do is to captivate you for however long I’ve asked for your attention. In this particular case, we’re telling stories inside the White House because the best stories I can think of to tell are the ones that center around so many of these issues. The way to make it real and the way to make it compelling is to give real full-throated arguments to these issues. That’s what creates the impression that I’m on a soapbox, that I have a political agenda, that I’m trying to persuade you of anything. When, in fact, all I want is to create great arguments and for my characters to have strong positions and hope that I capture you that way.

What inspired you to deal with so many provocative gay issues—more than any other drama on television?

I think that so many gay issues are provocative to me. I feel like, and I guess because I’ve spent my adult life, whether I was in school as a theater major or coming out of school in New York, starting out as a writer in theater and coming out here in Hollywood and working in film and television, the gay issues don’t seem abstract to me. They don’t seem like somebody else’s thing. These are my friends and the people I work with every day. It seems like we have entered a time when gay bashing seems OK somehow.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was horrible. It seemed to rubber-stamp the notion that because the majority disapproves of the behavior of the minority, therefore so be it. That’s a terribly dangerous thing. There’s the philosophical reason why. The human reason why is that no one can be allowed to be put down at all. Certainly no one can be allowed to be put down as the result of fear and ignorance. That really needs to be called out every time it happens.

I don’t want to be the white, liberal guy who can get in touch with the feelings of the gay man. I can’t possibly. But I feel comfortable making this observation: Any one who grew up gay or lesbian, I have to believe that there was a struggle there at some point. That there was confusion; there was a feeling that they would be ostracized. It was on some level harder for them than it was for me.

I certainly have to believe that anyone who is gay or lesbian who, after being told repeatedly by their country that in some way there’s some kind of problem with them that needs to be dealt with, and then being told “don’t ask, don’t tell”—and they still want to join the service, they still want to give their life for their country, they still want to do this thing that you couldn’t pay me enough money to do—I can tell you that as an American, that’s absolutely somebody I want. This person is very serious about serving their country.

Go ahead and fight.

I think it is so admirable, and then to have [them] put down. And we’re not talking about extremist radio personalities...congressional leaders stand up and make the kind of preposterous misstatements that they’ve made about homosexuality. If they made similar statements about Jews or blacks, the sky would fall down.

They’d be drummed out of office. Absolutely.

In a half an hour their desk would have to be cleaned out. You don’t feel that same kind of uproar about the gay and lesbian community. You certainly hear it from the gay and lesbian community but not about them. Honestly, if there’s a struggle forming on the show, it isn’t finding gay and lesbian issues to write about, It’s saying, “Gee, I’ve done it four times in the last six episodes, let me back off for a couple, and then I’m going to go to this one I want to do.”

Give it a little bit of a rest. That’s great.

I graduated college in 1983, and so it was really right as I was in school and coming to New York that AIDS awareness became what it was. And like everybody else in show business, once a year I can count on a friend of mine dying. The spread of the disease and the death count of the disease can be attributed at least in part to a Republican administration in the ’80s basically saying, “Well, listen, if it’s just affecting homosexuals, what do we care?”

And your show on African AIDS, the drug companies, was a great way to deal with that issue that wasn’t on the nose. For a lot of gay people, that was a wonderful way to talk about the United States’s response internally and externally.

Absolutely. And with AIDS in Africa you have then the added insult of, “Well, if it’s just Africans, what do we care?” In that episode someone even said, “If it was 25 million Europeans, we [would have] found a cure yesterday.”

Are you aware of how proud gay people who work on the show are of being a part of the show—not just because of the gay issues but because of all the things the show talks about?

I’m really happy to hear that. From time to time, someone on the crew will say something to me. It will be someone I’ve never asked, but I assume that they’re gay, and it’ll mean a lot to me that they think something of it.

That’s a big deal. When you were creating The West Wing, you probably thought about putting a gay person in the administration and dealing with all the things that would happen—

How do you know I haven’t?

I actually don’t know that you haven’t. Oops.

Yeah, I’d like to. I think what I would like to do—and this was part of the point of Charley Lang’s character, [the gay Republican congressman] Skinner.

The first thing I wrote was [the play] A Few Good Men. And in A Few Good Men, one of the two marine defendants is black. Corporal Dawson is black; Wolfgang Bodison played him in the movie and Victor Love played him on Broadway. I remember before we started rehearsals, one of the producers, an older man from a different time, had said something to me like, “Gee, Dawson doesn’t seem very street.” These kinds of things. And, no, he wasn’t. He was a marine like other marines. And there was another black character in the show too, the judge. In neither case did their blackness have anything to do with the character, with the story, what was going on. And that’s what pleased me about that.

I guess the point that Skinner was trying to make [on The West Wing]—what he says is that his entire life doesn’t have to be about being gay. I would like to have a gay character on the show whose sexual orientation is what we all want our sexual orientations to be: a personal matter of privacy. And we can go about our day the way everybody goes about their day. In other words, I don’t think if you have a gay character on the show that they have to do the gay stories. I don’t think Dule [Hill]’s character [Charlie Young] has to do the black stories on the show. Josh [Lyman, played by Bradley Whitford] and Toby [Ziegler, played by Richard Schiff] don’t have to do the Jewish stories. I think one of the better things I can do for everybody is just keep showing how we’re all the same—that Social Security affects everybody, health care affects everybody.

Getting to the humanity—you also led me to another question seems to pop up now: When you have created gay characters, you haven’t created the gay characters that gay people necessarily like to see. The Bob Balaban character [in the first season] is not necessarily a flattering portrayal. He’s a [Hollywood] media mogul, he’s manipulative, he’s driven by ego, and that is embraced. Instead of being opposed, that kind of thing is wonderful. A gay Republican instead of a radically liberal gay Democrat is something that’s really loved.

And I’m glad to hear that’s embraced. Again, I just think that as many gay stories as we’ve done, like gays in the military and the Matthew Shepard story that we did early last year—[the crime on the show was] followed by his parents coming to town for the hate-crimes bill signing. And [press secretary] C.J. [Cregg, played by Allison Janney] has assumed that the father is very quiet and uncomfortable about this because he’s embarrassed that his son is gay—when in fact he is so fumingly pissed at the president for his chickenshit attitude on gay rights in this country that he simply can’t bring himself to be at this bill signing. I think you’re right; it’s an interesting way of putting it—showing gay characters not necessarily the way we want to see them might be the best thing.

We gotta talk about the Dr. Laura scene. It really pleased people, especially that last beat of it, for some unknown reason. When Rob Lowe comes and takes the little apron—for some reason that tickled people to no end.

I’m glad. To me, she is a horrifyingly, staggeringly mean and ignorant person. She should be given access to the airwaves. I’m given access to the airwaves, and there was a good scene to write and I wrote it. Listen, I don’t want to pretend that I’m not passionate about this stuff, that “hey, there was just a scene there and I wrote it.” It’s great when you can catch hold of one that you really feel like, gee, my blood is in this too.

Has Clinton ever seen this show as criticism of him?

I couldn’t possibly tell you. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you for sure if Clinton has seen the show. I have to believe that he has because his aides say that he has. The aides say that’s all Hillary will watch. I don’t know. That’s a good question.

Because when the president, in the episode that I directed, says that this [anti-gay-marriage bill] is “legislative gay bashing,” that’s everything we wish Clinton would have said but didn’t.

Lots of times on the show it’s stuff we wish Clinton would have said but didn’t. That’s a really interesting question. I have no idea [if Clinton has seen the show]. I still have this romantic fantasy of Clinton after all these years, and my fantasy has him watching that moment when [President] Bartlet [played by Martin Sheen] says it’s legislative gay bashing, and [Clinton] saying [to himself], “Yes, it absolutely is,” and somehow being so comfortable with that place in himself that says, “Listen, my job was to stay popular for eight years so I could get things done. This is a TV show where they’re allowed to do that.” The answer is, I don’t know.

Maybe when he has his talk show, he’ll be able to bring you on. The Republican voice that you brought on this season, is that something you want to keep doing? Do you want to balance the argument with the other side within the administration?

For the sake of drama, you want two strong arguments. If two people are going to be arguing about something, anything, the time of day, you want two strong arguments. You don’t want one of our guys beating up a tomato can. It doesn’t seem like they did anything. My favorite moments in arguing are the “God, I never really thought of it that way” kinds of moments. Back to A Few Good Men: Nicholson’s “you can’t handle the truth” speech—part of its power came because of “gee, he has a point. I just heard him defend killing a guy, and he had a point.” So I was looking for a voice for those “you never quite looked at it this way” moments and an unexpected mouth for it to come out of: an attractive young woman.

Do you think you’ll continue to develop that?

Yes, I do. I don’t think that it’s my responsibility to achieve political balance on the show. I don’t think that for every time I say we need gun control that I need someone giving an equal argument saying there’s the Second Amendment.

It’s not equal time.

It isn’t. I’m not a journalist. My responsibility isn’t to the truth, it’s the drama. On the other hand, the best drama is going to be created by two strong arguments. It’s not likely you’re going to hear a strong pro-life argument on the show. I have trouble getting to it; I really do. But it’s possible that what you will hear on the show is that not all people who are pro-life can fit into this mean-spirited shoebox that we tend to— Here’s what you’ll hear on the show: Not everybody who disagrees with you is bad. Not everybody who isn’t a liberal Democrat is mean or greedy or both.

What tidbits you can tell us about what’s coming up?

[Here’s how] I’ll answer that question: The election cycle is simple—we [on The West Wing] live in a parallel universe two years off of the actual one. This past November we were on midterm elections. A new congress was elected. And we met [President] Bartlet in the middle of his first term. So he’s been president for two years now. You start watching the new shows that begin airing after the first of the year and you’ll see they’re gearing up [for reelection]. Toby even has the line, “A president gets to govern for 18 months, and then you gotta get the job again.” So it’s really starting up now. But [for me to give away] tidbits for the future? Paris, you know better than that.

A little something? A little bone that makes him feel special?

I’m not trying to be coy; I’m not trying to keep a secret. I’m about to start writing episode 15 of the season. I have no idea what happens [after that].

Anything more to say to The Advocate’s million readers?

I would like to say the following things: I’d give anything to be a lesbian. And the other is that we are very pleased with the letters that we get. We seemed to be embraced by the gay and lesbian community, many of whom work right on the show.

Posted by Ryo at February 13, 2001 03:17 PM