Aaron_Sorkin

One of the biggest mistakes rookie screenwriters make is not having a strong intention or obstacle. The drive shaft of a car, beautiful leather seats, a fantastic sound system, a really cool paint job but the car isn’t going to move forward if the car doesn’t have a strong intention or obstacle.

Avocado, when I write something, I don’t hope for anything more than that you will enjoy yourself for however long I’ve asked for your attention. I don’t have a political or social agenda, with The Newsroom I wasn’t trying to tell the professionals how to do their job. For me it was just an interesting work place in which to set a drama.

Catcher in the Rye.

Intention and obstacle is everything. Intention and obstacle is what makes it drama. Somebody wants the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia; it doesn't matter, they just need a strong intention, and then there needs to be a formidable obstacle. The tactic that your protagonist (or protagonists) use to overcome that obstacle is going to be your story. That's what you're gonna hang everything on. Without intention and obstacle, you're coming dangerously close to finger painting.

Thanks very much for the kind words, I’m able to do much more rewriting in features that I am in television simply because of the time constraint. In a feature, if I get stuck (I get stuck a lot) I can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for the script and let them know that I’m stuck and that I’ll be delivering it 3 months later that I said I would. On television, there are hard air dates, there is no flexibility at all, so in television, we shoot my first draft.

I assume that the people who watch movies and television shows are at least as smart as the people who make movies and television shows. If the dialogue makes you sit forward a little, and listen a little bit more, that's a good thing. It makes the audience active in the experience.

If I had an idea or a way to do The West Wing today, I would think seriously about doing it. I would want to do it myself because I’m so personally attached to it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to do anything to tarnish anyone’s memory of the show.

When it comes to screenwriting or television writing, there are real rules, and there are fake rules. In 1970, a CBS executive famously said that there are four things you'll never see on television: a Jewish person, a divorced person, a person from New York City, or a person with a mustache. Obviously, that CBS executive had no idea what he was talking about, and those are the fake rules.

The real rules can be found in Aristotle's Poetics.

When you’re a screenwriter, it’s the material that’s speaking for you. When I started out, I was living in New York and when I would come to LA for meetings, I was considered exotic because I was there from New York and everybody wanted to meet with me because I was in town for only a few days. I think that you should, whether it’s New York or LA or Wyoming, I think you should live where you’re happy and comfortable and where you’ll write the best.

Just like a LA screenwriter, a NYC screenwriter has to get his work into the hands of the people who read scripts. So my recommendation is stay warm in the winter and hate the Red Socks.

I'd love to be able to do that. I'd love to be able to relax in my chair, and god knows anything else that you focus is good. But, I've never tried meditation.

u/AngryCotton, your experience as a DP is going to serve you well. Already, I guarantee you, you have a better visual sense than I do. When it comes to dialogue, you're gonna need to find your own voice, and trust it. I find it very helpful to say the lines out loud while I'm writing them, and you can hear for yourself whether it sounds like the bad dialogue you're familiar with, or the good dialogue you're familiar with, or even better, something you've never heard before.

NYC. There are four different seasons, and not everybody fundamentally does the same thing I do for a living.

MrTayJ it’s good to talk to you again, fundamentally the writing is the same for me, for television and film. The big difference is time, With a movie, I have a year or two to really think about what it is I’m going to write and to do any research I may need to do to write a big clunky first draft and turn it into a less clunky second draft. With television, I only have 9 days and about 5 of those days are going to be taken up with trying to come up with an idea. So we have to shoot my first draft.

That's a great question. I don't like to commit myself to anything in a character's backstory until I have to. I didn't know going into the West Wing that Bartlet had MS. Then, along came an episode where I needed to introduce the idea that the First Lady (Dr. Channing) was a medical doctor. And the way I did it was by giving Bartlet MS.

David Mamet have written some excellent essays on this subject. You can get lost in the weeds if you sit down and try to create an entire biography for your character. If this is what they were like when they were six years old, and this is what they did when they were seven years old, and they scraped their knee when they were eight years old. Your character, assuming your character is 50 years old, was never six years old, or seven years old or eight years old. Your character was born the moment the curtain goes up, the moment the movie begins, the moment the television show begins, and your character dies as soon as it's over. Your character only becomes seven years old when they say, "Well when I was seven years old, I fell in a well, and ever since then I've had terrible claustrophobia. Okay?

Characters and people aren't the same thing. They only look alike.

I write a lot of drafts of screenplays and plays. I keep writing and I keep writing; what I try to do at the beginning is just get to the end. Once I've gotten to the end, I know a lot more about the piece, and I'm able to go back to the beginning and touch stuff that never turned into anything, and highlight things that are going to become important later on. And I go back, and I keep doing that, and I keep doing that, and I'll retype the whole script, over and over again, just to make things sharper and sharper. That's for movies and plays. In television, there just isn't that kind of time. In television, I have to write a 55-minute movie every nine days, so we shoot my first draft.

Ha! Here’s the worst and the best studio note I’ve ever gotten, early in run of The West Wing, there was an episode in which an US Air Force jet carrying a bunch of US doctors accidentally wandered into Syrian airspace and was shot down. The network, NBC and the studio, Warner Bros, both received letters from the Arab American Anti-Defamation League, strongly protesting that story. A few episodes later, I had Toby in a throwaway line make passing reference to hebrew slaves in Egypt 5000 years ago, the network and the studio had an issue and sent me back a note saying please show your research. So I sent them back a copy of the Old Testament with the chapter of Exodus highlighted.

u/gmred91, thanks for your kind words about Studio 60. We all had a great time doing it, and we all wish we could have done it longer. The answer to your question is, I don't know where I'd take it if there was a second season, but now you've got me thinking!

BFA, like any proud father, I don’t like picking a favorite episode. There were some that worked better than others and there aren’t any that I don’t wish I could have back and write all over again. That said, if I were to give someone one episode of The West Wing to watch, it would either be 17 People, Two Cathedrals, or Noel.

As for upcoming projects, in the fall I am going to be directing for the first time, the movie is called Molly’s Game, a true story of a young woman, played by Jessica Chastain, who ran the world’s most exclusive high stakes poker game. Early in 2017, NBC will be doing a live production of A Few Good Men and I’m currently working on a Broadway interpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird.