Bartlet4America News Archive

'West Wing' Cast Gets Special Tour

By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — White House officials led the cast of "The West Wing" on a tour of the real thing Sunday and mugged with the actors in a mock news briefing.

Notably absent was President Bush and the man who plays a Democratic president on the television show, Martin Sheen — a real-life Bush critic who in February called Bush a "moron."

Setting politics aside, a half-dozen aides from the Republican administration tagged along as five cast members visited the White House press briefing room.

"They've been incredibly nice to us. We are, after all, the fictional opposition," said Bradley Whitford, a deputy chief of staff on the show.

Whitford campaigned for Democrat Al Gore in Minnesota, Oregon and New Mexico, and in October traveled to his native state, Wisconsin, to introduce Gore at the biggest rally of the campaign. "I'm not a politician, I just play one on TV — kind of like George Bush," Whitford would tell audiences.

Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, led the tour of White House offices. Card's deputies, Josh Bolten and Joe Hagin, posed for photos with Whitford and Richard Schiff, who plays communications director Toby Ziegler.

Hagin, an influential but behind-the-scenes player on the Bush team, gave the show credit for increasing public understanding of his job. "Most of my friends and family relate to what I do up here by the TV show," he said.

Rob Lowe, another star of the show and also a Democratic activist, arrived several hours later for a separate tour courtesy of Bolten. He marveled at the history of the building, and said, "It's just amazing, how open to the public it is."

Allison Janney, who plays press secretary C.J. Cregg, climbed down a floor hatch leading to what was once a White House indoor swimming pool. "Someone take a picture of me!" she said.

Cast members were in town for the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner Saturday night.

Sheen was busy with a filming, Whitford said.

Bush was not available Sunday because he was entertaining other guests, Hagin said. A spokesman would not identify them.

Big Bro Details West Wing’s Josh

By DOUG MOE
The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

The phone call came from David Granger, the editor of Esquire magazine, who had a story idea. David Whitford, a 1975 Madison East grad, author of three books and Boston-based writer for Fortune magazine, wanted very much to write for Esquire, and he knew Granger from when they'd worked together on Sport magazine in the '80s. But the story idea gave Whitford pause.

"How about a profile of Brad?" Granger asked. "Brad" is Bradley Whitford, himself a Madison East graduate, quickly becoming famous for his TV role as Josh Lyman, deputy White House chief of staff, in "The West Wing." Brad was in Madison in late October when he stood on a stage at the top of King Street and introduced Al Gore at a massive campaign rally.

He's also David Whitford's younger brother. By phone Friday from Boston, David was recalling what his brother's reaction was when he mentioned a possible Esquire profile. "He said, You're not going to slam me, are you?' "

The article, which appears in the May issue of Esquire, is not a slam — anything but — though in its complexity it is far superior to most celebrity magazine profiles. David loves and admires his brother but must probe to find out what Brad had inside that allowed him to climb so high in such a long-shot profession as acting.

At one point in the piece, David remembers a moment at East High in Madison after the Whitford family had relocated here from Philadelphia in 1972.

"To a place called Maple Bluff, on the east side of Madison," David writes. "One day during my senior year, I was sitting with my back to the wall in the big covered courtyard at East that we called the mall. There were lockers and benches and picnic tables there, and people had their spots. Crossing the mall between classes was like crossing a stage, always nerve-wracking — for me, anyway.

"But here came my brother, maybe 30 feet away when I spotted him, moving in a way I'd never seen him move before. So easy and so cool, almost floating, as if he were king of the mall or something. I was dumbfounded. Who's that? I was wondering." In that moment David caught Brad's eye, and Brad seemed to wilt — caught in the act. Later David would tell Brad he figured Brad wilted because David knew that cool dude wasn't his little brother, not really.

Brad looked at him and said, "How about if that was me?"

It was, it surely was. The kid could act. There's a great picture included with the Esquire piece of Brad at 17 playing the male lead in "Annie Get Your Gun" at East. There's another picture, further up in the magazine on the contributors' page, of Brad and David standing in swim trunks with a lake in the background. "Has to be Lake Mendota," David was saying Friday. He provided Esquire the photo. "We didn't have a house on the lake or anything but it looks like we're standing by a truck that's trailering a boat."

David details the rise of Brad's career in the piece, and also Brad's marriage to actress Jane Kaczmarek, who is from Milwaukee and stars in "Malcolm in the Middle." David attended the Golden Globes with the couple earlier this year (both were nominated but didn't win) and hung out in Hollywood for a while. One night he asked Brad to rent "Billy Madison," in which Brad played a bad guy opposite Adam Sandler. "I really don't want to," Brad said. Neither brother had ever seen the movie. "It might be good," David said. "I really don't want to." They didn't. Brad doesn't watch "The West Wing" very much either. He said he finds watching himself on screen "weird."

David said Brad is happy with the completed article: "He said he was happy just to be in Esquire." David ends his tale by relating a moment when he was on the set of "The West Wing," watching his kid brother, now grown up, act. "That's Bradley Whitford, I'm beginning to realize," David writes. "That's my brother. And once again he catches my eye. But this time he doesn't wilt."

First, Family

By JASON LYNCH and MICHAEL FLEEMAN
People

Fatherhood has mellowed Richard Schiff, a West Wing Emmy winner — as well as its unlikeliest sex symbol

Richard Schiff's West Wing costar Allison Janney isn't joking when she calls his supporting actor Emmy win last September "the worst thing that could have happened to him." It was bad enough that he beat costar and conominee John Spencer. But he also forgot to thank wife Sheila Kelley in his acceptance speech. Schiff quickly tucked away the statue behind a softball trophy in his study. "It caused too many mixed emotions," he says. Still, he receives little pity from three-time Emmy winner Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet. "If that's the only grief he gets in his life," says Sheen, "may he win an Emmy every year."

He may not achieve that goal, but there is no question that as White House communications director Toby Ziegler, Schiff, 45, has thoroughly charmed viewers with his low-key manner and soulful looks. "It's his quiet mystery," says Janney (West Wing press secretary C.J. Cregg). "You wonder what's going on under the surface."

Actually, female fans clam to be drawn as much to that scruffy surface as to his mystique. "Most TV ensembles are good-looking guys who floss a lot," says Bradley Whitford, a friend and fellow Winger (Josh Lyman). "But Richard is like an unmade bed. He doesn't care." Yet according to executive producer and creator Aaron Sorkin, who hired Rob Lowe to be the show's resident hunk, "much of the mail we get points to Richard as the sex symbol."

The adulation doesn't surprise his wife, Sheila Kelley, 36, who says that Schiff "swooped me away" from her then-beau in 1990, just before she joined L.A. Law as lawyer Gwen Taylor. They moved in together later that year and married in 1996. But it took another life event for Schiff to get down to serious career business. "The minute we conceived is when I started getting interested in making money," says Schiff, who became a father to Gus in 1994. Their daughter Ruby arrived last August.

Now that the money is rolling in, he's making sure Kelley gets her fair share. When she was pole-dancing at a Hollywood men's club as a way of researching her role as a stripper in the upcoming film, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, Schiff was her best customer, forking over $50 for a private show. "It's how we got pregnant with our second child," says Schiff with a smile. But Kelley adds that the incident also represents a turning point. With the trials of fatherhood, her husband has found more humor in life. "Him coming into the club," she says, "I don't know if he could have done that earlier."

In fact, Schiff was a quiet boy growing up in Manhattan as the middle child of Edward, a lawyer, and Charlotte, a homemaker who became a corporate executive and later a theater producer. "One day we had a family to come home to, then all of a sudden it stopped," says Schiff, whose parents split when he was 12.

Schiff enrolled at New York's City College in 1973 but dropped out two years later to spend time in Colorado and Europe. Returning to school in 1977, he took an acting class and found his calling. He began directing plays, founding the Manhattan Repertory Theater in 1982.

After a period of frustrating auditions, he started landing small but prime roles in TV (NYPD Blue, Relativity) and film (The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Dr. Dolittle) before The West Wing came his way in 1999. Yet Schiff refuses to become transfixed by the show's soaring success. "We had the [same] situation when Sheila was on L.A. Law," he says. "We know it's temporary. We go to functions to support our cast members, but other than that we barely go out."

With good reason: Now that they have moved into a new house in Los Angeles, Kelley is installing a stripper's pole in Schiff's home office so she can keep in shape. "I'll be entertaining him at his desk," she says. Beats your typical Hollywood shindig any day.

West Wing delves into Bartlet's disease

By PETER JOHNSON
USA Today

Fans of NBC's The West Wing have been privy to President Josiah Bartlet's (Martin Sheen) secret: He has multiple sclerosis.

But the American public in this hit drama has been kept in the dark, as have many of his top aides — including communications director Toby Ziegler, played by Richard Schiff.

On Wednesday's episode (9 p.m. ET/PT), Toby puts two and two together and confronts his boss. It makes for an intense scene, Schiff says.

"The best way to put it is to say we turn a corner from which we can't go back," he says.

"It's disturbing. There are always secrets in this world that are meant for certain ears and not for others — for practical and political reasons. But this miscalculation is going to cost us dearly."

Schiff says that ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos, who was the communications director during the Clinton administration, was taken aback when he watched the episode being filmed recently for his report on the hit drama for ABC's Good Morning America.

"He was stunned," Schiff says. "He said, 'Oh my God, we never had to deal with anything like this.' "

Schiff says the episode sets up a chain of events that aren't going to be resolved anytime soon. "It'll change the perception of the presidency in our fictional world."

The end of the TV season is approaching, and talk of another West Wing cliffhanger is inevitable. Schiff doesn't think anything could come close to last season — when Bartlet and others were shot during an assassination attempt, "but anything is possible."

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.