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October 02, 2002
Aaron Sorkin on The Charlie Rose Show
Charlie Rose: Aaron Sorkin is here. He is the creator and executive producer of the hit NBC series "The West Wing." Last week the show continued its reign as the best dramatic series on network television. It won the Emmy for best drama for the third year in a row. On Wednesday, 18 million viewers tuned in to watch the two-hour season premiere. I am pleased to have Aaron Sorkin back at this table. Welcome.
Aaron Sorkin: Thank you. Nice to be here.
CR: It's nice to have you for a one-on-one because the last time you were here…
AS: Yeah, it was a big crowd. It was most of the cast.
CR: It was a big crowd. Most of the cast, right. So here's what somebody said: "The best thing about the new season: it is no longer last season."
AS: Yeah, I said that. Yeah. Among the lesser casualties of 9/11 was that, you know, a few weeks after 9/11 I think that we wanted a diversion, we wanted to laugh. I think that a series like "Friends" couldn't have had its best season at a better time. But what we weren't ready for were fictional heroes. Our hearts were completely with the real ones and particularly a fictional president of the United States when the real president of the Untied States was embodying everything that we were feeling--the anger--
CR: American anger, American will, American--
AS: Exactly right. And from week to week, you felt like you were writing the show handcuffed a little bit. I didn't know how to write it anymore. It was a constant search for what I wasn't doing that used to make the show work. And I'm very proud of everybody that I work with; we stuck together and we saw it through and came back to work after the hiatus and didn't feel any of that, just felt the normal week-to-week pressure of trying to write well. And we're having a terrific time now.
CR: It's important. I mean, I find admirable is you acknowledge this. I mean, you're saying, "Look, we had a bad year last year. We didn't have a bad year in terms of all the normal--But in our hearts we didn't think we got into the rhythm that we normally have."
AS: That's absolutely right. Yeah. And, you know, you've got to be a diagnostician a little bit. You've got to be able to say it's not working now and why. And during those times when it's--So maybe there was a way to make it work. There probably was. I wasn't able to find it in twenty-two episodes.
CR: Now a couple of things we have to ask about. One is Rob Lowe. Is he coming back? Is he not coming back? Are you going to pay him enough money, or is NBC going to pay him enough money?
AS: Well, I hope he stays. Everybody hopes he stays. And all he has to do to stay is stay. It's easy. He just has to not leave. Very simply the way it works is there's Martin Sheen, who has a particular pay scale cause he had a shorter contract than everybody else. His contract was… expired, and he negotiated a new one.
CR: By that time, it was a hit series.
AS: Yeah, that's right. Dule Hill and Janel Moloney, who are the two newest members of the cast, who are on the lower end of the pay scale. In the middle are five actors--Richard Schiff, John Spencer, Brad Whitford, Alison Janney, and Rob. And at the moment, they're all five being paid the same. Rob would like to be paid more, and Warner Brothers doesn't want to do that to the other four actors. I don't want to do it to the other four actors. And that's where we are. But there's no villain in this situation.
CR: And nobody, certainly, within the family of West Wing are angry at each other.
AS: Oh, absolutely not. We are laughing every bit as much as we used to. No one more than Rob, by the way. He--and I love him for this--he comes to work every day absolutely ready to play, terrific sense of humor, energizing everyone else on.
CR: Was his character assumed to be, at the beginning, when it was in your mind, when you first began to create this series, the star?
AS: No. There was no star. I'm not crazy about stars. I like kind of writing for a band--a group of people--
CR: With multiple story lines.
AS: Yeah, that's right. As a matter of fact, Brad Whitford, who plays Josh, was offered his choice of Josh or Sam and chose Josh. And I'm saying this simply to illustrate that these were all equal roles.
CR: He would have chosen Sam if Sam were the big star. Was a bigger role.
AS: So the answer is no. We were thrilled when Rob came in and read cause his audition was just wonderful, and the thing that was working against him in the casting process was the fact that he was a recognizable name, and we were concerned that somehow would draw away from the ensemble feeling--that there'd be a perception that this is a show about Rob. But we, you know, we swallowed that fear because he read so great for it and cast him.
CR: It has also been written that Josh is your voice.
AS: I'm not sure that any of them are my voice. Either none of them are or they all are. But certainly nothing in between.
CR: You write every episode.
AS: Yeah, every episode except--We've done 72 now. What will be the seventh episode this season, I didn't write. It was written by two guys on our staff, Kevin Falls and Eli Ati. And then episode number twelve this season is going to be written by the playwright John Robin Bates. Robbie Bates.
CR: Oh, he's great. So what--he came to you, you went to him?
AS: I went to him, and I said--and it really--it was one of those things. As you said in your opening, the season premiere was two hours. And NBC said, "Great. We'll do a two-hour premiere, but you still have to deliver twenty-two Wednesdays of original West Wings." And the only way that that could be accomplished is if I benched myself for one. And I thought, well, instead of trying to anticipate--you know, talk to a writer and anticipate where we're going to be at episode twelve--why not go to a playwright and say, "Take one of our characters out of the show and put them in a play. Take Alison Janney's character, and send her home to her twentieth college reunion, something like that." And I went to Robbie right away and said, "Would you do this?" And he said yes. We're thrilled.
CR: Okay, roll tape. Here's from the current season where Toby and Josh and Donna miss the presidential motorcade back to Washington. Roll tape. Some of you may have seen this. Here it is.
CR: How many have you written so far?
AS: This year?
CR: Yeah.
AS: I've written--I'm writing the sixth. We've shot five.
CR: And you've only premiered one, that two-hour spectacular?
AS: That's right. That's right. So the train's beginning to catch up.
CR: Can you argue to your motion picture brethren that there's every bit as good a writing on television today in the best dramas than there is in film?
AS: I would take myself out of the equation, because I'm biased, and tell you that my motion picture brethren by and large would have no argument with that statement. That certainly recently, while the quality of television has really gone up, something's happened to movies. We can all list the exceptions. There have been terrific films this year and last year and the year before. But the more studios depend on the opening weekend being everything, the less it becomes important to have a good movie; what you need is a good ad campaign. And that's what I think, what we're seeing more of these days.
CR: So are you going to make a movie?
AS: I hope so. I'd like to. I love movies, and I love plays. And it turns out I love television.
CR: You started out as a playwright.
AS: Yeah, I still am.
CR: There was something even before "A Few Good Men."
AS: I had this one act in a basement here in town that got a lot of attention. And then "A Few Good Men" and another play. But it was "A Few Good Men" that took me to Hollywood to do the screenplay adaptation, and I was just going to stay there for ten minutes while I did the screenplay adaptation, but I stayed there for that and another movie and another movie after that. And then two TV series--there was one before this called "Sports Night."
CR: Good writing again.
AS: Thanks very much. I love movies because they're big and they're American, and they're two hours and twenty minutes long--
CR: "The American President" was a big movie.
AS: Right. There are no commercials, and you have the entire language available to you, which is what's nice about them. What's nice about television is that you have a continuing relationship with the thing that you write. You know, with a movie, you're done writing the screenplay and you kind of--you're not really necessary on the set, but you hang out there anyway cause you can't tear yourself away, so you eat a lot of donuts at craft service and then it's another three months in post-production. You enjoy the milk and cookies during premiere week and, you know, then it's done. And with this--What this is is summer stock with a lot of money.
CR: New York Times Magazine wrote a piece about you.
AS: Yeah.
CR: What did you think of the piece?
AS: Well, I don't know. I'll tell you, at the time what I remember--
CR: Peter De Jong was his name.
AS: Peter De Young, I think, you pronounce it. And I thought there were some strange observations in there.
CR: Okay, well, I want to get at one of those at least. Okay, it is this notion that you wrote "A Few Good Men;" you are not a 50-year-old ex-Marine. People see you write about things and it's almost things that you're not that interested in, but you can infuse them with a powerful sense of reality and powerful writing that makes the lines, you know, stand up and shout.
AS: Yeah.
CR: Now, what's that about? I mean, that was one point that seemed to me to have some reality. Does it or not?
AS: It does. There's a bit of a Chauncey Gardner thing going on with me, I think, and it's--When I was ramping up to my thirteenth birthday--believe me, I'm not going to drag you through my entire life here--I have no religious training at all; I'm Jewish but never went to Hebrew school. But in the seventh grade, nearly every Saturday I was going to a friend's bar mitzvah. And I was just beginning to develop kind of my love of theatre. And this was great theatre. These people were up there, and there was a robe, and they were singing and speaking, and there was an audience, and they were getting--you get a pat on the back. So it's about six weeks before my birthday where there was just going to be, you know, the boys in my family had big parties on their thirteenth birthday. And I opened up a local phone book and called a local rabbi and said, "Rabbi, I'm going to be thirteen in six weeks, so I want you to teach me the Torah." He said, "It's going to take me a lot more than six weeks." And I said, "No, no, no. You don't understand, If you just say it into a tape recorder, I've got a very good ear, and I can learn it phonetically." And he pointed out that's hardly the reason for doing it.
CR: Good for him.
AS: And I'm mentioning this because I grew up surrounded by people a lot smarter than I am. Whether it was--
CR: Are you sure?
AS: I'm certain. Whether it was at my dinner table or at a poker game--my friends.
CR: You were the least smart person in the room?
AS: By far. I was the person terribly interested in doing the drama club productions. These were all the people headed for Harvard and Yale and Princeton. And have since graduated from there and have gone on to do extraordinary things.
CR: They've gone on to work for you is where it's going.
AS: And I, just like with learning the Torah phonetically, I began to just learn the sound of intelligence, what that sounded like.
CR: This is great.
AS: And that's how I would write. This is happening that I'm developing--
CR: So you actually learned the courtroom drama from the idea of how--?
AS: Well, with the courtroom drama with "A Few Good Men," I had a small window in. My sister at the time was a lawyer with the Navy Judge Advocate General's court. So I'd ask her to give me things, to give me pamphlets--nothing confidential at all. To give me any pieces of paper that had the jargon of this place on it. And I would really start to fall in love with phrases and the sound of things, and I'd want to put this into the scene. I also loved, from a very young age--my parents took me to the theatre all the time when I was a little kid. And they took me--They didn't take me to little kid plays; they took me to plays I had no business being at, like "Championship Season" when I was eleven years old, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" when I was twelve. And I didn't--
CR: Those are pretty good plays.
AS: Those are great plays.
CR: A couple of Pulitzer Prizes, I think.
AS: Yes, but an eleven-year-old doesn't know what "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is about. But what I loved was the sound of dialogue; it was like symphony music to me. It was just terrific. And I wanted to make that. And so I phonetically create the sound on "The West Wing" of people who are much more politically sophisticated than I am. I look for a point of friction. You've got to have--for drama, two people have to disagree on something--and I---
CR: But do you know politics?
AS: No. No, I don't know politics at all.
CR: Do you watch poliltics? I mean, have you ever seen C-SPAN?
AS: Oh, sure, sure. And I watch--there are shows that I think are terrific, like "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang" and all those shows because they're--
CR: Bill O'Reilly.
AS: Yeah. They're drama. People are disagreeing, and it's interesting to me. And when people are talking about something, it isn't so much their position that I'm trying to imitate as the way they're presenting it. I'm just trying to phonetically recreate the sound of political sophistication and knowing what you're talking about. And oftentimes in things that I've written, whether it's "A Few Good Men" or I wrote a movie called "Malice" or "The American President" or "Sports Night" or "The West Wing," there'll be a quick passage that will go by and somebody--the studio or the producer--someone will say, "Gee, no one's going to know what these two people are talking about." I'll say, "It's not actually important that they do. What's important is that the audience say, 'Wow! These guys really know what they're talking about. That's interesting.'" And that's what I try to do.
CR: So here's what you said in this piece: "The things I write about are pretty much disconnected from the things I think about." Which is what you're saying. You don't have to think about them to write about them. You have a sense of drama more than a sense of content. Or not?
AS: I think what Peter was getting at was this, and I think that I was getting at it too there, this piece--
CR: Peter wrote this because of conversations with you.
AS: Of course he wrote it because of conversations with me. He also wrote it--it came quickly on the heels of a fairly public arrest. A year ago April, I was arrested at Burbank Airport for drug possession.
CR: Crack cocaine.
AS: Yeah, there were bad drugs.
CR: Marijuana.
AS: And mushrooms. And I think what Peter was getting at was that it doesn't seem like the guy who wrote "The American President" or "West Wing" or even "A Few Good Men" has this in his world and why would he be--
CR: That's right. Cause it's an idealized, positive, fictionalized sense--as you say, you create fictitious heroes.
AS: Yeah. I like to write very romantically, very idealistically.
CR: And here's a guy who's going through--who's stupid enough to try to go through an airport security system.
AS: Well, forget about just the stupidity of trying to go through an airport system. Who's using the drug in the first place. And what Peter was saying was "Gee, why not write about that? It seems to me there's something going on more dramatic than 'I love America.'
CR: And?
AS: And I don't know what the answer to it is.
CR: Come on.
AS: I honestly don't. I'm not being coy. I think about it all the time.
CR: And what conclusions do you reach?
AS: The conclusion that I reach is I love writing this. This, for me, is like sitting down at a piano and doing something healthy, frankly, and playing nicely and practicing.
CR: Are you through with drugs or not? Because you literally seemed to say drugs helped you. Are you through or not?
AS: I am. I mean, I haven't taken any drugs since my arrest last April.
CR: And how hard is that for you?
AS: There are times it's harder than others. And, you know, there have been times you get to the precipice. I'll tell you what's made it a lot easier since April--I've had what's called institutional sobriety. I'm in the criminal justice system now, which means I'm drug tested once in a while. The consequences of failing a drug test--
CR: About how often? Is it random or--
AS: It's random, and it's often.
CR: It's random and often.
AS: And often. And the consequences of failing a drug test are dire.
CR: You go to prison. Go to prison.
AS: Yeah.
CR: Because there a lot of young--certainly young minority kids in this city for possession of crack cocaine who are in jail, and you know that.
AS: Yeah.
CR: And they have put that weight on top of you to say if you don't behave--
AS: That's right. It's worth mentioning, by the way, since I talked about minorities, that the--truly, I'm not complaining on my behave, I'm white--but the mandatory sentencing for crack cocaine is considerably more severe than the mandatory sentencing for powder cocaine. The reason being that, I think, 70% of all drug users are white; about 80% of all crack users are black.
CR: That's why I made that point. That's exactly--And you're saying--What's your point though?
AS: I was doing a parenthetical to say that that's racially ridiculous that that's the case. I think the point that you were making is that is it--Were you asking me because I have a TV show, did I get a lighter deal than--
CR: And you've got a lot of money and can hire the best lawyers and all that.
AS: Well, there's no question that I was able to hire terrific lawyers, but which--what I was sentenced to was called diversion. Which means you're on probation for two years and you have to put in a certain number of hours every week with a drug counselor in a group setting. It was not in my group executive producers of television shows. It was me and a plumber's assistant and a stripper and a gardener, all of whom received the same sentence that I did. And all of whom paid a lot less money for their legal counsel.
CR: You're a hell of a writer. I mean, I've just got to believe that out of all these experiences, there's something in you and it's fair to say, "Look, maybe I'll get to it. I hope I will." And writing is not easy. I've never met the person who said to me, "Writing is easy, Charlie." Especially at the level that you do it. So, you know, I hope you'll do that. Let me just come to--You got into some trouble about some stuff you seemed to be saying about Bush. Now what was that about?
AS: Silly is what it was.
CR: On your part? Or with the people who came up with criticizing--
AS: I think with the people who kind of made a magilla out of it. I was interviewed by David Remick.
CR: New Yorker magazine.
AS: Exactly right. In front of a small group of people. There was a Q&A, and right before the Q&A started, we were just chatting about something. And I remarked that I thought it was terrific that this was--I can't remember when it was; it was in early spring, I think, of last year. So it was maybe five, six months after 9/11. And I remarked that I thought it was terrific that people were laying off the knucklehead jokes a little bit with Bush, that we just weren't doing that and that was appropriate. Because we were just in this place in 9/11; that it just wasn't right to be talking this way about our president. But then I was concerned that legitimate news outlets--that the New York Times and others, and many, many others--were seeing something I wasn't seeing. They were talking about how he had been transformed on 9/11, that he rose to the occasion, he was a new man, and I wasn't seeing that. And I thought we were being snookered somehow.
CR: By the media?
AS: By the media. This was not--had nothing to do with President Bush. And David say, "Great. Let's talk about that when we're up there." And we did, and that interview was sort of allowed to be a part of that--
CR: It was on the record.
AS: A "Talk of the Town" piece. Frankly, the biggest trouble that I got in was that one of the examples that I cited was NBC News and Tom Brokaw had done a day in the life of the real West Wing, which began with Tom Brokaw telling us, "Now the president's schedule has been kind of pumped up for this event.
CR: So he acknowledged that that was true.
AS: And I simply acknowledged his acknowledgment.
CR: Oh, I thought what you said was "Look what they do. They pumped up it up" without giving credit to NBC for saying it beforehand.
AS: No, I frankly can't remember what the quote is. I may not have given credit to NBC for having said it. What I said was his schedule was pumped up for the benefit of NBC. NBC and Tom Brokaw allowed that, and I obviously have all the respect in the world for Tom Brokaw and NBC News. Even if I didn't, which I do, I wouldn't say that I didn't because I work for NBC too.
CR: I hope you called up Tom and apologized.
AS: I did call up Tom and apologized. He was a great sport about it. Called up Jeff Zucker and apologized.
CR: Jack Welch.
AS: Who else is on my list here? The Matt Drudgeing of the whole thing.
CR: Yeah, Matt heard it and just blasted it, didn't he?
AS: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
CR: Peggy Noonan, who--
AS: Oh, my god, Matt had me like in the Taliban, you know.
CR: There you go. That'll teach you not to go out there, running your mouth off about something you know nothing about.
AS: No, no. You know what? Now I'm just talking about penmanship and stuff on these panels.
CR: Here's the thing about you. You have these penpal relationships, these email relationships, with a whole bunch of very smart and sophisticated people in Washington. Maureen Dowd is one of those.
AS: Yeah, after three and a half years, you collect number of people--not nearly enough--but a dozen or so people who help you out an anecdote or a story, sent you in the right direction--
CR: Oh, these are sources, are they?
AS: Yeah, sent you in the right direction on China or Africa and they're all terrific people, and what they all have in common is they're all very funny. And so you really enjoy sending emails back and forth. The problem is you find it's 2 in the afternoon, and all I've done is, you know, is emailed with Johnny Apple.
CR: There's a good one. So you've got all these people; do they suggest you story lines as well?
AS: First of all, what's nice is that they all seem to enjoy the show. So they'll enthusiastically suggest a story about themselves.
CR: Now why do you think that is? Because it is a glorification of--
AS: Well, of public service and government work and oftentimes, by the way, reporters.
CR: Less so in terms of the mouth of the creator. I mean, you've jumped all over cable television too. You've said--
AS: No.
CR: No? You didn't say anything about cable television and the fact that what was going on on television didn't meet your approval?
AS: No. Are we talking about the reality shows?
CR: yeah.
AS: First of all, it's not important that most things meet my approval. It really isn't.
CR: I wasn't suggesting it was but--
AS: I sat on--this past weekend was the New Yorker Festival.
CR: Again. The same one you got in trouble with last time. Did they do another interview? Was Matt Drudge there?
AS: This time I sat on a panel called "What You Can't Say on TV: Censorship in Television." And we'd gotten to the end of the panel, and I had just mentioned that there hadn't really had time to talk about the biggest problem, which is not censorship by the networks or the FCC, broadcast standards and practices; it's self-censorship. That I feel that so many of the shows like "Celebrity Boxing" and these reality shows where people are getting paid fundamentally to humiliate themselves was so much worse than bad language and nudity in terms of a corrosive effect on society.
CR: I could not agree more with you.
AS: I'm glad to hear you say so. But, you know, I love everybody, and I'm really not a troublemaker. I'm just sitting in my room and I'm doing my thing--
CR: The problem is we can't let you out in public. We can't let you travel, and we can't let you out in public.
AS: That really is the problem. I can't go to airports anymore. It really is the thing. And I'm fine if I'm living in a fictional world that I've created. But once I have to put my socks on--
CR: Do you think of yourself as making a movie?
AS: We do. Every week. We're making a 41-minute movie every week for about $2 1/2 million.
CR: What else are you going to do? You may make a movie, and you just told me--
AS: I'm eager to get back to the popcorn and the movies, but when I say eager, I'm not at all eager to leave "The West Wing." I love it, and it's my home.
CR: But if you leave and you're doing so much, what happens to this baby?
AS: Oh, what happens is that a real writer comes in and starts writing it, and you can see what the show really can be.
CR: And we'll give credit to him, won't we?
AS: That's right. Very good.
CR: And we'll make sure we give credit to him when we win awards, won't we?
AS: Yes, we will. I've accepted a commission from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for the 2004-2205 season.
CR: This is great.
AS: Yeah, it's going to be real exciting.
CR: When will you get started on this?
AS: I should start pretty soon. 2004-2005 season's two years from now, three years from now, I guess.
CR: Things are going well?
AS: It's terrific, thanks.
CR: Great to have you here.
AS: Thanks for having me here, thanks
CR: Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing, executive producer, creator, writer. When are you on?
AS: Wednesday nights at 9 o'clock, NBC.
CR: NBC. If he's not there, go to CBS--9 o'clock on NBC. The Emmy award-winning West Wing. Thank you for joining us.
Posted by MorganG at October 2, 2002 10:09 PM