Aaron Sorkin

Hi Reddit, I'm Aaron Sorkin. I wrote The West Wing, The Newsroom, The Social Network, Steve Jobs, and A Few Good Men. My newest project is teaching an online screenwriting class. The class launches today, and you can enroll at . I'm excited for my first AMA and will try to answer as many questions as I can.

Edit: Thank you all for your thoughtful questions. I had a great time doing this AMA.

Coming from 3 seasons of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show”, I assumed The Newsroom was in a similar vain to TMS considering people have said this show was worth watching. However, the pilot episode which kicks off the show is genuinely unbearable, and its solely due to dialogue.

I absolutely think the opening scene was way too preachy, rather than bold - especially when the background music kicks in towards end of Jeff Daniels’ character’s rant/speech about America. 14 year old me would be compelled by the opening sequence, but today, it just seems preachy and self righteous in my eyes.

Aaron Sorkin’s way with dialogue never stuck with me. The rest of the pilot episode just seemed like a ton of smooth-talking journalists delivering one liners and metaphors to each other. It comes off as a bit pretentious, and extremely forced, which makes me roll my eyes.

Obviously I cant judge the show as a whole, but I can judge its pilot episode, so I’ll probably continue the show unless it doesn’t get better from the rough pilot episode.

I'm reading and in an interview with Buck Henry, the following is said:

By the way, there are a lot of writers nowadays doing something that I find really interesting.

Which is what?

They write for other writers. They write for the owners, and the owner finishes the script. There's a whole bunch of these shows now.

What do you mean by "the owner"?

Well, I mean... take [screenwriter and producer] Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin writes all those scripts, but there are other writers writing for him. It's like writing for a soap opera - you write for him and he's got the skill and the ingenuity to sit down and put together all that material into a finished product. At least that's the way I understand it. But I think that's great, actually. I think it's a great way to go. It's like the old studio system in a way. I would do a TV series if I had four or six clever people writing ideas, stories, and outlines.

This doesn't read like "Sorkin took over someone else's projects" or "Sorkin got rewritten" or (like, Moneyball) "Sorkin and Zaillian wrote two separate versions and the director combined them."

Has anyone heard this? Is there merit to this?

Just... thought it was an interesting tidbit in my read this week.

Aaron Sorkin’s TV shows were typically dramadies (sometimes more comic than dramatic) with ensemble casts set in a workplace — and typically a workplace with a public-facing side. There was Sports Night (a cable sports show), The West Wing (the White House, with a large emphasis on communications), Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (a weekly comedy sketch show), and The Newsroom (a cable news program).

If you were to pitch an Aaron Sorkin workplace TV show today, what kind of workplace would it be? (While his often had a public-facing side, yours doesn’t necessarily need it.) What would some of the characters be like? Bonus: what would happen in the first season’s final episode, “What Kind of Day Has It Been?”

I just rewatched Steve Jobs and absolutely adored it. And yes, while the superb acting and Danny Boyle's fun visual choices played a part in that (love Boyle!), what REALLY sold the movie for me was Sorkin's script.

I know Sorkin has become a punching bag as of late — his last two movies weren't great, fair enough — but I think we gotta give credit where credit's due. When he was on his A-game, he was one of the greatest screenwriters in film/TV history.

And yet, I constantly see people giving more credit to his collaborators, whether its actors (Nicholson or Pitt in A Few Good Men/Moneyball) or directors (Fincher in Social Network). But I truly believe none of those movies would be NEARLY as good without those quippy, almost cartoonishly clever walk-and-talk Sorkin scripts. Plus, The West Wing is entirely Sorkin's baby, and that show (at least, the first few seasons) absolutely rules.

I know he has his low points — please, we don't need to bring up The Newsroom or Studio 60, everybody has their flops — but I just wanted to give Sorkin a shout out. The dude can write some fabulously entertaining and quotable dialogue.

I saw a post about the one egg is an oeuf joke, and somebody pointed out that the same joke had been in both TWW and Sorkin's Trial of the Chicago 7. Do you know if there are any other TWW lines that would have featured in Sorkin's other work?

If anyone isn’t familiar. master class is an online website where big names in every industry (home improvement, screenwriting, music, comedy etc) sit down and have a 3-4 hour class on how to become / do one of those things. There’s an agenda, class notes and everything.

Examples include “RL stein teaches how to write for young adults”…”Gordon Ramsey teaches cooking”

Aaron Sorkin has one called “Sorkin teaches screenwriting” He is in a room with 4 young adults, and he is going over how he’s never seen Season 5 episode 1 of the WW. So in this group, they re-write the episode as he would have without knowing what the actual episode is about. He goes on to say how he left 4.22 open so the new writers could use that to come up with something.

Anyway, it’s actually pretty interesting for the huge west wing fans. I haven’t finished it but excited to see where it goes.

I'm currently reading through the screenplay and there's a LOT of overlapping dialogue. I see lots of questions about how to format this, so I thought I'd share.

Basically he puts parentheses around the portion of dialogue that's going to be stepped on, and then indicates that the interrupter's dialogue is doing this with a parenthetical (over). Super simple, easy to follow.

I'm sure he didn't invent this technique, but it's the first time I'd seen it and thought it would be useful information.

Don't overthink it! If it reads well, it works.

The way Josh talks about it in Red Mass I’m thinking not.