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May 22, 2002
The Today Show interview with Aaron Sorkin
Katie Couric: Tonight, NBC will air the much-anticipated finale of its award-winning drama The West Wing. Sure to please the show's millions of fans, the show's creator and executive producer, Aaron Sorkin, has a new book coming out called The West Wing Script Book. I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Sorkin, who began his career as a playwright. We started by talking about his second play, A Few Good Men, which opened on Broadway when he was just 28 years old. A little while later, Hollywood director Rob Reiner turned it into an unforgettable film.
[Clip from A Few Good Men]
KC: That was such a powerful movie, and I think it's a very good example of how your writing is dialogue-driven.
AS: Yeah, I really love dialogue, and the most dangerous thing about that is that, you know, I can sit at home and I'll write 100 pages of crackling dialogue and realize on page 101 that I haven't begun telling a story yet and you're obligated to do that.
C: Is the story sort of secondary to the interaction among the characters?
AS: Well, for me, the dialogue is the fun part, and the plot is intrusive. It's necessary, but you have to do it.
[Clip from The American President]
KC: Anybody who watched The American President and now The West Wing, if they're trying to figure out where you stand politically, it's not very tough.
[Clip of Martin Sheen and Dule Hill]
KC: Michael Douglas played a liberal Democratic president. President Bartlet certainly is left of center.
AS: Yeah.
KC: Are you trying to send a political message with your work?
AS: No. It would be tougher than you think, I think, to figure out where I stand politically. You have to remember that these are characters. The characters aren't necessarily speaking for me. I'm not the world's most political person. I have a bachelor's degree in musical theatre, and we did this show with the idea that you didn't have to agree with the characters in order to like the show.
[Clip of Toby and Jed from In Excelsus Deo]
KC: When you came up with the character of Josiah Bartlet, what kind of qualities did you want him to embody specifically?
AS: Mostly my father's, who really has a great love of education and literature, all things old, and believes in a genuine goodness in people, and has a real "Aw, Dad" sense of humor. I really wanted to try to be able to capture that.
KC: You also are very patriotic, and I think that's very apparent on the program. I mean, would you say that's a fair assessment?
AS: Yeah, I love the country. I mean, I think everybody does. And when I grew up--and I was born in 1961--patriots wore hard hats. Anybody with hair like my length, you know, didn't like the country somehow, so I was really excited to write about a different kind of patriotism once I became old enough.
KC: Where do you get some of these story ideas, Aaron?
AS: Mostly, I'm surrounded by people who are a lot smarter than I am, a lot more creative than I am, and they'll say, you know, "Hey, what if we did something with this? Let me do some research for you and show you, you know, how good this could be."
KC: So it doesn't necessarily come to you in the middle of the night--"Aha! I'll give President Bartlet MS!" It really sort of unfolds.
AS: It so seldom comes to me in the middle of the night. I wish it would come to me in the middle of the night.
KC: Some people have said that the writing is a little too eager. You ever said, "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."
AS: That was my mentor, William Goldman, the writer, who told me that.
KC: Have you been able to harness that desire or inclination?
AS: No, I have not. Neither in my writing nor in my dating have I been able to do that.
[Clip of CJ and Jed from Take This Sabbath Day]
KC: I hear you're a master procrastinator. That sometimes that you'll say, "My god, there's going to be an hour of dead air next week on NBC if I don't get cranking on this thing."
AS: Well, Katie, you call it procrastination; I call it thinking, you know.
KC: You do? But I hear you give people the script sort of in the middle of the show and they both love you and hate you for it cause it's so darn good. On the other hand, they're like, "Hello?"
AS: They hate me, Katie. There's no love there.
KC: No, no, that's not true. You must thrive under pressure. You must like that.
AS: I don't like it, but it's the way it is. And I--really I'm really grateful to the people I work with and the people I work for, who are also the people you work for, that--
KC: They put up with you?
AS: They haven't fired me.
KC: How realistic is your show?
AS: I don't know. I've never worked in the White House. And I don't care that much. I'm much more interested in the television show than the reportage, than the element of it which is documentary. The appearance of reality is terribly important to me. You don't want it to seem like a fairy tale world.
[Clip of Jed from Two Cathedrals]
KC: Now comes "Aaron Sorkin, The Dark Side." Of course, there was a lot of publicity about you last spring when you were arrested for--what?--having a freebase pipe and mushrooms at the airport in Los Angeles. You've reportedly been in and out of rehab, and I know that your marriage ended. These are highly personal things obviously. But when you're someone like Aaron Sorkin and you've enjoyed this much success, these things become public. Unfortunately for you. When you think about this sort of chapter in your life, what's your explanation for it?
AS: Well, I mean, I was off-the-chart stupid. I had drugs with me and was arrested and--you know, and paid a price for it.
KC: You didn't have to serve any time or anything like that, right?
AS: No, I didn't. I think that there was a sense that, because I write a television series, that somehow I got it easier from the law than other people did, and I didn't. There was a price to pay publicly, and it was rough. I don't think it was any more than I deserved probably. And it was a terrible thing to do to my family, to my friends, the people I work with, the people I work for. It's regrettable.
KC: Do you think it was the pressure of what you do?
AS: It wasn't pressure. In fact, at the moment that I did it, it was the moment that I was done with the pressure. I'd just turned in the last script of the last episode of the second season of The West Wing. One of the difficult things--challenges--that an addict has is celebrating without drugs. And so, you know, you say, "Well, you can do this, and it's not going to be like it was before." You're always wrong.
[Clip of Leo from Bartlet For America]
KC: Talk to me just briefly about some of the people on the show. Because as important as the dialogue, I would think, are the people who are charged with delivering it.
[Clips of Martin Sheen, John Spencer, Richard Schiff and Rob Lowe, Alison Janney and Mark Harmon on location]
AS: It's really--it's been a love affair from the beginning. It's a once-in-a-lifetime cast. To us, it seems like we just started a couple of weeks ago; but we've been doing this for three years now, and everybody shows up and swings from the fences every week.
KC: If you had to look into the future, do you think The West Wing will kind of go the way of LA Law and stick around for eight years, or some of these other great dramas that have really captivated the country?
AS: It is hard to say. You know, there's no other discipline in the arts that's meant to last this long. I've been writing the show now for three years, and my time will be over pretty soon. And somebody else will come in and write the show.
KC: Really? You'd be willing to hand over your baby to somebody else?
AS: Yeah. You know, you don't want to stay too long at the fair.
KC: Anything in mind right now that you're thinking about writing?
AS: No, there's, you know, with this job really, you know, The West Wing is just sunrise and sunset, and there's no time to think about anything else.
KC: And, again, The West Wing season finale airs tonight at 9, 8 central time, right here on NBC.
Posted by MorganG at May 22, 2002 01:10 PM