Aaron Sorkin Breaks Down His Career, from 'The West Wing' to 'The Social Network'

If I'm talking to young screenwriters

and I'll be asked, how did you get your start?

And I'm always reluctant to tell the story

because my story is such a, you got hit by lightning.

It doesn't happen with the way it happened with me.

I'm Aaron Sorkin.

And this is the timeline of my career.

[Nathan] I have neither the time nor the inclination

to explain myself to a man who rises

and sleeps under the blanket

of the very freedom that I provide

and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

[Aaron] I got out of college, where I was a theater major

came to New York, had a whole bunch of survival jobs.

I bused tables.

I drove a cab.

I dressed up as a moose and passed out leaflets

in Times Square, but mostly my steadiest survival job

was working as a bartender in Broadway theaters.

I wrote most of A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins

at the Palace Theater during the first act

of La Cage Aux Folles.

And what I was thinking was, I can't wait 'til I'm done.

And then I'm going to have a bunch of actor friends

over to the apartment and we'll all read it.

I thought that was the end of that.

I had taken a break to write a one-act play

so that I could submit it to a one act festival.

My brand new agent, my first agent said,

Do you have anything else?

And I said, Well, I'm working on this full length play.

I gave it to him.

He called me and said, this is terrific.

We're gonna send this to our West Coast office.

And we think we can get you staffed up on a TV show.

I wasn't cocky.

I was just, I guess naive.

I was just about plays.

So I said, Well, that sounds nice,

but what about doing the play?

Remember I'm still a bartender kind of shrugging off,

Hey, we think you can get you staffed on a TV show.

That night, my agent, he happened to be standing next

to a woman who was the development director

for a legendary producer named David Brown

who produced The Sting,

who produced The Verdict, who produced Jaws.

The development person said to my agent,

David had a great time making The Verdict.

He really wants to do another courtroom drama.

Do you know of anything?

My agent literally had my A Few Good Men script.

Four days later and it only took four days

because David Brown was on a safari in Africa.

David came back, he wanted to meet with me.

And here's where things got really crazy.

David said, I love this,

and I wanna option the film rights.

I'm still a bartender at the Palace Theater.

And I said, Well, the thing is,

I really wanna see this done as a play.

He said, Well, what if I were to do it as a play first?

I still didn't jump at it.

I said, Well, have you ever produced a play before?

He said, No, but what if I brought in Robert Whitehead

to produce it with me?

Robert Whitehead produced the Broadway debuts

of Tennessee Williams, William Inge,

Arthur Miller, and in a stunning anticlimax, me.

Then I got to stop bartending.

I miss it a little bit.

[Nathan] Did you order the code red? I did the job.

Did you order the code red?

You're Goddamned right I did!

Is there anything I can other than the President

rode his bicycle into a tree?

He hopes never to do it again.

Seriously, they're laughing pretty hard.

He rode his bicycle into a tree, CJ.

What do you want me?

The President, while riding a bicycle,

on his vacation in Jackson Hole came

to a sudden arborial stop.

What do you want from me? A little love, Leo.

The West Wing happened entirely by accident.

My agent asked if I would like to have lunch

with the television producer, John Wells,

and I'd never met John.

I knew his work.

I knew him as a producer

of really some terrific TV shows, ER, China Beach.

The night before the lunch,

a couple of friends came over to my house for dinner.

And one of those friends was the writer Akiva Goldsman.

He had not yet won the Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind.

I had a little office in the basement.

We snuck down to the office to have a cigarette.

And there was a poster for a movie I'd written,

The American President on the wall.

And I told them about the lunch I was having

the next day with John Wells.

And he said, Gee, you know, it would make a good TV series?

That, and he pointed to The American President.

And he said, You know, if you forgot about the romance

between the President and a lobbyist and kind of focused

on the senior staff that'd be a good series.

And I'd say, Yeah, but I'm not gonna do a TV series.

I'm just having lunch with him.

I'm not there to pitch a series or anything.

I went to the lunch the next day,

and I saw that as soon as I walked in

that it wasn't just a getting to know you lunch.

Cause John was already there as seated

at the table with several executives

from Warner Brothers and a couple of CAA agents.

And I sat down and almost immediately

John said, So what do you wanna do?

Meaning what TV show do I want to do?

And instead of saying, I think that there's been a mistake.

I don't have anything to pitch you.

I really just came here for lunch.

I said, I wanna do a TV show

about senior staffers at the White House.

John reached across the table and said, you got a deal.

So I left there saying, Oh my God, what just happened?

I have to write a pilot script

for a show about senior staffers at the White House.

And all I was thinking was

that I was gonna have to write a pilot script

'cause there was no way this was gonna get on the air.

Sure enough, it didn't get on the air at first.

But the next year, there was a change

in the top management at NBC.

Two guys, one Scott Sassa and Jeff Zucker,

they read the script and they said

we're doing this, which is basically how it happened.

It was 88 hours of television that I wrote in four years.

[Jed] From what part of Holy scripture do you suppose

the lambs of God drew their divine inspiration

when they sent my 12 year old granddaughter

a Raggedy Ann doll with a knife stuck through its throat?

$18,000. Yes.

In addition to the $1,000, you'd already put up?

Yes. A total of $19,000 now.

[Mark] Yes. Hang on.

Just checking your math on that.

Yes, I got the same thing.

[Aaron] There was a book proposal going

around town and I was told about this.

I was having a lunch with a fantastic woman

who has been the chairwoman of three different studios,

Stacy Snyder, who ran Universal, ran Dreamworks and ran Fox.

And we were having lunch.

And she told me about a book proposal that was going

around about Facebook and two lawsuits

that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were facing.

One, these two identical twins who were claiming

that Zuckerberg stole Facebook from them.

And then the other person is suing Zuckerberg

was his best friend who had somehow gotten cut

out and was owed about a billion dollars.

You better lawyer up, asshole,

'cause I'm not coming back for 30%.

I'm coming back for everything.

That sounded interesting to me.

Was not then nor am I now on Facebook or Instagram.

I don't have a Twitter account.

I'm not a Luddite.

I'm really not.

Social media has just never been interesting to me.

And I'm grateful for that because chances are,

if it was I would never do anything else but that.

The person I said yes to was Scott Rudin,

the producer, Scott Rudin who owned the book proposal

at this point.

I thought what was gonna happen was I would have a year

before I even have to start thinking

about it because the book had to be written

and then I'd read the book.

And I would try to write on adaptation

but I found out no, the studio wants me to start now.

You're not gonna wait for the book.

You're gonna write it while the book.

These two things are just gonna happen simultaneously.

Ben Mezrich was writing a book called

The Accidental Billionaires.

He's gonna be writing that.

You're gonna do your own research and do your own thing.

But I really did become interested in Mark Zuckerberg

as an anti-hero and writing him without judgment.

The way you have to write an anti-hero

is if they're making their case to God,

why they should be allowed into heaven.

What it seemed to me, my interpretation

of events was that a guy who wasn't smooth

at socializing, which is something I can identify with,

who wasn't having the kind of college experience

that everyone else seemed to be having,

because we always look around and think

that everybody's at a party that we haven't been invited to.

He managed to create a social structure wherein

he is the mayor and the social network,

the world's most successful social network

was that it was created by the world's most anti-social guy

was very interesting to me

[Marylin] You're not an asshole, Mark.

You're just trying so hard to be.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement

that we're the greatest country in the world.

We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science,

49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality,

3rd in median household income,

number four in labor force and number four in exports.

We lead the world in only three categories:

number of incarcerated citizens per capita,

number of adults who believe angels are real,

and defense spending.

[Aaron] The Newsroom would end up being tough for me.

I was never able to get it quite right.

I always felt like I had a pebble in my shoe,

felt like I could write a good scene.

I could put a couple of good scenes together.

And football team at the beginning of the season

will talk about how they had a good quarter or two,

but they can't put together a full game.

I was never able to put together a full game.

Without my realizing it,

I was giving a mistaken impression,

beginning with the very first episode,

two mistaken impressions.

One was Will McAvoy's

America the greatest country in the world speech.

What I was writing was a scene

about a guy having a nervous breakdown.

He's not doing the kind of thing he knows

he should be doing.

He's selling out a little bit.

They call him the Jay Leno of news,

which back then meant something.

The woman he was in love with left

under painful circumstances.

And now in this auditorium at Northwestern,

it was his I mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

And just like Howard Beale, he was having his own breakdown.

I wasn't lecturing America on what was wrong with it.

Then later in the episode,

they get news over the wire that an offshore oil rig

off Louisiana has exploded and there's a massive fire.

And a date comes on the screen and we realized

that everything that we've been seeing has been

in the recent past, that it's a year and a half ago,

two years ago or something.

And because everything would be set in the recent past,

I think that there was a feeling

that I was trying to show the pros

how it ought to have been done,

that we're gonna do this again,

only we're going to give it the West Wing treatment.

We're honorable.

People are doing it right.

Obviously leveraging hindsight.

And I wasn't trying to do that.

I said it in the recent past,

because unlike The West Wing,

where I felt comfortable until 9/11,

where I felt comfortable creating a parallel universe,

I didn't feel safe making up news.

I didn't think it would be real.

Part of the fun, we're gonna be big breaking on news events.

And I didn't want to have to say

we're being attacked by Argentina.

I didn't want it to be silly.

And so the news will be real.

It was just meant to show people

trying to put on the news in a world

where, you know, doing the news and profit concerns

are always competing.

First step in solving any problem

is recognizing there is one.

America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

[Steve] Everything else is working.

Skip over the voice demo.

We need it to say hello.

You're not hearing me.

It's not going to say hello. Fix it.

Fix it? Yeah.

[laughs]

In 40 minutes? Fix it.

I can't.

Who's the person who can? I'm the person who can,

and I can't.

[Aaron] I said to Scott Rudin on the phone,

not really angry, not out of frustration,

just you know what I would really like as a screenwriter?

I would love to have it in writing.

I don't have to make a change

in the script that I don't want to.

That neither the studio, nor the director,

nor a star can say, I want to cut this monologue

or I want to do that.

That it's mine.

I had that phone conversation with Scott Rudin

and five minutes later, Amy Pascal,

who was the chairman of the Sony at the time called

and said, I'm gonna make your dream come true.

I want you to adapt some Steve Jobs book.

And you're going to have the terms that you want.

Scott called me back and said,

I really think that we should do it

because do we really want someone else to do it?

And I said, No, no, let's go for it.

Even though I've never been a Steve Jobs acolyte,

still even after learning a great deal about him

and writing the movie, I don't quite get

what the genius was.

You know, rectangles without corners.

He definitely made a very successful company,

but I still don't get it.

Neither does Steve Wozniak.

And I knew that that was gonna be fun friction

between the two of them.

But I had a tough time with Steve Jobs.

The subject matter, not the person who was no longer alive

because I was the father of a young daughter.

And I simply couldn't at all relate

to somebody who was so horrible

to his daughter for the first nine years.

It wouldn't even admit that she was his daughter.

I just thought I understand antiheroes

and writing them like they're making their case

to God that why they should be allowed it to happen.

I'm not sure this guy should be.

I'm just not finding anything

that's gonna make us want to stay with them.

And the person who helped me with that was Lisa Jobs.

I met with a whole bunch of people in Steve's life.

A lot of time with Wozniak,

a lot of time with the character Kate Winslet played,

a lot of times with the character Jeff Daniels played,

but I spent a lot of time with Lisa Jobs.

Once she let me into that world,

I felt like there might be a movie to write here

but what I didn't want to do as a biopic.

I didn't want to do a story that began

with a little kid looking in the window

of an electronic store and ended with his very tragic death.

I wanted to do the opposite.

I wanted to compress it.

So I called Scott.

I called the studio once I kind of knew

what I was going to do.

And this was after months and months of research.

And I said, listen, what I'm thinking of doing

is writing this entire movie as three real-time scenes,

three 40-minute scenes that each take place backstage

before one of Steve's product launches.

They said, that sounds great.

Go do it.

And so I was really happy to be able to write a film

in a sort of non-cinematic scope.

How bad are you saying? It's pretty bad.

Molly Bloom, self-proclaimed poker princess.

Is that Us weekly?

I would agree, it would be unusual

for them to print something that wasn't true

but it's not true.

And if you think a princess can do what I did,

you're incorrect.

After I wrote The Social Network,

the producer, Scott Rudin and Amy Pascal at Sony,

they thought that I should direct it,

but we all agreed before we make that decision,

let's get the script to just one director.

'Cause we know how great David Fincher would be

at this right, so let's just give it to David,

let David pass and then I'll consider becoming a director

suddenly at this point in my life and three hours later,

I got a email from David saying, Hey, Aaron, it's Fincher.

I'm gonna direct 'The Social Network.'

Can I come over?

And I've never been so happy not to get a job in my life.

I love David and no one could have done

as good a job as he did, and I do love that man.

With Molly's Game, I turned in the first draft

of Molly's Game.

I met Amy Pascal, who's now no longer chairwoman

of the studio, but she is a producer of Molly's Game,

along with Mark Gordon.

We meet for dinner with a list of directors

that we wanna go to and we go through each name on the list,

pros and cons.

When we got to the end,

they said, but we think you should direct it.

They told me why they thought I should direct it.

And I said, let me think about it.

Okay, let's talk about this again

after the first of the year, and I came back in

and I had thought about it,

and the reason I really was leaning toward directing it

was I felt that with Molly's Game,

and if you see the movie

I think you'll understand what I'm talking about.

I felt like there was a gravitational pull

toward the shiny objects in the story,

all the money and the movie stars, the bold face names,

and the money and the money and the money.

And I didn't want that to be what the movie was about.

I didn't want the one sheet to be Jessica Chastain

throwing chips up in the air like that.

For me, the story was more interesting.

It was just more personal.

I just had something different in mind.

Well, the best way to make sure

that gravitational pull doesn't get its grip

on the movie is to be the one doing it yourself.

So listen, after I I'd been a professional writer

for 25 years, more than that.

If you stood next to Mike Nichols long enough,

Danny Boyle long enough, David Fincher long enough,

Tommy Schlamme long enough, you would really have

to not be paying attention at all

to not learn something from these people.

It really was just an extension of the writing.

It was just staying longer with the screenplay.

And I discovered all this time

I've kind of been directing things

as I've been writing them.

So there was a lot to learn.

There still is a lot to learn.

I'm feeling more and more comfortable doing it,

and it was because of Molly's Game.

Steven Spielberg was sufficiently pleased

with Molly's Game that he thought

I should direct Chicago Seven.

When was the last time you slept?

It was a while ago.

My problem is it for the next 50 years,

when people think of progressive politics,

they're gonna think of you.

They're gonna think of you and your idiot followers passing

out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon.

So they're not gonna think of equality or justice.

They're not gonna think of education or poverty or progress.

They're gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost,

disrespectful, foul mouthed lawless losers.

And so we'll lose elections.

All because of me.

It was in 2006, I was asked to go

to Steven Spielberg's house on a Saturday morning.

He told me he really wanted to make a movie

about the terrible riots that happened in Chicago in '68

and that crazy conspiracy trial that followed.

And I said that sounds great, count me in.

I wanna write that movie.

And as soon as I left his house, I called my father

and I asked him what happened in Chicago in 1968.

And was there a crazy conspiracy trial that followed?

I had no idea what Steven was talking about.

I was saying yes to Steven,

and I heard the word trial in there.

And I liked that.

I was saying yes to that too.

There was a lot of research to be done.

A day after I turned in the first draft,

the Writers Guild went on strike,

and that strike lasted a long time.

By the time we all got back,

there were other commitments that people had to attend to.

I found myself flying to London to meet

with Paul Greengrass who wanted to direct it now.

And then I spent some time

with Ben Stiller who wanted to direct it.

Really what the problem was was the riots.

The riots were a budget buster.

Movie like Chicago 7,

obviously the budget has to somehow be

in proportion to what the studio imagines

the audience appetite is gonna be.

And there were riots and tear gas in this movie.

By the way, back in 2006, I remember the last thing

Steven said to me was, I really think this film

should come out before the election.

He was talking about the election of 2008.

And then we thought the movie should come out

before the election in 2012,

and then before the election in 2016.

So it was the election of Donald Trump.

The discovery that he was by magnitudes worse

than our very, very low expectations for him were

in the first place and what that was doing to the country.

It was the combination of that.

And like I said, Stephen seeing Molly's Game

and feeling like okay,

we shouldn't look for a director anymore.

It's coming out right when it should.

Look, the film was plenty relevant

back when we were making it last winter.

We didn't need it to get more relevant,

but it did in chilling ways.

I was asked the other day I if I changed the script at all

to mirror events in the world and no I didn't.

The world changed to mirror the script

in astonishing ways.

The most significant way these violent clashes

between peaceful protesters and the police

with many people blaming the protestors

and many people blaming the police.

Demonization of protest as being anti-American,

the tension between Abbie and Hayden mirrors

the tension that we feel now between the left

and the further left, between the more pragmatic left

looking for incremental change, trying to scare anybody off

and mostly trying to win an election

so that we can do something, anything.

And the people further left

who were tired of incremental change

and wanna start breaking things.

Watching CNN's coverage of Kenosha, of Minneapolis,

of Madison ,I thought, you know what,

if you just degraded the color

on that film a little bit, it would look exactly

like the file footage we use from 1968.

Bad times generally produce good art.

So we can look forward to that, I have a hunch.

Most of us would prefer good times and bad art,

but I hope that once it's safe to do it,

that people start going back to theaters,

movie theaters and stage plays.

Watching something with an audience is different

than watching it alone.

Being part of an audience,

there's nothing that can replace that experience.

So, and I don't think it will disappear.

It's something that's been around for thousands of years,

but I am eager for that to come back.

Thank you very much, Vanity Fair.

I hope you enjoy the timeline of my career.

[soothing music]