Aaron Benjamin Sorkin (born
June 9, 1961) is an American
screenwriter, producer and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The American President,
The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 On The Sunset
Strip and The
Farnsworth Invention.
After
graduating from Syracuse University
with a Bachelor of
Fine Arts degree in Musical
Theatre in 1983, Sorkin spent much of the 1980s in New York as
a struggling, largely unemployed actor." In the Spotlight: Script Sensation", Brad
Herzog, Syracuse University Magazine, Summer 2001.
Retrieved on May 9, 2007. He found his passion in writing
plays, and quickly established himself as a young promising
playwright. His stageplay
A Few Good
Men caught the attention of Hollywood producer
David Brown, who bought the film
rights before the play even premiered.
Castle Rock Entertainment
hired Sorkin to adapt
A Few Good Men for the big screen.
The movie, directed by
Rob Reiner, became
a box office success. Sorkin spent the early 1990s writing two
other screenplays at Castle Rock,
Malice and
The American President.
In the mid-1990s he worked as a
script
doctor on films such as
Schindler's List and
Bulworth. In 1998 his television career began
when he created the comedy series
Sports Night for the
ABC network.
Sports
Night's second season was its last and in 1999 overlapped with
the debut of Sorkin's next TV series, the political drama
The West Wing, this time for
the
NBC network.
The West Wing won
multiple
Emmy Awards, and continued for
three more seasons after he left the show at the end of its fourth
season in 2003. He returned to television in 2006 with the
dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset
Strip, about the backstage drama at a late night sketch
comedy show, once again for the NBC network. While Sorkin's return
was met with high expectations and a lot of early online buzz
before
Studio 60's premiere, NBC did not renew it after
its first season in which it suffered from low ratings and mixed
reception in the press and on the Internet. His most recent feature
film screenplay is
Charlie
Wilson's War. (subscription required)
After more
than a decade away from the theatre, Sorkin returned to adapt for
the stage his screenplay The Farnsworth Invention,
which started a workshop run at La Jolla Playhouse
in February 2007 and which opened on Broadway
in December
2007.
He battled with a cocaine addiction for many years, but after a
highly publicized arrest he received treatment in a drug diversion
program and is reported to have recovered. In television, Sorkin is
known as a controlling writer, who rarely shares the job of penning
teleplays with other writers.
His writing staff are more likely to do research and come up with
stories for him to tell. His trademark rapid-fire dialogue and
extended
monologues are complemented, in
television, by frequent collaborator
Thomas Schlamme's characteristic visual
technique called the "
Walk and
Talk".
Early years
Sorkin was
born in Manhattan
to Jewish parents, and raised in the wealthy suburb
of Scarsdale, New
York
. His mother was a school teacher and his
father a copyright lawyer; both his older sister and brother went
on to become lawyers. Sorkin took an early interest in acting.
Before he reached his teenage years, his parents were taking him to
the theatre to see shows such as
Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? and
That
Championship Season. At that age, Sorkin did not always
comprehend the plot of the plays; nevertheless he recalls enjoying
the sound of the dialogue.
Sorkin
attended Scarsdale
High School
where he became involved in his high school drama
and theatre club. In eighth grade he played General
Bullmoose in the musical
Li'l
Abner.
In 1979
Sorkin attended Syracuse University. In his
freshman
year he failed a class that was a core requirement. It was a
devastating setback because he wanted to be an actor, and the Drama
department did not allow students to take the stage until they
completed all the core freshman classes. He returned in his
sophomore year determined to do better, and graduated in 1983 with
a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre.
Unemployed actor, promising playwright
After
graduation, Sorkin moved to New York City where he worked odd jobs
ranging from delivering singing
telegrams, driving a limousine, touring Alabama with the
children’s theatre company Traveling Playhouse, handing out fliers
promoting a hunting-and-fishing show, to bartending on Broadway
at theatres
such as the Palace
Theatre. One weekend, while house sitting at a friend's
place he found an
IBM Selectric
typewriter, started typing, and "felt a phenomenal confidence
and a kind of joy that [he] had never experienced before in [his]
life."
He continued writing and eventually put together his first play
Removing All Doubt which he sent to his old theatre
teacher, Arthur Storch, who was impressed. In 1984,
Removing
All Doubt was staged for drama students at his alma mater,
Syracuse University.
After that, he wrote Hidden in this Picture which
debuted off-off-Broadway at Steve
Olsen's West Bank
Cafe Downstairs Theatre Bar
in New York City in 1988. The contents of
his first two plays got him a
theatrical agent. Producer John
A. McQuiggan saw the production of
Hidden in this Picture
and commissioned Sorkin to turn the one-act into a full-length play
called
Making Movies. His reputation as a playwright was
quickly gaining stature on the New York theatre scene.
A Few Good Men
Sorkin got
the inspiration to write his next play, a courtroom drama called
A Few Good Men, from a phone
conversation with his sister Deborah, who had graduated from
Boston
University Law School
and signed up for a 3-year stint with the U.S.
Navy Judge
Advocate General's Corps.
She was going to Guantanamo
Bay
to defend a group of Marines who came close to killing a fellow
Marine in a hazing ordered by a superior
officer. Sorkin took that information and wrote much of his
story on cocktail napkins while bartending at the Palace Theatre on
Broadway. He and his roommates had purchased a
Macintosh 512K so when he returned home he
would empty his pockets of the cocktail napkins and type them into
the computer, forming a basis from which he wrote many drafts for
A Few Good Men.
In 1988 Sorkin sold the film rights for his play
A Few Good
Men to producer
David
Brown before it even premiered, for a deal possibly worth a sum
well into six-figures. Brown had read an article in
The New
York Times about Sorkin's one-act play
Hidden in this
Picture and found out Sorkin also had a play called
A Few
Good Men that was having off-Broadway readings. Brown produced
A Few Good Men on Broadway at the
Music Box Theatre. It starred
Tom Hulce and was directed by
Don Scardino. After opening in late 1989, it
ran for 497 performances.
Sorkin continued writing
Making Movies and in 1990 it
debuted
off-Broadway at the Promenade
Theatre, produced by John A. McQuiggan and directed by Don
Scardino. Meanwhile, David Brown was producing a few projects at
TriStar Pictures and tried to
interest them in making
A Few Good Men into a film but his
proposal was declined due to the lack of star actor involvement.
Brown later got a call from Alan Horn at
Castle Rock Entertainment who was
anxious to make the film.
Rob Reiner, a
producing partner at Castle Rock, opted to direct it.
Screenwriting career
Working under contract for Castle Rock Entertainment
In the early 1990s, Sorkin worked under contract for
Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. He
wrote the scripts for
A Few Good Men,
Malice, and
The American President: the three films grossed about $400
million worldwide. While writing for Castle Rock he became friends
with colleagues such as
William
Goldman and
Rob Reiner and met his
future wife, Julia Bingham, who was one of Castle Rock's
business-affairs lawyers.
Sorkin wrote several drafts of the script for
A Few Good Men in his New York
apartment, learning the craft of screenwriting from a book about
screenplay
format. He then spent several months at the Los Angeles offices
of Castle Rock, working on the script with Rob Reiner. William
Goldman (who regularly worked under contract at Castle Rock) became
his mentor and helped him to adapt his stageplay into a screenplay.
The movie was directed by Rob Reiner, starring Tom Cruise, Jack
Nicholson, Demi Moore, and Kevin Bacon, and was produced by David
Brown.
A Few Good Men was released in 1992 and was a box
office success.
Goldman also approached Sorkin with a story premise, which Sorkin
developed into the script for
Malice. Goldman oversaw the project as
creative consultant while Sorkin
wrote the first two drafts of
Malice. Sorkin had to leave
the project to finish up the script for
A Few Good Men,
and screenwriter
Scott Frank wrote two
drafts of the
Malice screenplay. When production on
A
Few Good Men wrapped up, Sorkin took over and continued
working on the script for
Malice through until the final
shooting script. Harold Becker
directed the film, a medical thriller released in 1993, which
starred Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin.
Malice had mixed
reviews.
Vincent Canby in
The New
York Times described the film as "deviously entertaining from
its start through its finish".
Roger
Ebert panned it, and
Peter Travers
in a 2000
Rolling Stone
review summarized it as having "suspense but no staying
power".
Sorkin's last produced screenplay for Castle Rock was
The American President
and once again he worked with William Goldman, who served as a
creative consultant. It took Sorkin a few years to write the
screenplay for
The American President, which started off
as a massive 385-page screenplay; it was eventually whittled down
to a standard shooting script of around 120 pages. Rob Reiner
directed. The film was critically acclaimed.
Kenneth Turan in the
Los Angeles
Times described the film as "genial and entertaining if not
notably inspired", and believed its most interesting aspects were
the "pipe dreams about the American political system and where it
could theoretically be headed".
Script doctor for hire
Sorkin did uncredited script work on several films in the 1990s. He
did a polish of the script for
Schindler's List at
Steven Spielberg's invitation, and wrote
some quips for
Sean Connery and
Nicolas Cage in
The Rock. He worked on
Excess Baggage, a comedy about a girl
who stages her own kidnapping to get her father's attention, and
rewrote some of
Will Smith's scenes in
Enemy of the
State.
Sorkin collaborated with
Warren Beatty
on a couple of scripts, one of which was
Bulworth. Beatty, known for occasionally
personally financing his film projects through pre-production, also
hired Sorkin to rewrite a script titled
Ocean of Storms
which never went into production. At one point Sorkin sued Beatty
for proper compensation for his work on the
Ocean of
Storms script, however, he eventually continued working on the
script once the matter was settled.
Sports Night
Sorkin came up with the idea to write about the behind-the-scenes
happenings on a sports show while he was living in a room in the
Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles writing the screenplay for
The American President. He would work late, with the TV
tuned into
ESPN, watching continuous replays of
SportsCenter. The show
inspired him to try to write a feature film about a sports show but
he was unable to structure the story for film, so instead he turned
his idea into a TV comedy series.
Sports Night was produced by
Disney and debuted on the
Disney-owned
ABC
network in the fall of 1998.
Sorkin fought with the ABC network during the first season over the
use of a
laugh track and a
live studio audience. The laugh track
was widely decried by critics as jarring, with
Joyce Millman of Salon.com describing it as
"the most unconvincing laugh track you've ever heard". Sorkin
commented that: "Once you do shoot in front of a live audience, you
have no choice but to use the laugh track. Oftentimes [enhancing
the laughs] is the right thing to do. Sometimes you do need a
cymbal crash. Other times, it alienates me." The laugh track was
gradually dialed down and was gone by the end of the first season.
Sorkin was triumphant in the second season when ABC agreed to his
demands, unburdening the
crew of the
difficulties of staging a scene for a live audience and leaving the
cast with more time to rehearse.
Although
Sports Night was critically acclaimed, ABC
canceled the show after two seasons due to its low
ratings. Sorkin entertained offers to
continue the show on other television channels but declined all the
offers as they were mainly contingent on his involvement which
would have been a difficult prospect given that he was
simultaneously writing
The West Wing at that point.
The West Wing
Sorkin conceived the
political TV drama
The West Wing in 1997 when he went unprepared to a lunch
with producer
John Wells
and in a panic pitched to Wells a show centered on the senior staff
of the White House, using leftover ideas from his script for
The American President. He told Wells about his visits to
the White House while doing research for
The American
President, and they found themselves discussing
public service and the passion of the people
who serve. Wells took the concept and pitched it to the
NBC network, but was told to wait because the facts
behind the
Lewinsky scandal were
breaking and there was concern that an audience would not be able
to take a show about the White House seriously. When a year later
some other networks started showing interest in
The West
Wing, NBC decided to
greenlight the
series despite their previous reluctance. The
pilot debuted in the fall of 1999 and was
produced by
Warner Bros.
TV.
The West Wing was honored with 9
Emmy Awards for its debut season, making the show
a record holder for most Emmys won by a series in a single season.
Following the awards ceremony, a fiasco ensued, centered on the
Emmy for writing
The West Wing episode "
In Excelsis Deo" which was awarded to Sorkin
and
Rick Cleveland, when it was
reported in a
New York Times article that Cleveland had
been ushered off the stage by Sorkin without being given a chance
to say a few words. The story behind
The West Wing episode
is based on Cleveland's father, a Korean war veteran who spent the
last years of his life on the street, as Cleveland explains in his
FreshYarn.com essay titled "I Was the Dumb Looking Guy with the
Wire-Rimmed Glasses". A back and forth took place between Sorkin
and Cleveland in a public web forum at
Mighty Big TV where Sorkin explained
that he gives his writers "Story By" credit on a rotating basis "by
way of a gratuity" and that he had thrown out Cleveland's script
and started from scratch. In the end, Sorkin apologized to
Cleveland, admitting he had been "dead wrong".
In 2001,
after wrapping up the second season of The West Wing,
Sorkin had a drug relapse, only two months after receiving a
Phoenix Rising Award for drug recovery; this became public
knowledge when he was arrested at Burbank Airport
for possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms,
marijuana, and crack cocaine. He was ordered by a judge to
attend a drug diversion program. His drug addiction was highly
publicized, most notably when
Saturday Night Live did a parody
called "The West Wing", though he did recover.
In 2002, Sorkin assailed NBC news anchor
Tom
Brokaw's TV special about a day in the life of a president,
"The Bush White House: Inside the Real West Wing," comparing it to
the act of sending a valentine to President George W. Bush instead
of real news reporting. Sorkin's TV series
The West Wing
aired on the same network, and so at the request of NBC's
Entertainment President
Jeff Zucker he
apologized, but would later say "there should be a difference
between what
NBC News does and what
The
West Wing TV series does."
Sorkin wrote 87 teleplays in all, which amounts to nearly every
episode during the show's first four Emmy-winning seasons. Sorkin
describes his role in the creative process as "not so much [that
of] a
showrunner or a producer. I'm
really a writer." He admits that this approach can have its
drawbacks, saying "Out of 88 [West Wing] episodes that I did we
were on time and on budget never, not once." In 2003, at the end of
the fourth season, Sorkin and fellow executive producer
Thomas Schlamme left the show due to
internal conflicts at Warner Bros. TV not involving the NBC
network, thrusting producer John Wells into an expanded role as
showrunner. Sorkin would later return in
the final episode in a
cameo appearance as a member of President
Bartlet's staff.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
In 2003 Sorkin divulged to the American television interviewer
Charlie Rose on
The Charlie Rose Show that he
was developing a TV series based on a late night sketch comedy show
like
Saturday Night Live. In early October 2005 a pilot
script dubbed
Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip for a new TV
series, written by him and produced by Thomas Schlamme, started
circulating around Hollywood and generating interest on the web. A
week later, NBC bought from
Warner Bros. TV the right to show the TV series
on their network for a near record license fee in a bidding war
with CBS. The show's name was later changed to
Studio 60 on the Sunset
Strip. Sorkin described the show as having
"autobiographical elements" to it and "characters that are based on
actual people" but said that it departs from those beginnings to
look at the backstage maneuverings at a late night
sketch comedy show.
In September 2006, the pilot for
Studio 60 aired on NBC,
directed by Thomas Schlamme. The pilot was critically acclaimed and
had high
ratings, but
Studio
60 experienced a significant drop in audience by mid-season.
The seething anticipation that preceded the debut was followed up
by a large amount of thoughtful and scrupulous criticism in the
press, as well as largely negative and feverish analysis in the
blogosphere. In January 2007 Sorkin
spoke out against the press for focusing too heavily on the ratings
slide and for using blogs and unemployed comedy writers as sources.
After two months on hiatus,
Studio 60 resumed to air the
last episodes of season one which would be its only season.
Back to writing for film
In 2003, Sorkin was writing a screenplay
on spec about the
story of
Philo Farnsworth, a topic
he had first become familiar with back in the early 1990s when
producer
Fred Zollo had approached him
with the idea of adapting a memoir by
Elma Farnsworth into a biopic. The next year
he completed the screenplay under the title "The Farnsworth
Invention", and it was picked up by
New
Line Cinema with
Thomas Schlamme
signed on to direct. The story is about the patent battle between
inventor Philo Farnsworth and RCA tycoon
David Sarnoff for the technology that allowed
the first television transmissions in the US. However, Sorkin
shortly reconsidered "The Farnsworth Invention" as a film and
rewrote it as the play
The
Farnsworth Invention; the film did not go into
production.
Sorkin's next jaunt back into film occurred when he was
commissioned by
Universal Pictures
to adapt "60 Minutes" producer
George
Crile's nonfiction book
Charlie Wilson's War for
Tom Hanks' production company
Playtone.
Charlie Wilson's War is about
the colorful Texas congressman
Charlie Wilson who funded the
CIA's secret war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Sorkin completed the screenplay and the film was released in 2007
starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman,
directed by Mike Nichols.
On July 12, 2007,
Variety reported that Sorkin had signed
a deal with Dreamworks to write three scripts. The first script is
titled
The Trial of the Chicago 7, which Sorkin was
already developing with Steven Spielberg and producers
Walter Parkes and
Laurie MacDonald. In August 2008, Sorkin
announced that he had agreed to write a script about how Facebook
was founded for Sony and producer
Scott
Rudin. The film,
The Social
Network, is set to premiere in 2010.
Returning to the theatre
After
more than 15 years away from the theatre, Sorkin found himself
easing his way back into playwrighting in 2005 when he took to
revising his play A Few Good
Men for a revival at the London West End
theatre
, the Haymarket
. It had been a while since he had originally
written the play and so he gave it a polish. The play opened at the
Theatre Royal Haymarket in the fall of the same year and was
directed by
David Esbjornson, with
Rob Lowe of
The West Wing in the
lead role.
Yet
Sorkin had begun thinking about writing a fresh new play back in
2003 when he was contacted by Jocelyn Clarke, the commissions
manager of the Abbey
Theatre
in Dublin
, requesting
he write a play for them, a commission which he accepted. In
time Sorkin decided to tackle his commission by rewriting "The
Farnsworth Invention" as a play.
He delivered a first draft of the play to
the Abbey Theatre in early 2005, and a production was purportedly
planned for 2007 with La Jolla Playhouse in California
deciding to stage a workshop production of the play
in collaboration with the Abbey Theatre. But in 2006 the
Abbey Theatre's new management pulled out of all involvement with
The Farnsworth
Invention. Despite the setback, La Jolla Playhouse pushed
on, with
Steven Spielberg lending
his talents as producer. The production opened under La Jolla's
signature
Page To
Stage program which allowed Sorkin and director Des McAnuff to
develop the play from show to show according to audience reactions
and feedback; the play ran at La Jolla Playhouse from February 20,
2007 through March 25, 2007. A production followed on Broadway,
beginning in
previews at the
Music Box Theatre and scheduled to
open on November 14, 2007; however, the play was delayed by the
2007 Broadway stagehand
strike.
The Farnsworth Invention eventually opened at
the Music Box Theatre on December 3, 2007 following the end of the
strike; it closed on March 2, 2008.
Sorkin has continued in his renewed capacity as a playwright,
attaching himself to several projects. In March 2007, it was
reported that Sorkin had signed on to write a musical adaptation of
the hit 2002 record
Yoshimi Battles the Pink
Robots by psychedelic-rock band
The Flaming Lips, collaborating with
director
Des McAnuff who has been
developing the project. In August 2008 Des McAnuff announced that
Sorkin had been commissioned by the
Stratford Shakespeare
Festival to write an adaptation of
Chekhov's The
Cherry Orchard.
Writing process and style
Sorkin has written for the theatre, film and television, and in
each medium his level of collaboration with other creators has
varied. He began in theatre which involved a largely solitary
writing process, then moved into film where he collaborated with
director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman, and
eventually worked in television where he collaborated very closely
with director Thomas Schlamme for nearly a decade on the shows
Sports Night,
The West Wing, and
Studio 60 on
the Sunset Strip; he now moves between all three media. He has
a habit of
chainsmoking while he spends
countless hours cooped up in his office plotting out his next
scripts. He describes his writing process as physical because he
will often stand up and speak the dialogue he is developing.
A
New York Times article by Peter De Jonge explained that
"
The West Wing is never plotted out for more than a few
weeks ahead and has no major story lines", which De Jonge believed
was because "with characters who have no flaws, it is impossible to
give them significant arcs". Sorkin has stated: "I seldom plan
ahead, not because I don’t think it’s good to plan ahead, there
just isn’t time." Sorkin has also said, "As a writer, I don't like
to answer questions until the very moment that I have to." The
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer's TV critic John Levesque has commented
that Sorkin's writing process "can make for ill-advised plot
developments". Further complicating the matter, in television,
Sorkin will have a hand in writing every episode, rarely letting
other writers earn full credit on a script. Peter De Jonge has
reported that ex-writers of ''The West Wing'' have claimed that
"even by the spotlight-hogging standards of Hollywood, Sorkin has
been exceptionally ungenerous in his sharing of writing credit". In
a comment to ''[[GQ (magazine)|GQ]]'' magazine in 2008, Sorkin
said, "I’m helped by a staff of people who have great ideas, but
the scripts aren’t written by committee."{{cite news |title=Why
Does Aaron Sorkin Feel So Guilty? |author=Mickey Rapkin
|date=2008-08-12 |work=[[GQ (magazine)|GQ]]
|url=http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/gqeditors/2008/08/why-does-aaron.html
|accessdate=2008-09-26}} {{quote box|width=35%|quote="You almost
never see how anyone travels from point A to point C [in most TV
shows]. I wanted the audience to witness every journey these people
took. It all had a purpose, even seeing them order lunch. It just
seemed to be the proper visual rhythm with which to marry Aaron's
words. I got lucky that it worked."|source=[[Thomas Schlamme]], on
the "[[Walk and talk|Walk and Talk]]" device.}} Sorkin's nearly
decade-long collaboration in television with director [[Thomas
Schlamme]] began in early 1998 when they found they shared common
creative ground on the soon to be produced ''Sports Night''.{{cite
web |title=Interview with Thomas Schlamme, Director and Executive
Producer, "Sports Night" |author=Elif Cercel |date=1999-11-11
|work=[[Directors World]]
|url=http://b4a.healthyinterest.net/news/archives/1999/11/interview_with.html
|accessdate=2007-01-21}} Their successful partnership in television
is one in which Sorkin focuses on writing the scripts while
Schlamme [[Executive producer#Television|executive produces]] and
occasionally directs; they have worked together on ''Sports
Night'', ''The West Wing'', and ''Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip''.
Schlamme will create the look of the shows, work with the other
directors, discuss the scripts with Sorkin as soon as they are
turned in, make design and casting decisions, and attend the budget
meetings; Sorkin tends to stick strictly to writing. One of
Schlamme's trademarks is ''The West Wing'''s style of continuously
tracking in front of characters as they walk side by side while
talking at the same time, usually while on their way to a meeting
or conference directly related to the substance of the discussion,
a visual technique called the "
Walk and
Talk". Schlamme did not want to have scene cuts that relocated
characters without any explanation of how they got there so he
developed the "Walk and Talk" device to work with Sorkin's
dialogue.
Sorkin is known for writing memorable lines and fast-paced
dialogue, such as the "You can't handle the truth!" piece from
A Few Good Men and the
partly Latin tirade against God in
The West Wing episode
"
Two Cathedrals". In television,
Sorkin's stylemark is the repartee that his characters engage in as
they small talk and banter about whimsical events taking place
within an episode, and interject obscure popular culture references
into conversation.
Although his scripts are lauded for being literate, Sorkin has been
criticized for often turning in scripts that are overwrought. His
mentor
William Goldman has commented
that normally in visual media speeches are avoided, but that Sorkin
has a talent for dialogue and gets away with breaking this
rule.
McFarland & Company has
published a collection of essays of criticism of Sorkin's works by
various writers titled
Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the
Politics, Poetics and Sleight of Hand in the Films and Television
Series and a book of criticism of
The West Wing by
Melissa Crawley titled
Mr. Sorkin Goes to Washington: Shaping
the President on Television's the West Wing. A collection of
essays about
The West Wing has been published by
Syracuse University Press as a
book titled
The West Wing: The American Presidency as
Television Drama.
Personal life
From 1996–2005, he was married to Julia Bingham. They have one
daughter, Roxy, born in 2000. He has dated
Kristin Chenoweth, the actress who played
Annabeth Schott on
The West Wing, and has reportedly dated
Maureen Dowd.
A consistent supporter of the Democratic Party, Sorkin has made
substantial political campaign contributions to Democratic
candidates between 1999 and 2007, according to CampaignMoney.com.
During the
2004 US presidential
election campaign, the liberal advocacy group
MoveOn's
political action committee
enlisted Sorkin and Rob Reiner to create one of their anti-Bush
campaign advertisements.
In August
2008, Sorkin was involved in a Generation Obama event at the Fine Arts
Theatre in Beverly Hills, California
, participating in a panel discussion subsequent to
a screening of Frank Capra's
Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington.
In 1987, Sorkin started experimenting with marijuana and cocaine.
He has said that in
freebase
cocaine he found a drug that gave him relief from certain
nervous tensions he deals with on a regular basis. In 1995, he
checked into rehab at the Hazelden Institute in Minnesota, on the
advice of his then girlfriend and soon to be wife Julia Bingham, to
try and beat his addiction to cocaine. In 2001, Sorkin along with
colleagues
John Spencer and
Martin Sheen received the Phoenix
Rising Award for their personal victories over substance abuse.
However,
two months later on April 15, 2001, Sorkin was arrested when guards
at a security checkpoint at the Burbank Airport found hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, and crack cocaine in his carry-on bag when a metal
crack pipe set off the gate’s metal
detector. He was ordered to a
drug diversion program.
Saturday Night Live parodied the
highly publicized event in a comedy sketch called "The West Wing"
where the U.S. President played by
Darrell Hammond does a "Walk and Talk"
through the corridors of the White House while tripping on
mushrooms, accompanied by host
Pierce
Brosnan.
Sorkin continued working on
The West Wing, and his
workaholic habits and drug-taking were both reported to have
contributed to the break-down of his marriage, which ended in
divorce. There have been no public reports of any further drug
use.
Credits
Television series
- Sports Night (1998–2000)
creator, writer (40 episodes), executive producer (45
episodes)
- The West Wing
(1999–2006) creator, writer (1999–2003, 86 episodes), executive
producer (1999–2003, 89 episodes)
- Studio 60 on the
Sunset Strip (2006–2007) creator, writer (22 episodes),
executive producer (22 episodes)
Films
Plays
Uncredited work as script doctor
References
Further information
External links
Wikis
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