Bartlet4America News Archive

The West Winger

By BOB SPITZ
Delta Sky

Behind the scenes with West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin

Considering the widespread discontent caused by burdensome taxes, campaign reform, dimpled chads and a widening political divide, it seems inexplicable that Aaron Sorkin has forged a career making American politics and government entertaining. Forget the adage, "Timing is everything." He wrote a play damning the military that came out in the days following the Persian Gulf War (A Few Good Men) and romanticized the presidency while the U.S. special prosecutor squared off against Bill Clinton (The American President). Then, when many Americans were finally good and disgusted with the executive branch, Sorkin created a TV series (NBC's "The West Wing") glorifying its exploits. Hasn't this guy learned anything about the public's taste?

Sorkin, 39, may be Hollywood's current golden boy, but he doesn't adhere to its creed; that is, he shuns the obvious, the recycled and the mundane.

His writing is every bit as absorbing as David Mamet's and as witty as Woody Allen's, but it has a style all its own. Thanks to a keen ear and strong voice, Sorkin writes distinctive dialogue that crackles with imagination. His Oscar-nominated screen adaptation for A Few Good Men offered Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon and even Jack Nicholson some of the most compelling work of their careers. And any five-minute clip of "The West Wing" serves as a highlight reel for network television; each episode is risky, funny and tough — as intoxicating a highball as viewers could hope for.

This result, of course, comes at an outrageously steep price. Sorkin not only writes each script alone (at one point, he was churning out two a week — one for "The West Wing" and another for the widely acclaimed but short-lived "Sports Night"), but also produces, casts and often confers with the actors. He is a notorious workaholic who maintains a marathoner's pace and has understandably become acquainted with the ravages of burnout — and worse. At one point in his young career, his life veered out of control, and he required some serious counseling to wrench it back on track. Now he has regained his remarkable steadiness, which is not to say he's slowed down, as this intrepid — though somewhat out-of-breath — Sky writer can attest, having caught up with him between episodes of "The West Wing."

Almost all of your work, aside from "Sports Night," focuses on government and its ripple effect on our lives. Is that an outgrowth of your own personal disenchantment, or maybe just an irresistible topic?
I've never been disenchanted; I've always been enchanted. But I've had much less experience in politics than maybe "The West Wing" or The American President would lead you to believe.

At a time when most decent TV series manage a completely compelling show every eight weeks or so, how does "The West Wing" hit a home run week after week after week? Is there a portrait of you withering in the attic, or is there just too much great source material?
We're shooting our 37th episode right now, and there's never been one where we've said, "Hey, it's just TV. We did a good show last week. We're going to do a good show next week. This isn't the sweeps period right now. Everybody likes the cast. Let's just have them go out there and say funny things." We all kind of live and die with each episode, and when we do one that wasn't quite as good as we hoped, we allow ourselves a few moments of misery before we realize, "We've got to get back in the game here. We've got to do a show next week." It's also a very talented and terribly committed group of people who are doing it, from Martin Sheen down to the assistant boom operator.

Speaking of Martin Sheen, you've cast him twice: as Michael Douglas' chief of staff in The American President and, of course, as the president in "The West Wing." What is it about him that suggests such sure-fire presidential material?
I've put him in the White House twice, but it's nothing compared to the number of times other people have put him in the White House. I think he's played all the Kennedys. But like Rob Lowe, he was cast in spite of that feeling. It was the only thing he had going against him; he was too obvious a choice for it. I had actually imagined someone much more rumpled than Martin, someone less presidential-looking. The earliest thinking was, what would have happened if Atticus Finch [of To Kill a Mockingbird] had grown up to be president? However, a phone call came one day, saying, "Are we interested in Martin Sheen?" I thought, "Well, that's the ballgame right there."

What are the challenges in writing for an ensemble cast, as opposed to a few principal actors?
Whatever challenges there are are far outweighed by the benefits. Working with this cast, it gets me thinking of Joe Torre and some of his Yankees teams. You can play any of these guys, and it turns out great. The cast is terrific about not saying, "Gee, I don't have as much to do in this episode," but they never say that. Brad Whitford [Josh] says that I like to play the whole band, which is true.

Yes, but is it harder to carry so many different characters and their myriad story lines week after week?
Yes. It's hard; there are a lot of balls I have to keep up in the air. An hour show is 41 minutes and 30 seconds, which isn't very much time to get things done. But I grew up admiring ["Doonesbury" cartoonist] Gary Trudeau. He, over the course of many years, was able to populate his world with enough supporting characters so that he could just pull any of them in, and at any time, to tell his story. There were characters that disappeared for three years and all of a sudden came back. That's a little bit of what I'm trying to do here.

Is "The West Wing" a window to the American people, or is it merely a study of business at its biggest?
It might be both. It's a workplace drama. When the show debuted, there was a feeling that it was meant to be the Clinton White House, and that it was timely. I didn't think it was timely. If you'll forgive the pretentiousness, I thought it was timeless, because we've been telling stories about kings and what goes on behind the palace walls for thousands of years. This is just another one of those. Nevertheless, it is the study of a big corporation. It's the study of a country that is really many different countries; so many different kinds of people live here and have so many needs. If you write a hospital show — even the best hospital show: "ER" or "St. Elsewhere" or "Chicago Hope" — ultimately the stories you're gonna have to tell have to be about sick people who need to be healed. With "The West Wing," there isn't any story that is off-limits to us, but I try very hard to stay away from prominent, real-life events. If something is on the front page, I don't like to write about it. Because then our show starts to seem like a movie-of-the-week. But sometimes I write a script, we shoot the episode and then the story actually happens. And it seems like we're ripping it off.

How do you keep "The West Wing" from being bogged down in the cynicism that most people feel regarding government?
Interestingly, there are plenty of nonfans of the show for exactly that reason. Some people refer to it as "The Left Wing." They make the assumption — mistakenly — that I am writing about the Clinton White House. People feel I've simply airbrushed all the faults out of Clinton and his circle. If you were to take a poll, you'd find that most people are cynical about lawyers and doctors, but when they watch "ER" and "The Practice," there is a wish fulfillment. There is a cultural divide in this country, and the hate mail that we get, almost to a letter, says what they don't like is that people who don't believe what they believe are being portrayed as smart and glib. They refer to them as "the beautiful people." Look, I'm a fiction writer. I don't feel any responsibility to truth, to fairness, only to the elements of storytelling. But on "The West Wing," a lot of what I do lives in argument and debate. The arguments on the other side of whatever it is we're arguing are most often equally compelling. Remember, in A Few Good Men, Nicholson's got the big speech at the end, and I think its effectiveness — other than the fact that it was being delivered by Jack Nicholson — was that it made people think, "Gee, he's got a point," when we didn't want to think that. I love that kind of moment. It offers a terrific argument. I don't want the people who disagree with our stars to be like the Germans in "Hogan's Heroes."

I have to imagine that you wrote and polished A Few Good Men over a long period of time. Yet these days, you're cranking out a script — maybe even two — a week. Are playwrights prima donnas, or does television somehow require less polish?
Neither. With A Few Good Men the play, with A Few Good Men the movie, with The American President and with Malice — the plays and the screenplays — I wrote each for a year-and-a-half, maybe two years. I do many drafts. If I get up in the morning, and I don't really have it, and I go to the movies instead, I don't write that day. We begin making the movie when I'm ready. On television, the deadline is king. It's a script every eight business days. It reminds me a little bit of the way that Hawkeye would talk about the kind of surgery they do at the MASH unit. He would reprimand Winchester, "You can't get too delicate, you can't get too fine. This is meatball surgery here, patch it up and move 'em on to Seoul." Well, this isn't meatball surgery here, and you want to get as delicate and fine as you possibly can, but I often equate this series to summer stock with a lot of money. We're doing a show every week, the deadline is king, but most of the time the real difference is you can't afford those days where you don't really have it. The frightening thing is that we're almost always shooting my first draft. With every show, I wish they'd just give me the script back for another week so that I can really make it hop.

In "Sports Night," you created one of the smartest, sharpest, best-cast and critically acclaimed shows on television — and apparently that wasn't enough. What else did the show need?
The show needed to be on a different network. We did 45 episodes of it. And so, for me, a two-year run was a hit. But, by and large, the shows that were already on ABC-TV were not attracting an audience that was likely to enjoy "Sports Night." And as a TV network you're pretty much limited to the audience you already have. I'm also not sure it was promoted in the best manner. "Sports Night" was a different kind of half-hour, and different tends to be anathema on television, particularly in a half-hour genre. They don't want a half-hour show, they want a comedy block; they want 8 to 10, here are these four shows, and they're pretty much all alike. You can be comfortable with them, flip through a magazine, cook dinner, put the kids to bed, talk on the phone. "Sports Night" wasn't really like that; you had to pay attention. In an effort to convince people, "Don't worry about 'Sports Night,' it's just like everything else," they tried to make it look that way, and it didn't work.

Why is network television such an enemy of originality?
Let's remember that every once in a while, something original and wonderful busts through. That said, it is an enemy of originality for the reasons I just mentioned. The relationship between the audience and what's on television is a very passive one. It's not like a movie or a play, where you've made a decision to do that — leave your house, buy a ticket, hire a baby sitter; it's a commitment. And while I've seen people walk out of movies and plays, it's not nearly as easy a thing to do as changing the channel.

Does that mean that a show like "The West Wing" or, say, "Homicide" — another well-written, insightful, original show — can do reasonably well on television, but, as with an art film that wins the Academy Award, the larger empire won't support it in the long run?
That's a very good analogy. With movies and plays, I don't think there is anyone who would consider me edgy. You might consider me someone who defines the middle of the road. I write Hollywood movies and kind of boulevard plays. And yet once I did the exact same thing on television, it was like "Sports Night" became the art-house film of television. The reason why is that networks believe the best recipe for success is something very familiar, very easy. You're supposed to design a show and fill in the name of the star.

It's no secret that you went up against ABC. Is that a battle you can ever hope to win against any network?
Yes, it is. First of all, it's a battle you need to fight. Writers have to write what they think is good, what they think is right. You want to be working creatively with the director, with the actors, your designers. ABC badly wanted me to make "Sports Night" into a show that seemed more familiar to them. "Can't we have the neat guy and the sloppy guy?" "Can't we have the jock and the wimp?" Those are the things that made sense to them. When an ABC development executive comes to me and says, "Listen, I think you're doing this wrong, and I think you should do it this way," I have a right to wonder, "Are you the genius behind the concept of 'Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place'?"

All your characters — from Tom Cruise's lawyer to Jack Nicholson's colonel to the entire White House staff — seem to have tragic flaws. Is that an essential part of your writing?
I was a theater major in college [Syracuse University] and had a wonderful teacher named Geri Clark who just pounded Aristotle's Poetics into us. So it's all about examining a tragic flaw. And where it's cathartic is this: that in most of these characters, whether it's Cruise or Michael Douglas or any of the people in "The West Wing," generally what you start with is good versus evil or good versus better. Most of these characters, when you meet them, are perfectly likable, very capable, smart, doing a good job — they wouldn't hurt a little animal. And then they are faced with a challenge that requires them to step it up a notch. What they're not doing is risking much. Tom Cruise, at the beginning of A Few Good Men, is a plea bargainer; he's in the Navy so that he can pay off his law school loan, he's just going to lay low and get out and get a real job. Then — wham! — all of a sudden he's faced with a real killer of a case. Oftentimes, that's what happens on "The West Wing." The characters on "The West Wing" lose as often as they win. They almost always have to compromise.

Who is the highest-ranking government official to have offered you an opinion of the show?
President Clinton, who loved watching it. We're going to miss the Clintons terribly, as you might imagine. They've been a terrific research source. The cherry on top, however, came last May. Four times a year, we go to Washington for a few days to shoot exterior locations, and we were shooting our season finale in Georgetown, when out comes Madeleine Albright, who lived around the corner, and was very upset: "Why is there no secretary of state on the show?" Later, I was summoned to the office of National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who chewed me out for not having a national security advisor. So I opened the next season with Anna Deavere Smith as the national security advisor.

What do you hear from President Bush's people?
We last heard from them back during the primaries, before he got the nomination, when someone — I'm assuming low in the campaign hierarchy — called to see if we'd be interested in having him on an episode. We've not heard from them since, but we're hoping that we'll have as friendly a relationship with them as we had with their predecessor.