The New Yorker Radio Hour - Aaron Sorkin Rewrites “To Kill a Mockingbird”

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

As he set about adapting “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage, Aaron Sorkin found himself troubled by its protagonist, the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch. Harper Lee’s Finch, he thought, is tolerant to a fault—understanding rather than condemning the violent racism of many of his neighbors. Sorkin also felt that Lee’s two black characters, the maid Calpurnia and the falsely accused Tom Robinson, lacked a real voice. “I imagine that, in 1960, using African-American characters as atmosphere is the kind of thing that would go unnoticed by white people,” he tells David Remnick. “In 2018, it doesn’t go unnoticed, and it’s wrong, and it’s also a wasted opportunity.” Sorkin’s changes in his adaptation led to a lawsuit from Harper Lee’s literary executor, who had placed specific conditions on the faithfulness of his script. In Sorkin’s view, the criticisms of the executor, Tonja Carter, were tantamount to racism, in that they reinforced the lack of agency of black people in the South in the nineteen-thirties. (Carter declined to comment on Sorkin’s remarks, and the lawsuit was settled before the play was produced.) Sorkin says that, of his own volition, he cut some of his new lines that hinted too broadly toward the current Presidency. But Atticus Finch’s realization—that the people in his community whom he thought he knew best were people he never really knew at all—mirrors the experience of many Americans since 2016. Plus, Ocean Vuong, the author of the best-selling autobiographical novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” visits the food court at a largely Asian mall in Queens that reminds him of home.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. To Kill a Mockingbird has been considered a classic novel for at least a half a century. Partly because many schools have seen the book as a way to talk about prejudice, about white injustice and violence, in a way that's suitable for kids. It does have to be noted, though, that in Harper-Lee's story about standing up to racism, the moral compass is a white man, Atticus Finch, father to the young girl scout. At the same time, the black characters in the novel remain on the margins without a voice, and that posed a real problem for Aaron Sorkin, who was writing a new play based on To Kill a Mockingbird.

There's an old saying, a person is smart. People are dumb. A mob acts out of emotion. Absent facts, absent contemplation, mostly absent responsibility. What they get in return is anonymity. Conscience can be exhausting. It'll keep you up at night. Mobs are a place where people go to take a break from their conscience. Aaron Sorkin, of course, is best known for the White House drama, The West Wing,

and for movies like Moneyball and the Social Network. To Kill a Mockingbird opened on Broadway in December, and it's been a huge hit. I spoke with him shortly before opening night. I just thought that my role in adapting to kill a mockingbird was just going to be essentially adding stage directions, that I'd take the greatest hits of the novel, and I would stand them up, dramatize them, and that would be the play. And that was my first draft, and it was terrible. Because it was what? It was just, you were adding nothing to it? It was what, yeah, there was nothing new.

It was not a thrilling night in the theater. It was an homage. It was a trip to a museum, and it was not what plays are supposed to be. And it was our producer, Scott Routon, who made that clear to me. How did he make that clear to you? Because he's usually not a master of subtle opinions. Yeah, no, he's not. Did he throw it at you or anything?

It was kinder than that. I've worked with Scott many times before. Scott produced the social network. He produced Moneyball. He produced Steve Jobs. And ordinarily, I turn in the first draft. He says, great, come to New York, we'll have a session. Those sessions usually last three or four days. I go home with hundreds of notes and do the second draft. When I sent in the first draft to kill a mockingbird, the session lasted 45 minutes, and he had two notes. The first note was, we've got to get to the trial sooner. Okay, that's a structural note. The second note was the note that changed everything, including and especially my attitude toward the whole project. The second note was Atticus can't be Atticus from the beginning of the play to the end of the play. He has to become Atticus. And that really got me thinking.

First of all, of course, that's what has to happen. That's what a protagonist is. A protagonist has to be put through something and change. And a protagonist has to have a flaw. So I thought, well, how did Harper Lee get away with it in the novel? Atticus is Atticus. He doesn't have a flaw. He doesn't change.

He's kind of carved out of marble. The answer is Atticus isn't the protagonist in the novel. Scout is. She's the one who changes. She loses some of her innocence. And her flaw is that she's young. But I wanted Atticus to be the protagonist. And I went and reread the book again and found that I did not have to create a

flaw to paint onto him, that there were things I found troubling about Atticus, things that when I read it in middle school, we accepted those things as a virtue, primarily that Atticus believes that there's goodness in everyone, that she can't understand someone unless he crawl around in their skin for a while. He is tolerant of intolerance. He excuses racism all over the place. He excuses it in Bob Ewell because he just lost his WPA job. Bob, Bob Ewell being the father of the young woman who's been raped and abused. Yes. He's a stone-called racist in the book. In the play, he's a stone-called racist who's a member of the Klan. I don't recognize the subtle nuanced differences between the alt-right

neo-conservatives, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-conferiorates, regular Confederates, they're all with or without the Halloween costumes. They're the clan. And so we just come right out and call Bob Yule clan. But did you have racial anxiety about writing about race initially? It seems that this came a little later because this is a story set in 1934, Alabama. The novel comes out 58 years ago. And as you say, we're in a very different time racially.

The black characters in the novel have no voice really. Well, that was another thing that troubled me. There are two significant African-American characters in the novel, Calpurnia the maid, Tom Robinson, the defendant. And in a story about racial tension and injustice in a small fictional town in Alabama, neither of the African-American characters have anything to say on the matter. Calpurnia bakes cornbread, and she seems more concerned about whether Scout wears a dress or overalls. And Tom Robinson gets to plead for his life on the witness stand, and that's it. Now, I imagine that in 1960, using African-American characters only as atmosphere is the kind of thing that would go unnoticed by white people.

In 2018, it doesn't go unnoticed, and it's wrong, and it's also a wasted opportunity. You want their voices in this story, and you want those characters to have agency. I've been watching and in many ways listening to Aaron. Sorkin's writing and voice, I don't mind admitting it rather fanatically for a long, long time. With great appreciation. And I was very curious to see how much of the sort of, and I don't mean to stereotype, but Aaron Sorkin voice, which is so, so distinct in West Wing or the newsroom or things that are utterly yours. And how much of it is going to be there in adaptation? And I was pleased to see that it didn't, as it were, sound like an Aaron Sorkin thing. You must be very aware of

this, how, you'll forgive me, Sorkinian can kill Mockingbird be as opposed to an episode of the West Wing or any of the things that are purely yours? Right. I'm not trying to write Sorkinian as you say. Sorry, sorry for that, but you know what I mean. Any more than I'm trying to make my voice sound like it. Is that my speaking voice? It's the way I write. And on occasions when I have tried to write some other way, for instance, in reading the book over and over, there were similarities between the way I write and the way Harper Lee does. She also enjoys long winding sentences with parenthetical subc clauses and things like that. So what I would do is I'd start to read her stuff out loud over and over again, kind of.

get into the music of it, and then I'd add a couple of words of my own at the end. And then after doing that for a while, I'd start to substitute my words in the middle. And before too long, the whole thing was mine. Okay. So there was a lawsuit. You're in the midst of writing again, and all of a sudden, you've got to present this to the literary executor who's been appointed by Harper Lee. Harper Lee passed away. an executor took over the estate.

We did not yet present it to the executor because it was a very early draft. We were still months away from starting rehearsal. But by this time, you've got investors, you've got a theater, you've got the bulk of the cast. We are, yes, we are happening. We're doing it. The executor got a hold of the script, was not a fan of it. What's the executor's name? Her name is Tanya Carter.

And what are her interests? What is she trying to protect? What is she trying to allow? It seemed from her complaint that she would have been happier with my first draft of the script. A kind of hagiographic production. Exactly. What was entirely unclear was legally was whether she was entitled to insist on changes to the script. There were two things in Scott Rudin's agreement with First Harper,

and then the estate which inherited that contract. One, Harper Lee had absolute unambiguous approval over who the playwright would be. She approved me, but the other thing was a clause that said that I would not depart from the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird nor alter any characters. What does that mean? The spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird. The spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird. I don't know what the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird is. Or it is I don't believe you do or anyone else.

Well, this is it. Can a judge, much less a literary critic, determine what the hell that means? No. There was a list of, it has a name. It's a list of complaints that she had. What were the complaints? Atticus would never take the Lord's name in vain. Atticus would never drink alcohol.

Atticus wouldn't have a rifle in his closet. There were more, but let me explain those. But those are the three that you agreed to. in the end in order to have it move forward. That's right. If that had been the case early on, it would not have been such a big deal, right? It would not have been such a big deal. There were other elements, and we're getting into tricky territory here because the other elements were fairly racially charged.

Okay. First, those three that I named, I just want to explain why they were there for the first place, in the first place, for anyone thinking, yeah, Atticus wouldn't do those things. Right. First of all, we're talking about fictional characters. And if you think asking a federal judge decide what the spirit of something is, asking a federal judge decide what a fictional person would or wouldn't do. This has brought the argument down there. That's fair enough. And on the three points, I get it.

But on the racial aspect, can you be a little more forthright about what complaints were in racial terms? Sure. One of the notes was a typical black maid in the South at this time would not talk to her employer that way. There's no such thing as a typical black maid, and plays aren't written about typical people doing typical things. Other notes were that Calpurnia felt a little too civil rightsy, but to my mind, let me put it that way. All of them added up to, I don't like the mouthy black maid. Okay. and in trying to settle this lawsuit,

there was not a chance in hell that I was going to aid and abet. What I felt was racism on the part of the person in charge of the legacy of the Kilimockenburg, of all things. So that battle was had... How did the executor back off on these issues? First of all, we were sued in Alabama. Scott then countersued to have the...

case moved to New York. A session was arranged. We wanted it to be in person to work these things out. There was a big snowstorm that day that closed the airport. So didn't Scott Rudin even suggest putting on the entire play before the judge, which is maybe unprecedented in the history of drama or jurisprudence? Yes. Then Scott Rudin said to the court, we will perform the play for you in your courtroom. And you can make these decisions. We thought if nothing else, We'll go in the record books as the only play ever to close on opening night in the Southern District. So this play is opening in the midst of one of the great American political crises of the last hundred years, which is to say a president who has displayed his own views on race and women and an attitude toward the law and all the rest and may well be impeached.

And inscribed in To Kill a Mockingbird is this moment to some degree. I wonder if you could describe how you go about doing that to what degree you can get away with it. How do you want it to do it? Which moment? Just the Trumpian moment. Oh. It's present. Yes, I see what you're talking about.

I can tell you that just about a week ago, I changed the line because of, you know, There was a concern on my part that there was one line toward the end of the first act, which felt a little bit like the production was kind of unzipping itself, and we were stepping out and saying that this is... Two on the nose. Exactly right. Can you say what it was? Since it's now gone?

Bob Ewell, the Klansman. I don't think this is a spoiler. Toward the end of the first act. He and his friends, it's on the eve of the trial. They come to the jailhouse. They come to Lynch, Tom Robinson. Atticus is there, and Bob Yule, on his way out, turns to Atticus and says, don't underestimate the rage that lies just beneath the surface of an ordinary person. That rage can turn itself into a revolution.

You know how I know, because it always does. And he walks off. The last bit is what you... No, I changed the whole line. Because you think the audience, by and large, is also in political sympathy with you. Yes, I feel like at that moment, not consciously, but on some level, they could see me typing that line as a way to make the play relevant. And the play is just doing a good enough job of that on its own. You're revising and you're revising.

Tell me about the work of going at it again and where you're. you got to. Okay. What I had to do was make the decision that I am not going to swaddle the book in bubble wrap and gently move it to a theater. That no longer was the goal going to be, how close could I come to preserving the novel on stage? I had to stop listening to all the voices that I knew were going to be online if you ruined my childhood and why did you change this and why did you do that? And Atticus, would never do this, and Scout would never do that. I was going to write a new play. So the play hasn't been updated in the sense that it still takes place in 1934 in Alabama. But its themes, I think, are very relevant today. Beginning with the fact that Atticus keeps saying, these are our friends and neighbors, these are our friends and neighbors, I know these people, I know these people.

Sure, do we have ignorant citizens that are stuck in the old ways? Of course. but does their bigotry extend so far as to send an obviously innocent man to the electric chair? No, I know these people, I'm telling you. And of course, through the course of the play, he discovers that he does not know these people. I think a lot of us, frankly on either end of the ideological spectrum, have had that same feeling for the last couple of years. I thought I knew these people, my fellow Americans. I had no idea that they felt this way, not just about Mexicans, not just about African Americans.

I had no idea that we were this misogynistic. Or I had no idea they saw me as an elitist who looks down at them, that that was the problem. So in other words, you relate a little bit to Atticus' cluelessness. Yes. I'll tell you a quick story of my own slight awakening, and I understand slight. I don't know why it took me so long to wake up to this. My favorite scene in the movie, the scene is in the book, too, and my father's favorite scene, my father is a boat was, he passed away two years ago, bow tie wearing, died in the wool,

liberal from Brooklyn. The trial is over. The courtroom has cleared out except. for everybody, but Atticus, who's, you know, putting papers back in his briefcase, and all around the balcony is what they called the colored section. All the African Americans in Macombeam standing silently out of respect for Atticus, and a scout is sitting there, and the Reverend Sykes says, Miss Jean-Louis, stand up, your daddy's passing as Atticus walks by. Always put a lump in my throat. It always made me cry. I know a lot of people who feel the same way. For some reason,

while I was working on this play, I don't know why. It just occurred to me to think about why is that my favorite scene of the play? What do I like about that so much? I mean, it's a movie scene. I get that. But why did I love that so much? And the answer was troubling to me, which was this. In reality, those people in the balcony should be outside on the streets rioting.

They should be burning the courthouse down, chanting no justice, no peace. but instead they're standing docile in gratitude to the white liberal man. It's sentimental white liberalism. It's a white savior moment in the thing. And I was in touch with the fact that that's what I want. It's what a lot of people want to be recognized as one of the good ones. Harper Lee was obviously a genius. And this novel is fantastic.

but it is worth looking at for things that are worth asking about. So in a sense, the work of adaptation is both a work of bringing one thing to another medium in another time, but it's also a work of looking at a work of art anew and even critically. You know, sometimes writers adapt their own work I did with a few good men. And even then when it was my own work, I think I was writing the movie a couple of years after I wrote the play. play, and I was able to look at it again and kind of write it better. Again, I want to be clear. I'm not making the case that I have written a better to kill a mockingbird. It's just that it's a different writer writing it. And I got to be me. Aaron Sorkin, thank you so much. Thank you very much,

David. I appreciate it. Aaron Sorkin wrote the new play based on To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and in a minute, we're going to make a new year. you very hungry. So grab a snack if you can and we'll be back with the writer Ocean Vuong. That's coming up. Now for today we've got one more story and it takes place in Queens at the end of the number seven subway line in Flushing. This is where the writer Ocean Vuong used to come for a taste of home. Vuong was born in Vietnam and immigrated as a boy living in a crowded apartment with a handful of relatives. As a young man he gained a reputation as a poet and now Vuong has just made what may be the fiction debut of the summer, a novel that went right on to the

New York Times bestseller list and got him appearances on all kinds of late night shows, and it's called On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I love that title. A while back, Ocean Vuong brought us here to one of his favorite places in the city, a food court in the lower level of a mall. We are in the New World cafeteria in Flushing, New York, and, um, we're in, um, we're in, um, My friends and I, my Asian friends and I, joke and say this is the real Chinatown. They call it the People's Republic of Flushing.

You imagine the food court of any American mall. You have, you know, Taco Bell, Wendy's, you know, except here it's like every region. There's kimchi, there's spicy foe. Dumplings are really great down there, my favorite. But I used to come here when I used to live in Flushing. It was the first place I lived in New York. It was 2008. I just asked around, I said, where can I go grocery shopping for Vietnamese food, you know, Asian food?

Just a bottle of fish sauce. I'm vegetarian except for fish sauce. I can't give my fish sauce. I lose my Vietnamese part. It's almost very much like life in Vietnam. There's little malls like this with little stalls. Here you have Korean food, Vietnamese. Chinese, and not to mention the different provinces and the politics around that.

I immigrated in 1990. I was two years old, and the space reminds me of my childhood. Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, living in a one-room, one-bedroom apartment with seven of my family members who initially immigrated with me, most of whom were women. and essentially the apartment, it was a small Vietnamese village. English was not spoken, and they were all illiterate. Down there, there's a noodle shop, these little stalls, you know. So when I grew up, I started reading books at the kitchen table. We didn't have a desk, the dining table, that was it.

When I started writing, that became my desk. And I would always be surrounded by, the women who cooked and the smells and the gossip, the stories that they would tell while they were cooking. And that's where you get the fresh basil and cilantro. They were all poets. They just didn't write it down, you know. And when I would read, my mother would come and look over my shoulder

and she'll say, Why, you know, gizond, don't know how you get, don't know, Menin'i see young kianwa? She said, and it looked just like ants. What do you get out of it? It looks like a bunch of dead ants. Don't your eyes hurt, right?

And I couldn't explain it to her. How do I explain to someone who was never read? And quite frankly, they do look like dead ants. But this for me, when I got here in 2008, I was just so happy to find this place. I couldn't believe it existed, you know, Because even in Hartford, there was only two Vietnamese, two Asian grocery stores. And that's where, you know, I remember my mom and I would shop as slowly as we can in the tiny little store,

just so we can hear the gossip between the aisles and, you know, check up on people back in the old country. And so we would shop very slowly. You see the beef over there is smoking up the steaks. and after a while you start smelling that and the ducks, you know, you can almost tell when the duck skin gets crispy at the rotisserie over there, it starts to change and all of a sudden the air gets richer

and a little more pungent when they put the garlic and ginger on. It's actually quite great to be here when it's really busy because you see all the energy and the shouting. People argue and gossip, you know, and I would just read here. I would just take out a book

you know, like this. And I would just pretend that I was back in that kitchen in Hartford with my family. You can sit here for hours without hearing a lick of English. Me, as a Vietnamese person, I don't understand completely what they're saying, but I've always felt, you know, as strange as an immigrant in America. But here it's like another level where You are estranged within people who are also estranged. Roland Bach, the French philosopher, says, if you do not have a language, you must steal it as men steal bread. And it's perfect.

In a way, I was sitting here borrowing and stealing language, trying to find a little piece of home. Ocean Vuong, talking about the New World Cafeteria in Queens. You can read some of Vuong's work at New Yorker.com. and his new novel is called On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous. I'm David Remnick. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get something to eat because just hearing about the crispy duck skin has made me a little hungry.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianne Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Andres O'Hara, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Mung Faye Chen. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.