WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 987 - Aaron Sorkin

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

It's very possible the only reason Aaron Sorkin became a writer is because he spent a lonely night in a friend's apartment where the only thing working was an electric typewriter. Aaron tells Marc how that fateful night put him on the path to writing his first play, A Few Good Men, and kicked off a writing career on Broadway, in film and on TV that has few rivals. Aaron also talks about his hero and mentor William Goldman, why his first try at adapting To Kill A Mockingbird was no good, and how his habit of writing high landed him in rehab. Plus, stories about the making of The West Wing, The Social Network and more. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace and SimpliSafe. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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conversation upstairs at the Schubert Theater in New York City, where To Kill a Mockingbird is currently running. We recorded it a while back. I did want to put this out there before you guys get to that. There's a lot of conversation about the screenwriter and novelist William Goldman, who was a mentor to Aaron Sorkin. He passed away. William Goldman passed away about a week after aaron and i had this conversation great writer great guy apparently according to aaron but i just wanted you to know that aaron was not being glib and not recognizing his passing

obviously it was because this was recorded a couple months ago. All right? You got that? I just need you to know that. For those of you who have been like, wow, he seems sort of kind of like he's just not acknowledging it. That's because it hadn't happened, the sad passing of Mr. Goldman. That said, I'm also beginning. I've just done. I don't know how it went yet because I'm recording this before I do it, but last night was the first of the series of shows.

I'll be doing a Dynasty typewriter here in Los Angeles. If you'd like to come, there's dates up on the website at WTFpod.com slash tour. I'm doing a series, I think I'm doing five, including last night. Let's see. Yeah. So it'll be February 10th, February 17th, February 24th and March 17th here in Los Angeles at a small theater called the Dynasty Typewriter. You can go to WTFpod.com slash tour to get tickets for those shows. All right? That's out there. Also, I guess I can go ahead and push the other dates. Wheeler Opera House, Aspen, Colorado, March 23rd, and Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado, on March 24th.

All right? Okay, all right, I'll be honest with you. All right. I've gotten myself just all strung out again. I'm just like, I'm doing nicotine lozenges, and I'm on about a gallon of black tea a day. I'm just like, and it's amazing because I'm sitting around and I'm wondering, why am I so anxious?

Why am I so jacked up all the time? Why am I so fucking aggravated? And I just refuse to acknowledge what's causing it. I mean, seriously, this is a, it's just patterns, man. It's patterns. I mean, I'm like, I'm a caffeine and nicotine sponge that I have to keep soaked all day, every day, all the time. I am a nicotine and caffeine sponge. I have figured out a way to ride a tea high, a loose tea high. And I was a while back, I think I told you about it.

I was smoking a few cigars. I don't do it socially. I don't do it for affectation. I do it for the buzz. And I was doing two or three a day. And I'm like, fuck this. I got to get back on the lozenges to get off the cigars. And now I'm just fucking soaked in it. Cellularly soaked nicotine and caffeine. But it takes me forever to realize that's it, man. That's it.

And that in and of itself is the beautiful denial mind inside the addict head. Anything to protect my desire to stay jacked, to protect my process. This is my process. To protect my process. This is my process. This is my job. Is to figure out how to stay jacked. And ride that high.

Ride that balance between caffeine and nicotine. Without coffee. So there's a lot of exotic teas going on. Many different kinds. Today I have had Earl Grey. Irish breakfast. Earl Grey creme. And now I'm doing English breakfast.

And these are two-cup glasses, 12-ounce motherfuckers. Oh, my God. Why do I keep doing this? It's just, you know, there's time in between. But, Jesus, I always get to this point. I mean, why keep doing it if it is clearly uncomfortable good question well at least that's consistent that must it's the consistency of the discomfort right but also it's the habit the ritual i mean tea like if you get into it it's got a lot of you know got you got certain strainers you got you know teaspoons how much

steam in the milk got an amazing frother i don't even make it anymore i think it's a norelco frother and it's the best thing so i'm frothing putting that in the tea it's just the habit the ritual man it's just the what it really is it's the discomfort that you experience without anything but then you add that layer of festering the festering festering for the relief and then the relief getting well and you just like you earn it you earn it by needing the shit. I mean, thankfully, it's just this shit, not other shit. But it's just, man, it's just round and round. Patterns of life. Circling the drain and I'm the drain.

The whole. Come on. I got to get it from the outside. I can't get it from the inside, right? I mean, do we really change? I mean, I'm 55 and I've been beating the shit out of myself lately. Do we really change? Can we really change?

I think yes. The bottom line is eventually we get tired, right? You get tired of the repetition, tired from age, tired from the distractions, and eventually something gives or we just give up. Then we change. Relax. Humbled. Or maybe you just don't do things anymore. We just, that's really, I think, the most obvious way that you change.

that's really, I think, the most obvious way that you change. We stop ourselves from taking the action, from saying the thing, from making the face. You stifle yourself, right? That's a learned thing. It's called behaving yourself. So that's changing, right? You can change by knowing your choices and making the right one

but see even that that can get exhausting right indecision then you're back to giving up tired letting go fuck man too thinky i just it's just like the longer you live the clearer it becomes that change is just sometimes this gradual thing and has nothing to do with anything but age and being humbled by the wheel of time which is good it's good let it happen be aware of it conserve that energy you have left for the last few laps and you you know, and, you know, sex and running and, and, uh, engaging in what your passions are. If you know what they are, I'm not yet. I don't want this to be a cynical dark thing. Cause I'm not always aware of that, man. I'm just going fast, going fast all the time. Yeah. I just, uh, I just backed my car.

It was rainy and I backed my car into another car. And I dented it. The plastic bumper just buckled in. Is that the word? It's dented, but it's plastic. Maybe it'll pop out. I don't know, man. It's just, I can't, I can't have nice things.

I turn everything to shit within months or days, even new boots. I fuck those up. I get shit on them somehow, scratch them up. New car. I just, I have no luck with that. I just have no luck with it. I don't know that I have, I don't know if I have generally,

I don't have good luck in general. I know that about myself. I think the only luck that I really had, to be honest with you, was the timing of this podcast. Oddly, Aaron Sorkin talks a bit about luck and about patronage and about it's just if you really think about your life i don't know what life you're living

but i know this from from both sides of it that uh when you think about people who have helped you along during the way why would they do that it's weird that most of the time the things that change your life are just people that choose to to to show up for you somehow or to to give you time to give you attention to give you some sort of um lesson but they don't have to do that it's weird because i experience it now people approach me for advice and you know i don't what to do that. It's weird because I experience it now. People approach me for advice and, you know, I don't, what do I know? What do I know fucking about anything? I know what I did. I know how, you know, what happened to me, but there's no system to it.

But, you know, if I think about the people when I was wandering through trying to figure out who I was, I mean, I had teachers that were impressive, but there was a guy who owned a bookstore, Gus, and I don't know why he chose to talk to me, but he did, and he changed my life. I don't know if it was effortless on his part or if I was annoying or something, but he didn't have to do it. And it's sort of like the like even meeting my producer

brendan mcdonald we did a radio show together and then we just it just we ended up working together now for for almost a decade on this show and then another you know bunch of years before that is the word is it fortuitous is that the Yeah, I think that's the word. If you really look at these moments in your life, I guess these can cut either way, really. They can be bad luck or good luck. I've had my share of both, but the fortuitous moments are usually relationships. They're meetings.

They're people that change your life. And they don't have to, but sometimes they do. You should have gratitude for that, you know? Because if you've got the goods, that doesn't necessarily mean it's enough. Whatever the goods you have. I'm not an advice guy, but I'll tell you, man. Yeah, you can do all the work. You can put all the work in and it might not manifest, man, because you need someone to go, let me help you out.

Let me give you a leg up. Or you need that weird bit of timing where you just sort of like you got in the pocket. The best luck we ever had was we put this podcast up when the landscape was pretty sparse it was still sort of the wild frontier there had been podcasts generation before and we got in the game and we kind of carved out our niche and it had an impact and it it inspired a lot of other people and and it just, that timing was good. The cosmic timing of my incredible bottoming out financially and emotionally just happened to coincide with the amazing opportunity of getting this thing out there. That was fortuitous.

But there's also those relationships like with my producer, Brendan, or people I've met in my life. A lot of times those are work relationships. A lot of times you have belief in each other and you want to work together. But sometimes there's just some people that drop into your life. They don't have to help you. They don't know that they're helping you. And they change the entire fucking direction of it thank those people if you know who they are and you still can so as i said before uh

i talked to aaron sorkin at the theater in new york the schubert theater was upstairs in a very sort of nice antique old room that i believe it was the schubert family it was the main guy's office or one of their the brother's apartment i i don't know but it was it was old-timey and and old new york and and it was very exciting to be in the structure and i didn't know what to really expect from aaron i i i always assume rarely do i make assumptions that are correct. I thought he would be intimidating. I thought he would be hard to sort of connect with, but it was not the case. He seemed to be very humble and very engaged in talking about this play, which is still obviously very relevant.

And certainly on this day, Martin Luther King's day, something to remember is that equality exists and that intolerance. That that's that's the thing, really, not just equality, but tolerance is necessary for democracy to function. You know, and whatever you think is going on in this country, whether you're like, it's never really been a democracy or you believe in it. The thing that seems to have gone by the wayside with this administration, with this monster and his type of, I don't even think, I don't think you can call it leadership. His example is that tolerance is no longer necessary. That you can say what you feel. If you feel hate and you feel racism or you feel sexism or you feel that you're being constricted by diversity,

you should just say it and act on those impulses. Tolerance of diversity is necessary. Tolerance of people in general is necessary for democracy to work. It just is. But now we live in an age where many people, too many, are tired of it. They've exhausted themselves of their ability to be tolerant, which is a learned thing. And it's a good thing to know and have and eventually feel. Look, this conversation with Aaron covers a little bit about the play, a little bit about his life, a little bit about politics here and there.

Obviously, the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird are totally relevant today. The play was terrific. And as I said earlier, we talked a lot in this conversation about William Goldman, who passed away about a week after we had this conversation. To Kill a Mockingbird starring Jeff Daniels and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on Harper Lee's book, is now playing on Broadway. I would highly recommend it.

And this is me talking to Aaron Sorkin. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, We'll be right back. other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

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This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. creative. The fucked up thing about it is like, is that you wake up and you look at that news and you have to realize like, I still have to have a fucking day. That's right.

You know, like what, what do I do now? Right. I said, here's, here day. That's right. You know, like, what do I do now? Right. Listen, here's my thing. Okay. One day, Trump is going to not be president. Yeah. Two years from now or four years from now, or rather six years from now or two weeks from now.

We're hoping that it doesn't change so drastically that he's there for much longer. What then do we do about the tens of millions of people who voted for him you know his whole campaign uh began with our worst problem is political correctness right and our worst problem is everybody's too polite um and and i understand that political correctness uh can be irritating, but that's probably the worst thing it is. And it's certainly a silly thing to base a presidential campaign on. But as long as it's on the table, isn't the worst form or the most dangerous form of political correctness right now not calling out America's epidemic of dumbness? America's epidemic of dumbness.

I know. That we have a huge, huge dumb problem that is a plain threat to national security. And the only thing I can think of to combat that is, well, we have to take teaching civics seriously. You know, it has to be taught the way we teach math. And I think that people are starting to catch on to this. Every time I hear the word strategy applied to anything that Donald Trump does, there is no strategy. He's not playing a

game of chess. It's exactly what it looks like. It's a man with an observable psychiatric disorder, which I also understand that we're not, because we're not doctors, we're not supposed to say it. Right. But, you know, I'm a parent. Every parent knows, isn't a doctor, and can say my kid is sick and can't go to school today. You don't need to be a doctor

to recognize when someone is bleeding or someone is limping, and you do not need to be a doctor to recognize that the man has a serious psychiatric disorder and is stupid as hell yeah so i don't know what we do about the dumb problem uh because that that's the last pc wall to come down right uh i i didn't like it when democrats jumped up and down on hillary cl Clinton for a basket of deplorables. Yeah. It was a self-evidently truthful statement.

Yeah. The problem with the dumb problem is now with conspiracy theories and the access to the internet and the sort of weird, almost spiritual satisfaction that they get from the closure that conspiracy theories provide them is that there's an empowered dumbness, is that now they're just putting those things in their head and they're like I got an answer that this false equivalency is masquerading as intelligence it's exactly right it's all about the the the unseen unnamed they yeah they do this they want want this idiot notion of the deep state.

The crazy conspiracies that are going to get somebody killed if they haven't already. A guy showed up to a pizza place with a gun to the synagogue. It's so funny. As a lefty guy who had a different they you know right that uh you know

you know that whatever my assumptions about deep state were you know when it started to be revealed that there wasn't one i was a little disappointed like i felt like all the weird cia conspiracies we had when we were kids it's sort of like, why aren't they doing something? Well, as a lefty who had that they, how do you feel when suddenly the right is accusing an organization like the FBI of being run by liberals? Yeah.

It's crazy. Yeah. Because we always thought the CIA, which were up to no good to begin with in making assassinations, restructuring foreign governments or whatnot, that I thought, well, if those are the same ones and they're pissed off about Trump, know taking and making assassinations restructuring uh foreign governments or whatnot that like i

thought well if those are the same ones and they're pissed off about trump they should do something about it and when they failed i'm like no fuck there's no they is there there's why are some people um i am i i grew up surrounded by people smarter than i am um where was this uh just up in scarzell in westchester everyone in my family uh was smarter than I am. Where was this? Just up in Scarzell in Westchester. Everyone in my family was smarter than I am. My circle of friends, they were smarter than I am. I mean, in measurable ways. I think I was the mascot or something in the group.

Right. And smart people don't make me feel dumb. I don't resent it. I enjoy it. I'm entertained resent it. I enjoy it. I'm entertained by it. And the characters, you know, some people, some writers write characters who are tougher than they are, cooler than they are. Yeah. Have superpowers where they don't.

Yeah. I write characters who are smarter than I am. Yeah. I always enjoy the sound of smart people arguing. Have you thought about it this way? That kind of thing. So what is the difference between people who admire smart people, who want the President of the United States to be smarter than they are, that gives them a feeling of security, and people who hate people who are smarter

than they are yeah um uh what's the difference between i want barack obama and i want donald trump well i think there's something about the people who trust their guts that there's a sort of like uh you know like like, I got good instincts. I know better for me. You know, we've always done it this way. You know, and it was just a matter of time before these smarties fucked everything up and we can finally show them how it's really done. Well, I think that you've put your finger on something.

I think, by the way, that I think that George W. Bush and Donald Trump did not get elected for the same reasons at all. I think with W., there was a guy you want to have a beer with factor. And I think with Donald Trump, first of all, the man was not elected because he tapped into the anxiety, the economic anxiety of the forgotten middle class. He has never mentioned ever the economic anxiety of the forgotten middle class. He only ever talks about himself or his enemies ever. Donald Trump, I think, simply was an excellent stick with which to poke liberals in the eye.

Oh, absolutely. And I think that it's not about hope. It's not about being uplifted. I think the nihilism at the core of it all, that there's enough people in this country for whatever reason have been shattered spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically, that they're at the core of it is like, fuck them. Let's get it over with. Well, there's nothing I can do about your debilitating inferiority complex. And I've decided it's no longer my problem. I think that there are millions and millions of people in this country who have a debilitating inferiority complex that all they can think is you think you're better than me. You think you're better than me. You look down your nose at us people in the flyover states. And if you think that way,

it will eat you alive and you will elect Donald Trump. No, no, I think that's absolutely right. I saw the show last night. I thought it was great. Thanks. Like, you know, it was one of those moments where they're there. It brought a lot of clarity to both sides of the struggle in a way. It was at least a bit humanizing of that side. Yeah. And that must have been a struggle. Listen, it wasn't a struggle to humanize the other side. The play doesn't forgive the other side. That's right. It's not apologizing for the other side. I guess that's right. It's putting a human face on the other side the play doesn't forgive the other side that's right it's

not apologizing for the other side i guess it's putting a human face yeah right but there's like there's moments in it that i was going to ask you about because you know i'm a smart guy but i don't i don't know that i've read the book and i'm not sure i saw the movie so i'm literally coming to the story through your show in a lot of ways. That was my first full experience of the story of Atticus and the story of To Kill a Mockingbird. Now, my question is how much, because I know obviously the timing of this is essential. I mean, you made a decision that this was the adaptation you were going to make because it spoke to what we're going through. Yes. And what was that process?

That process was this. First of all, it's interesting talking to somebody who didn't walk into the theater with any preconception of what was going to happen. None. Ask me what you need. Yeah, I'd love to. The process was this. And the process was this.

The first thing I did was, my first draft wasn't good at all. Because all I did was really was take the book, kind of take the best of the book, the all-star scenes, stand them up, and say it was a play. And it was a greatest hits album done by a cover band yeah uh the really the the best you could say about it was that it was harmless which is the i think the worst thing you could say about a play right uh and it was uh our producer scott rudin uh who gave me the following note atticus can't be Atticus for the entire play. He has to become Atticus. And I thought, that's obvious, of course.

I understand plays. The protagonist has to be put through something. He has to have a flaw and he has to be changed by the end of the play. How did Harper Lee get away with having Atticus be the same person for the entire book? How did Horton Foote, who wrote the movie, get away with having Gregory Peck be the same person for the entire movie? And the answer was, well, Atticus isn't the protagonist in the book or the movie. Scout, his daughter is. And Atticus is a kind of

father knows best, godlike figure. In the book and in the movie, Atticus is a kind of father knows best, godlike figure. In the book and in the movie, Atticus has the answers. In the play that I wrote, he struggles with the other questions. I wanted him to be the protagonist. Yeah. So I needed to give him a flaw. And what would that be? How do you take one of the most iconic characters in literature who has no flaws and give him a flaw and expect to get out alive?

Well, so I reread the book for the 19th time now. And something really struck me. Atticus keeps saying to his kids that there's goodness in everyone, that to really understand somebody, you've got to crawl around inside their skin for a while. He defends Bob Yule, who's a member of the Klan, by saying, you've got to understand he just lost his WPA job. He defends this woman, Mrs. Henry DuBose, who is just the most cruel kind of old lady racist. You've got to understand she's sick.

She stopped taking her morphine recently. He even tries to defend the jurors. They're neighbors. Yeah, they're our friends and neighbors. We've got to understand them. This is the deep south. It's going to take time, okay? It's just going to take time.

And I thought, I'm not sure I buy that. And I hate to say it, but it sounds an awful lot like there were fine people on both sides. And there, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take this thing that when we were taught the book in seventh, eighth, or ninth grade, that we were always taught was a virtue. And I'm going to challenge those beliefs in the play. taught was a virtue, and I'm going to challenge those beliefs in the play. And by the time Atticus gets to the end of the play, he is going to come to the point where he realizes that what he considers, what you and I might consider, a kind of liberal high-mindedness that we're going to understand everyone um is bullshit uh and um and there are sometimes when times when you just have to roll up your sleeves and fight

uh and it was just serendipitous that we have this president um uh right now you work you were start you start working on this before trump i started working on it before trump and when trump was uh not before he started running before he was inaugurated yeah um i and but it was definitely this new world that we're living in that fueled this play this classic piece of literature um where there is no event that happens in the play that doesn't happen in the book. I haven't made up new events. We just look at it a different way and we I just, I press on different things.

Yeah, I mean, because I found that because I've been dealing with some of that myself maybe you have as well. The idea that and it's a liberal idea, maybe not it might even be, I think it's's a liberal idea, maybe not. It might even be, I think it's probably a Christian idea, that there is good in everybody.

Because you start to think, that may be true, but if it's so easy to brainwash so many people simultaneously. Yes. Listen, I believe that there's no such thing as a baby who's born bad. Right. I think that our instincts are good. Our instincts might lean toward greed. Yeah. Probably.

Seven deadlies. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. But not evil. Right. Right. Unless you commit to them shamelessly. Mm-hmm. They're supposed to be there as a check. Right. One of the checks on humanity

uh now listen yeah we you got to take the bitter with the better um uh because we liberals we we want people for instance to understand that uh a lot of crime is the product of poverty, okay? And there are plenty of people who say, I don't need to understand anything. They committed a crime, they go to jail forever or just kill them, okay? But you and I, we want people to understand there's a problem that caused this that wasn't their fault. So we ought to be able to say the same thing about every single person who voted for Donald Trump.

But I have a hard time doing that. I need someone to help me get there. Well, there's a problem of rationalization, justification, you know, apologize. Like, I've gotten to the point where on stage I say, like, I think at this point, if there's still people in your family that are somehow still supporting this for whatever reason, they're shitty people. Yeah, I agree with that. And they are shitty people. And like I said, it's generally the motivation behind it. behind it and i think listen i think everything you need to learn about why someone is drawn to donald trump yeah can be learned you know it doesn't even need to be five minutes three minutes

reading the comment section at breitbart okay any comment section get a full education of uh of the emotion behind this donald Trump hates the people they hate. He hates me and you. They hate me and you. Donald Trump makes us crazy. They're all for that. But then psychologically and intellectually, the place the liberal goes in a way is like,

well, they hate themselves, and we haven't really addressed that. Psychologically, the place the liberal goes is the economic anxiety um that the coastal elites don't understand the shrinking middle class yes i understand it um perfectly i'm capable of empathy without the experience i i get it yeah but then i ask why isn't bernie sanders the president of the United States? He was the one talking about the shrinking middle class. It's got nothing to do with that.

It was entirely emotional. There's something else in the play. They also think, a lot of them think like, well, I can be Donald Trump. Yeah, that's maddening as well. And this notion of if he's able, yes, if he's able to be a billionaire, he can make me a billionaire too. If he's able to create a successful company, he can run the country. One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The United States is not a private family company. What were you going to say about the play?

I was going to say this about the play. Suddenly, once I kind of turned this corner, oh, here's a new way to dramatize this story. Suddenly, it was like Harper Lee throughout the book was foreseeing the future and leaving these clues to stuff. Boo Radley, who's an incredibly important character, though we never see him until the very end of the play, but he's talked about a lot. Boo Radley, everybody in town knows his name. Everybody is terrified of him. He lives in a kind of haunted house. He's got this mysterious history, which is mostly rumor. But she says in her description of Boo Radley, one of the things

that Harper Lee said, and it's in the play is that from time to time these crimes would be committed uh in town like terrible crimes like chickens would be mutilated yeah uh and things like that and anytime it would happen harper lee says people would always blame boo radley even when it would be proven that it was Crazy Carl who did it, people would still say it was Boo Radley. Well, that sounded exactly to me like immigrants. That even when we're told that an undocumented immigrant is considerably less likely to commit a crime than someone who's born here, we are still told to be afraid of these immigrants because they're committing these crimes, that the facts just don't matter. So I thought, you know, my fear was, will this thing be as relevant in 2018 as it was in 1960?

Because we've come a long way in 58 years. I think it's more relevant now than it's ever been. it's more relevant now than it's ever been yeah it's killing my and in in how much did you in the cross-examination scenes where where i don't know if it's cross-examination or just the initial questioning that you know when when um at when jeff daniels is atticus is questioning you will now did you how much of that dialogue is informed by what exactly's happening now. Did you add the Semitic stuff? Did you add... I added the Semitic stuff. Like you might have a little Jew in you, that kind of stuff. I might have a little Jew in you is the glasses of the condescension, that kind of thing. I noticed we're both wearing the same glasses. Oh, not today.

I added that in. I'm not sure why exactly it was important to me it might be because I felt like I want to throw my lot in with the marginalized people in this no I don't think it's off I think it's part of historical

stereotyping that feeds this machine my friend the novelist Sam Whipside, we had a conversation. He's a very brilliant guy, funny guy. But we had the same realization. Like I didn't quite understand why those guys at Charlottesville were saying the Jews will not replace us.

Is that because they think that the sort of liberal, democratic, global order is about taking away all national boundaries. And so it's a puppet master thing you know and i never put that together growing up um in scarsdale in scarsdale uh and then i went to school in upstate new york and i moved here uh to manhattan to to start my life as a struggling writer movies took me to la um uh but i'm thrilled to be back. Always a writer? When I was in high school, I thought I was going to be an actor. Yeah.

And for me, writing was just a chore to be gotten through for a school assignment. I'd never written for pleasure before. Right. And then it was right after I got out of college, I came to New York. I was living in a tiny, tiny very very tiny studio apartment with my ex-girlfriend i don't mean that she's my ex-girlfriend now i mean she was my ex-girlfriend then right dating my best friend but for 250 a month i could sleep on her futon uh and quietly suffer yeah well you listen to them fuck in the other room they happily they did that at his place okay um one weekend

yeah one friday a friend of mine i went to high school with had with him his grandfather's semi-automatic typewriter um this was literally weeks before the mac was introduced a computer just called the macintosh right the 127 the little 128 the little... It was 128K, yes. I had one, yeah. Greeting cards have more power than this thing had, but we thought it... It's amazing. Yeah. Cut and paste was just amazing. Man, if you're a writer, cut and paste is fantastic. That's all you needed.

Look, just the delete key. Before that, it was either whiteout or that tape. Anyway, he had his grandfather's semi-automatic typewriter, which electric keys and a manual return he was going out of town with his girlfriend he didn't want to schlep it with him he asked me if i could hang on to it my roommate ex-girlfriend she was out of town for the weekend and it was one of these friday nights in new york that everybody has experienced it just feels like

everybody you know has been invited to a party you haven't been invited to. I didn't have $3 in my pocket. And for some reason, nothing in this tiny apartment that requires electricity was working. Not the television, not the stereo. The only thing that was working was this semi-automatic typewriter. And I stuck a piece of paper in it and began for the first time ever writing dialogue which I my parents took me to plays all the time growing up I loved the sound of dialogue it sounded like music but was it the dialogue of a guy sitting alone full of resentment no not at all it was the dialogue of a of a guy who loves the sound of dialogue doesn't have a story to tell. The reason that happened is because,

like I said, thankfully, my parents took me to see plays all the time. Lots of times they took me to see plays that I was just too young to understand, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf when I was nine. I still can't understand it. I can understand most of it now because I've read it so many times

and I love it so much. But back then it was just, it sounded like music to me like these these this phenomenal phrasing these words and the musicians the actors right they were incredible because i didn't understand it plot for me has always kind of been this necessary intrusion on what i wanted to do like for yeah i just i just want to do the talking but I know I need a plot in order to do that. So I stuck the piece of paper in the typewriter, and I started writing dialogue, and I loved it, and I feel like that night has never ended. Right. And what were you heading towards with the Jew thing?

Here's what I was heading toward with the Jew thing. Growing up and hearing, always hearing the cliche of the Jews run everything and the problem is historically the problem being the Jews, Jews getting run out from everywhere. My grandparents got chased out of Russia to here. I thought that America was 50% Jewish. I was shocked when I found out that we're like 3.1% or something. Yes, I understand that the entertainment industry is, that most of the leaders in the entertainment industry are Jewish, that most of the leaders in the banking industry are Jewish, and in media are Jewish, but those things didn't happen. Nobody stormed the gates with guns um uh broadway was founded by

two jews from syracuse who didn't have 10 cents in their pocket who said you know if you put two theaters next to each other they'll help each other uh sell tickets and and uh so i've i've never quite i to this day will once i get comfortable enough with someone who's Jewish and smarter than I am, I'll say, I don't get it. Why do they hate us? I don't really understand. This Jews will not replace us thing? There are like six of us. What are you afraid of?

We're running everything, Aaron. And we're frightened of guns. So honestly, I'd be afraid of other people. I wouldn't be afraid of us. Well, they think we're the man behind the curtain. Of course. How Jewish were you growing up? Not.

I have no religious education at all. I have a brother. And so the boys in my family on our 13th birthday, we'd have a big party. But in seventh grade, when pretty much every Saturday you're going to a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah where I grew up, it was just when I was starting to get my love of theater. And I would go to these bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs and really regret that I wasn't having a bar mitzvah. For the speech? For the speech, for the singing, for the audience. And so about six weeks before my 13th birthday,

I opened the local phone book and called the local rabbi. I said, Rabbi, I'm turning 13 in six weeks. I'd like you to teach me the Torah. And he said, kid, I can't teach you the Torah in six weeks. And I said, no, that's okay. I have a very good ear. You can say it into a tape recorder. He said said i don't think that's the point of being bart mitsubishi um uh so i have it actually is the point uh is it in middle class american judaism

what do i got to learn i don't need to know what it means i guess so i want to sing it right but yeah um i do come from a long line of people who got their ass kicked for being Jewish. So I stand proudly with them. In what way? Like just what, your father, your grandfather? Yeah. Going back to Russia, my father fought in World War II. And there are a lot of us i am uh a a cultural jew a jew for the reasons i just told you i have no relationship with god yeah me neither at all i i don't believe things that

defy the physical laws of the universe no i find that if you fill your days with a lot of compulsive behavior you don't have to worry about spiritual matters until about an hour before bed. And if you get to bed in a half hour, you're good. That's right. And the last thing I wanted to... Listen, I know genuine people of faith. I do. And I have enormous respect for them. And I love the conversations that I have with them and there are times when I wish I had what they had just like there are times when I wish I got from a cup of coffee what other people get from a cup of coffee when I hear people say you know once I've had that first cup of coffee in the morning I'm ready to go I drink a cup of coffee there's simply no difference

in the before and after I need to drink two pots of coffee. And then now I'm back on nicotine lozenges. So I have to have four of these. So by 11 in the morning, I'm exhausted. I imagine. So true men and women of faith, I have enormous admiration for them. I have nothing but contempt for posers when it comes to that. Yeah. Well, there's actually, when you're around those people, and I think it's part of the gig, is that you feel a sense of grounded spiritual peace of mind.

Yes. That there's an acceptance of the things that are very hard to accept about being mortal. Not because you think you're going somewhere else. It's just that's the way it is, and we're here to do good if we can. Right. They say that in the play. Yeah, absolutely. It's funny because I tend to, not always, maybe not even often,

but from time to time, I will write about religion. You know, Atticus in the play is devout, and the play ends with a quote from the Bible. Martin Sheen's character on The West Wing, Bartlett, a devout Catholic. Yeah. In real life, too, I think. Yes, indeed. The character almost went to the seminary, but he met Stockard Channing and fell in love.

that but for the Ten Commandments, I would be fine committing murder or stealing or coveting my neighbor's wife is insane to me. Yeah. Well, but, you know, it's weird that now, like you see the seven deadly sins in the Ten Commandments as being some sort of checks on, you know, with the commandment societal civilization and with the seven deadly sins,

personal moral decency, right? I don't know, but where I go sometimes now is the Rwanda model, where what does it take to trigger half a population and just start killing the other half because they think it's the right thing to do? So I think that's really buttressing. It so i i think that that's what that's really buttressing it's not that we would just innately start you know murdering people but you know

hopefully if it came down to it it would be some sort of check on our behavior societally and personally and i i would imagine that a couple of thousand years ago that was important okay uh no i mean it might be important again aaron it might be important okay there's a presidential alert now there's there sure is but i i guess here's what it comes down to for me um i'm not arguing no i know you're not i don't need to believe in the divinity of jesus christ to believe in the morality of jesus. And not knowing anything from anything, what I always imagined happened was that about 2,000 years ago,

a Martin Luther King-type figure lived in Palestine and had a lot of followers. And a couple of centuries later, in order to continue teaching to an uncivilized world, to a barbaric world, what this man was teaching, they added some magic to it. Yeah, Jewish writer rooms. Jewish writer's rooms.

And they added consequences. They added reward for good behavior and punishment for bad behavior. But you deal with this on a personal level. You deal with the parameters of individual morality in a lot of the stuff that you deal with. In a lot of the stuff that you create and that you write.

Even if it's mundane or whether it's big. Right. It tends not to be about the difference between good and bad as the difference between good and great. Right. Usually it's about a good person and a capable person,

somebody you'd enjoy having dinner with. Yeah. We're not talking about Scrooge turning into a good guy overnight after he's been visited by three ghosts. But that person generally has to put um comfort on the line or popularity on the line uh he's got to take some sort of he or she's got to take some sort of risk uh to become a great person it's usually about um how do you behave when nobody's looking uh doing the right thing when nobody's looking um uh that kind of thing i enjoy those things i i have uh i think ever since i read donkey hoodie yeah oh yeah it's a great one

so so you get out you get down to new york you give up the acting dream you get this electric going and you know what do you what are your what are your role models? What are your models for? Because you're writing initially plays. Yeah. The first play I wrote was A Few Good Men. My older sister got out of law school, wanted to get trial experience right away. And we had been taught public service is important. I'm the only one in my family who didn't heed that,

and I feel bad about that. You were taught that by your parents? Yeah. What did your dad do? Well, my dad, everybody's a lawyer except my mother and myself. My mother taught public school here in New York for 40 years. She taught fourth grade.

My father, after he got out of World War II, my father really is the American story. His parents were chased here. He was a tailor. She was a seamstress, my grandparents. He and his friends didn't like the sweatshop working conditions that she and her friends were working in. And they formed something called Workman's Circle, which would later become the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. And it was really easy because being a Russian-Jewish union organizer back then was very popular.

I mean, he got his head beaten a lot. They had a son and a daughter. The son is my father. When he turned 18, he enlisted in the army. He went to— he lived in Brooklyn he went to a high school for smart kids who were poor, a public school and they took him

and right away they put him in counterintelligence and he served in both theaters in Europe and the Pacific came back, went to college and law school on the GI Bill so now the taxpayer has made an investment in my father, four years of college, three years in law school. Here's where that investment went.

He and my mother would have three kids. My parents were able to pay for college and law school for two of them all on their own. Those three kids have five kids, all of whom are going to college. We're all taxpayers now. That investment has, they went from lower middle class to upper middle class in one generation. That's what government can do. The idea that government is the problem, the smaller government is, the better, that government is intrusion is nonsense. Government is a place where we can all come together. That's what government can do.

So they had all these kids and all this taxpayer money coming in, but then they had you, the one they had to worry about. Then they had the one they had to worry about, the one who said he wanted to be a ventriloquist. Is that where that started? Do you have a doll? No, mom, dad, I want to be a playwright. Look, they were incredibly supportive. They want to be a playwright. They were incredibly supportive. They had to be terrified. But my sister, when she got out of law school,

joined the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. And one day she called me. She said, you're never going to believe where I'm going tomorrow. We have a Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This was way before it was the world's most famous prison. And she told me this story. And it gave me an idea and I wrote my first play and it was a one in a million thing. I was 26 years old. The play has 22 people in it. You can only produce it in a Broadway theater. It's too big to do it anywhere else.

Legendary producers came along to do it. A fellow who died just a few years ago named Robert Whitehead was the lead producer. Bob Whitehead produced the Broadway debuts of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, and in a stunning anticlimax, me. You did all right. Then I was brought out to L.A. to do the movie.

Yeah. This is a familiar story. I've only ever considered myself a playwright. I never thought about writing movies or television shows. I watched movies and television shows. You didn't really think about it ever? Ever. You liked the theater. I loved the theater. I didn't have anything against movies and television shows. I watched movies and television shows. You didn't really think about it ever? Ever. You liked the theater?

I loved the theater. I didn't have anything against movies and television shows. Yeah. I just, for some reason, it wasn't until I saw the movie Broadcast News that Jim Brooks wrote and directed, where I said, hey, I love the writing in this movie.

I'd like to do that too. I wish I'd written this. So I went out to L.A. to do the movie of A Few Good Men, and I was going to come right back and write my next play. The coming right back and writing my next play was 14 years later. I stayed in L.A., did another two movies. Then I had an idea that my agent said, you know, I think that's a television series.

And then I did several of them. So when you got to LA, you know, with this play and, you know, you were aligned with Castle Rock, with the production company. Now, that must have been where the education began, you know, in terms of like, well, this is a new form. I did this one thing, but you didn't have a history of storytelling. No, I didn't.

And all my friends who do what I do, they're all the ones who at camp, when you're around the campfire, I got a million of them. They're the ones telling the stories. I'm not like that. I don't have a million of them. What'd you do around the campfire? Listen to other people's stories. So yes, my education began there. It was on the job training. How'd that manifest? First of all, again, I got very lucky. And the phrase, first of all again I got very lucky and the phrase I got very lucky could apply to kind of every day of my life

a hero of mine William Goldman Bill Goldman won the Academy Award for incredible screenwriter incredible novelist and a great writer of non-fiction too I would recommend and I don't get a royalty from this I would

recommend for anybody, not just people in the movie business, anybody, the book Adventures in the Screen Trade. You'll read it in two nights. You won't want to put it down. A book called The Season, which explores all of Broadway

through one season, the 1968-69 Broadway season. And he also has a great book called Hype and Glory. In one year, he was a judge at both the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America pageant. And he uses that as two tent poles, or hammock poles, I guess, to talk about his divorce.

That's great. It sounds like a Terry Southern book. Yes. Anyway, Bill Goldman decided to take me under his wing how do you like that so he read the play of The Good Man Before

it went into rehearsal and he said I think you can write movies too do everything I tell you to do and I've obeyed that ever since he's still very much in my life he is yeah

he wrote All the President's Men He wrote All the President's Men, Marathon Man. He wrote All the President's Men, he wrote Marathon Man, he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. If that's all he had done is write Butch Cassidy

and the Sundance Kid. That would have been enough. What did we say? Diana. It would have been sufficient. So how does he, so this guy, he's what,

30 years older than you? Yeah. Or so? Yeah. And he just, he's obviously a worker. It doesn't seem like he has much time. He is a worker.

By the way, we didn't mention one title, The Princess Bride. Oh, right. Of course. And if you, again, I'm not in business with William Goldman. No, I get it. No, yeah. If you like the movie, The Princess Bride, this second, get the book. The book is, it is such a wonderful ride.

So he's brought in by Castle Rock? Castle Rock. The production company. I've been told lately that I don't explain things enough. At the time, it was actually a small studio, strictly speaking. With Glenn, what's his name? Paddock? Yeah, that's right. That's a name for the past yeah the the the flagship of castle rock was rob reiner yeah

was one of the owners castle rock had bought a pitch uh someone came in and pitched them a story based on a rumor yeah that had been going around bever Hills. That a Beverly Hills surgeon had conspired with a young woman to defraud a medical malpractice insurance company. That he was going to operate on her, screw up the operation on purpose in some non-life-threatening

way. He was going to be sued for $30 million and they were going to split the money. Well, I don't know if the rumor is true or not, but it's certainly the beginning of a great thriller. I love that pitch. Castle Rock bought the pitch. It didn't work out with them.

They bought the pitch and they hired him to write the screenplay. It didn't work out. So they went to Bill Goldman, with whom they had a relationship because he had written Misery, he had written The Princess Bride for them, and they said, start all over with this pitch.

Yeah. A surgeon and a woman conspire. And he said, this sounds great to me. I don't have time to do it. But here's what you should do. Identify some young, meaning cheap, some young writer who you think I'll like. And I will guide that writer through the process. And my play script, A Few Good Men,

was kind of being passed around. People were reading it and they identified me. And my phone rang one day and my hero was on the other end. Aaron, this is Bill Goldman. You want to have lunch tomorrow? I said, sure. And I put on the one suit that I owned.

I met him at the restaurant he told me to meet him at on the Upper East Side. I walked in. And I'm telling you, before I even sat down, he said, I don't think this is going to work out. Great opening line. Yeah, and my heart sank. And he said, I think you are a very talented young writer, but

you've never written a screenplay. You've never even written a bad TV pilot. I don't think we're going to have a vocabulary together. You're not bitter enough yet. You haven't dealt with it. And I thought, well together you're not bitter enough yet you haven't right um and i thought well what do i do now i mean they haven't even brought the bread am i supposed to stay here i don't know what to do and all i could think of was to say was listen i can't

pretend i have more experience than i do but maybe i can convince you that i don't need the kind of experience that you're talking about yeah and by the end of the lunch having bonded uh over our mutual lower back problems uh-huh uh he reached his hand across the table and said i'll tell you what we got a deal okay um now that movie did not turn out the way i i'd hope it's not it's not my finest hour what movie is movie called malice with nicole kidman Alec Baldwin. But while all that was happening, the play had opened on Broadway, A Few Good Men. And Rob Reiner came to see it and decided he's going to direct it. And then Nicole Kidman came to see it. And she called her then husband, Tom Cruise, and said, you should really come to this theater. There's a part I think you're

going to want to play. And it all came together very quickly so now you got to write the movie and so yes and so i'm the first thing i did uh when i had to write the movie i went out and i bought a screenplay format book yeah screenplays tend to are are format intensive like sid field's book or just a it wasn't even sid field's book or just a basic? It wasn't even Sid Field's book. It was just here's what screenplay formatting is. And it took me like a week to write two pages because I'm constantly dealing with the margins. The actual format? The actual format. So I picked up Bill's. This was way before Final Draft.

I pick up Bill's screenplay, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he ignores all the format rules. He comes face to face with the fact that many screenplays, or at least the way screenplays used to be written, are unreadable because they're not written to be read. They are a set of instructions for the making of a movie. And Bill decided, that's not good enough for me. I want the person who reads this, not just George Roy Hill in directing, I want the person who reads this, I want them to come as close as possible

to the experience of watching this movie. So he makes the format much simpler. It flows. He writes stage directions that are fun. I mean, you really get into the ride um uh and i called him and i basically said are you allowed to do this or do you have to be you to do this like can i do this yeah and he said throw out that format book don't even keep it uh on your shelf yeah write the experience you want the reader to have. It's going to be the only time this is read.

It's going to be performed after that. But write the experience for the director, for the actors, for the studio that you want people to have in the theater. Yeah. Wow. And that's what I've done ever since. And that was the big lesson. That was a big lesson. There have been many big lessons.

Some of them are just shut up. Yeah. You know, he's a good disciplinarian too and some of them have been a strong pat on the back and and some of them about story a lot of them about story and a lot of them simply by example uh you know um but he is by the way i'm not the only person who who has this relationship with Bill, whether he knows the writer or not. Here's what I mean to say. There are a number of us that Bill has taken under his wing. Tony Gilroy, for instance.

Scott Frank. Really fine writers that Bill has coached up. fine writers that Bill has coached up, but many, many more writers that Bill has never met, that he doesn't know, have looked at. He's very much the dean of American screenwriting. Now, when did you decide,

because it's interesting that your passion started in theater and now you're back doing this show yeah but there was some a point where you must have realized that that people don't have to necessarily talk like people talk right um it's never been a goal of mine to have characters talk the way people talk. There are writers who, in visual art, the equivalent would be photorealism, I guess. A painter whose goal is to get it to look like a photograph right um uh and so there are writers who write dialogue that's meant to be photorealism that that's meant to sound exactly like the way people talk and it's not what i do i i do like writing verbal hiccups yeah and and stuttering i i like scripting every sound the actor makes right uh that kind of thing yeah um but last year i i um i directed for the first time i know it's great thank you very much yeah uh we were shooting a scene one day with jessica

chastain yeah uh and molly's game it's molly's game yeah and uh jeez i'm trying to think of the line now the way it's it's printed in the script, the line is, the line is, I was a brat, okay? But the way it's printed in the script is I, I, I, I, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, was a brat, okay? In other words, it's,

I was a brat. Okay? In other words, it's, I was a brat. And on the first take, Jessica did it, and she was wonderful, but I told her there are five I's, and I think you're doing four. And she laughed, but then she did it with five I's, and it was, I write like that. I'm not trying to get closer to the way someone talks.

But you expect that out of the actor too. You don't, you know, you want them to honor the. I do, but I don't need the actor is, wants to do it that way. They're doing it on their own and they know when. And it's not because what I'm writing is so good, they want to do it that way it's just that they're recognizing that just like the dialogue when i was going to see the plays and still when i go to see plays sounds like music to me it's it's written that way and in music there

are strict rules like if something is in four four time there have to be four beats in a measure there can't be three there can't be five um It works out with comedy too, in a way. Of course it does. You know exactly where a pause has to go, exactly where a so anyway has to go. Eventually, I know. After a lot of work. But you started out with an instinct, right?

Right, of course. And just an instinct of, if I take a sip of water right here, that's going to give them the opportunity to laugh, and it's putting a button on the punchline without going ding, ding. It's a more sophisticated rim shot. You take that instinct,

and years and years and years of honing it at 2am at Catch a Rising Star is what gets you where you are right but like recently with the Steve Jobs movie you know that there was some you know criticism that like this isn't really what happened and I was the one who said you know I was always sort of like

who gives a fuck and the thing that I the analogy I make to it is that that there is a specific a particular way uh there was a way that sorkin dialogue works right and and it for me the analogy was like 1930s movies it's yeah i'm definitely influenced by 1930s do you know what i mean like hepern and and carrie Grant, it's a banter. Steve Jobs, you mentioned that. And if you were to ask Steve Wozniak,

for instance, he would tell you no, that conversation between Woz and Jobs never took place, but a hundred conversations like that took place. I say to people all the time,

it's meant to be a painting. It's not meant to be a photograph. I would never, because I've written nonfiction a lot now, I would never do something that damages someone. I'll give you an example from the social network and Mark Zuckerberg. The movie begins with Mark

on what appears to be a second or third date with a woman who was played by Rudy Mara. And it's not going well. This is going to be the last date they have for sure. She says something kind of mean to him, uh, at the end, after he has said a number of mean things to her, he goes back to his dorm room. And at that point, when he walks into his dorm room, he begins blogging. And I have, I'm writing this movie.

I have his blog post, uh, from that night, uh, a night in which he gets drunk, hacks into the Facebooks or student directories, the Facebooks of the different houses or dorms at Harvard and comes up with this website called FaceMash which compares two women

side by side who's hotter. Sort of a hot or not thing. And he tells us how he's doing it. I'm going to use JavaScript here and do that. So I knew I wanted to start the movie with what preceded that because his blog post begins

in the movie I call her Erica. I'm not going to say who the person is in real life. I'll just call her Erica. The blog post begins Erica Albright is a bitch. So I wanted to write what caused him to say that what caused him to come up with this kind of misogynistic website I have

walk into the dorm room stage direction screen direction calls for we're just on the laptop as he walks by powers up the laptop walks out of the frame and he tells us that he's drunk as he's blogging. Comes back in the frame, puts a glass down,

ice goes in the glass, vodka goes in the glass, orange juice goes in that. And over this, we're hearing the voiceover from the blog post. Well, a few weeks before shooting started, we found out that he was actually drinking beer that night. In fact, we knew he was drinking Bex. And David Fincher, the director, I love,

said, Aaron, you know, it's going to have to be beer. It's going to have to be Bex, not the screwdriver that you called for. And I begged him, please, the screwdriver is so much more cinematic with the ice and the stuff. Yeah. There's a story in the glass. There's a story in the glass.

There's a story in the glass. And it reads as drinking to get drunk as opposed to a college kid just thirsty. Right. So I'm drinking a beer. What does it matter? Why the authenticity? Just for authenticity's sake, we're not doing... I would never have him shooting up instead of drinking.

That's entirely different. Right. But we know that he's drunk. Authenticity's sake, we're not doing, I would never have him shooting up instead of drinking. That's entirely different. Right. But we know that he's drunk. What does it matter what he's getting drunk on? We're making a movie. Let's do the most cinematic thing possible. I respect David.

If you watch the movie, you'll see it's a beer. I mean, it was inevitable he was going to win that argument. But that's the kind of, when I say that my fidelity is to the story and not to the truth, that's what I'm talking about. Not I would make up. No, I get it. I get it.

It's something I made a note here. It said filling the gaps of the mundane. Right. That like, yeah, people do not live their lives in a narrative right they don't live their lives in a series of scenes they don't speak in dialogue um uh that far less interesting yeah um uh that's why we go to the movies that's why we watch television that's why we listen to music and it's mostly it's why we go to the theater um get what Lily Tomlin calls the goosebump experience.

Well, what is it with the obsession, too, also, thematically, if I'm going to look at everything, of the sort of pulling back the curtain? Whether it's politics or a sports show or the newsroom or Saturday Night Live or even Facebook to some degree given the reality of facebook you know i've i've been asked that question before that you know why do you uh uh like to go behind the scenes and i always jobs movie too i always try to come up with an answer for it and it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me doesn't everything do that i mean aren't we behind the scenes in an emergency room at a hospital drama or behind the scenes of the police precinct at a cop drama i guess so or behind the scenes in somebody's living room uh in a family drama i guess i'm asking i'm finally asking all these years

what's the question um how is what i'm doing um i'm really not being defensive i'm honestly asking in what way am i going behind the scenes that's standing out? I'll tell you. Is that, you know, what's being presented to us in front of the scenes of, say, a newsroom or the White House. I get it.

That's being presented as a reality. I get it. Right. Now I understand. Actually, I appreciate that. I do like writing about places where there is a facade and a behind the facade. And I would say at the West Wing in the writer's room that we're doing a show about the two minutes before and after what we see on CNN. Right.

Because that stuff should come into question. What did we just see? Why did we just see it? And what's the integrity of it? Right. And I always, listen, the West Wing, it was a workplace drama that took place at a very interesting, glamorous workplace where a lot of interesting things can happen. Drama, we know, is friction. It's intention and obstacle the kind of friction i generally write about is is ideas yeah crashing into each other the impetus behind the west wing

was uh that generally in pop culture uh when we write about our leaders our elected leaders they're either machiavellian or they're adults uh i am a huge fan both of veep and house of cards on one they're dolts uh on the other they're machiavellian a little machiavellian on uh on veep as well machiavellian dolts yeah um but i want to be clear yeah those are two brilliant shows oh yeah great yeah brilliantly written and performed and produced. So that was the impetus behind the West Wing. And so I wanted to do a show where they were seen as very competent people who they were going to slip on banana peels from time to time. But we understood they got up in the morning wanting to do the right right thing uh okay trying to work hard to do the right thing they're going

to lose as much as they were going to win but they were going to try to do the right thing my favorite moments always on the show was when we got to see that the president is a guy with a temp job, that he's a father, that he's a husband, that he's a person. Usually. Usually. Yes, usually. So, you know, those moments when he's having a husband-wife argument, I would like, or when he's being a dad to his kid. Or just when he would step out on the portico and have a cigarette because his day involved putting people in harm's way or deciding what fatal disease research money should go to.

That kind of thing. I always liked those moments where you pull the curtain back. Yeah, the humanity. And you get to see what's behind the facade. You're right. Now I understand the question. Where were you 20 years ago when I just couldn't understand the question? I did the same thing with a cable newscast with the newsroom.

Same thing with an SNL-type show or a sports center-type show. And I've done the same thing in movies. Yeah. And the thing is that you heighten it, too. I mean, you explore the ideas of who these people are as people behind the facade of whatever it is they're manufacturing

as information or entertainment or whatever and elevate that. I enjoy writing very idealistically and romantically. Yeah, no, it's great. So we're both people that have a long history with drugs. Yes. I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not. What was it that,

because you were working your ass off on West Wing and you needed to get a lot of stuff done. Were you on a relief pursuit or intellectual pursuit? As efficiently as I can, as economically as I can. Here's my history with drugs. I never so much as took a hit off a joint in high school or college. I was 25 the first time I tried marijuana. And the first time I tried cocaine, it happened in the same night.

Good night. And then from time to time, three friends of mine and I would each kick in $25 and we'd buy a gram of Coke. And I distinctly remember thinking, it's a good thing I don't have any money. Because if I did, this could be a problem. And I was right yeah um years later and uh and so i was uh i i was writing high and i i didn't couldn't imagine uh writing straight straight yeah um uh i couldn't imagine writing when the sun was up yeah years later somebody would show me how to cook the cocaine into a rock and smoke it. That's when the brakes came off.

And I have to say to anyone out there who's listening that the AA is the most extraordinary thing that there is. There are theologians, religious scholars, who believe that Bill Wilson's book, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the most important book written in the 20th century. It's amazing. Intellectually, spiritually, psychologically. I've never seen something work as well as this.

And it's not brainwash. You're not part of a cult or anything. I went to rehab. I went to a place called Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota. And I went there. I didn't think this was going to do anything. I don't buy into this stuff. There are fortune cookie slogans on the wall.

12 steps. What are you, crazy? I was going to go there for 28 days bad writing yeah yeah um and the first thing is giving yourself up to a higher power i spent my entire life um saying there is no such thing yeah um uh but i went there because i could hear the footsteps i knew that i was about to get caught or die uh i didn't think i was ever going to die. Wow. No, I always thought I can stop anytime I want. Just too many people knew.

And I thought it won't be bad to put 28 days between me and the last time I used. But mostly, I'll get a clean slate. I'll come back and I'll have earned the trust of everyone and nobody will bother me anymore. But I'm definitely on day 29, I'm calling my dealer. And somewhere around day nine of the 28 days, I just started to feel like this is making sense to me. This is really making sense to me. Just the fact that I'm getting up in the morning and making my bed,

showing up to breakfast, doing whatever chore I was assigned, cleaning the coffee mugs or something. This is working. I feel good. By day 27 of the 28 days, I went to my counselor and said, listen, are you sure I'm ready to go home? I can stay longer. I can stay longer. He said, get out. You're done.

Get out of here. But it's stuck, huh? It's stuck. Yeah. That's great. Now, listen, it's not magic He said, get out. You're done. Get out of here. But it's stuck, huh? It's stuck. Yeah. That's great. Now, listen. It's not magic. No, I know. You have to work at it.

And people relapse. And that's fine. I'll just give you one more commercial for AA. I'm all about it. And by the way, you don't need a reservation or anything. It's not scary. Just walk. There is, I promise you you a meeting going on right now

with a one mile radius of wherever you are okay um and just just walk in what i like to say and to protect the traditions neither aaron or myself are representatives of alcoholics anonymous but it has worked in our lives we do need to say that um uh a great thing about uh one of the many great things about aa it's it's not judgmental if you go to an aa meeting you're gonna see somebody who's high or drunk and they stumbled in there they may have had four years clean yeah and they just went out um uh they they fell out aa doesn't say, you screwed up. They said, you did the right thing,

you came back. Right. If you're in this room, you're doing the right thing. And you know what's the amazing thing is, for me, and maybe, I don't know, maybe you had it more than I did going in,

is that when you hear people's stories, there's a very specific context, is that it taught me empathy, I think, in a very real way. I know exactly what you're talking about because when you hear people's stories you realize that it doesn't matter what social or economic strata you are from that the common denominator of using their story is exactly like your story and um a story and in

a place like hazelden i think this is true for pretty much any rehab you're not going to come in contact with anyone who isn't an addict that's right um from the the chairman of the board of trustees to the person who serves the lunch in the cafeteria everyone is a recovering addict because they're the only ones who get it you'll hear some crazy story about how somebody took a crowbar and ripped their drywall down because when the house was being constructed just as a joke they hit a gram in there and you'll think i would have done the exact same thing that doesn't seem crazy at all we're all just people yeah and in in imparting here d what's your hope for for this play okay i'm you know i i know i'm gonna hear it when i get out of here that i didn't talk enough about no

you talked a lot about it and it's not because i'm not incredibly excited about it no you talked a lot about it my first and last hope always yeah uh for anything that write, is that you don't regret having spent the last two hours and 15 minutes in a theater doing this. They're happy that you did. I hope people have a thrilling night in the theater. We began previews on November 1st, and so far the audiences have responded in that way. Laughing out loud during the first act and and sobbing out loud uh during the second and big robust uh standing ovations they've

they've really been responding in an amazing way in a thrilling way beyond that um i i hope that people are able to see that To Kill a Mockingbird is right now not a museum piece. It's not an experience in nostalgia. That this book was written in 1960, but it could have been written yesterday. And the play was written yesterday. And this sort of, what we're dealing with on the level of the

malignant humanity yes uh is is ever present it is the more present the play is very much about decency and what it is to be a person and uh nowadays i think we're all looking at that yeah thanks for talking aaron thanks so much for having me, Mark. I appreciate it. So that was Aaron Sorkin and the play To Kill a Mockingbird that is now playing on Broadway. See if you can get some tickets. It's worth seeing. Okay, I guess I'm going to play.

I don't know. My hands! I don't know. I, I, my hands. guitar solo Boomer lives! Almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No. But moose head? Yes. Because that's alcohol, and we deliver that too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now.

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