Rearranging Electrons

AN INTERVIEW with AARON SORKIN

In the fall of 2022, in the midst of his rewrites on the book for Camelot, our editors spoke to Aaron Sorkin, the Academy Award-and Emmywinning screenwriter, director, and playwright whose credits include A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Newsroom, the stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a multitude of other iconic shows, films, and plays.

JOHN GUARE: One of my favorite things that I learned about you in my preparation for today was that you sold intermission drinks at the Palace Theatre. I sold intermission drinks and checked coats at the National Theatre when I was at Georgetown.

AARON SORKIN: We are brothers, then.

JG: Something most of our readers won’t know about you is that you went to Syracuse University to study musical theater writing, of all things. What was the first musical you saw that made you say, “That’s where I want to be”?

AS: Before my family moved to Westchester, which we did when I was eight years old, I was growing up in Manhattan, going to a private school in the village called the Little Red School House, and one of my classmates, when I was four or five, was the son of Herschel Bernardi, who had just taken over from Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, and one Sunday we had a playdate. But there was some babysitter emergency, and whoever was looking after us had to park us backstage at the Imperial Theatre during Herschel Bernardi’s Sunday matinee. Now, my friend was used to being there—that was dad at the office. But I didn’t understand any of this. What I remember is just standing, frozen. Now I understand it was backstage, but back then I didn’t know what backstage was, and I was watching a guy in profile, singing “Miracle of Miracles” to an audience that I couldn’t see. I stood there watching, like I was watching somebody who had just stepped off a spaceship. I was mesmerized.

The first time I saw a musical and at least understood I’m sitting in a theater watching something onstage was Man of La Mancha. I remember sitting at the back of the balcony—those were the seats my family could afford. I saw the top of a bassoon just peeking out of the orchestra pit, and it gave me chills. I was somehow aware, at that moment, that there was something alive in this building. We were about to rearrange the electrons in this building somehow. And, sure enough, the scariest staircase in all of theater came down on chains, and the guys from the Spanish Inquisition came down into the dungeon. I think that, from that moment on, I just kept wanting to write Man of La Mancha and Don Quixote in some fashion, no matter what it was, whether it was The West Wing or A Few Good Men, or, now, Camelot.

JG: It’s interesting that you didn’t go into writing musicals immediately. Is Camelot your first musical to be produced?

AS: It is my first musical of any kind.

JG: Did you ever go to straight plays when you were a kid?

AS: My parents took me to the theater a lot. When they were a young couple, they got into the theatergoing habit. It was more affordable when they were newlyweds, but they took me a lot, and often took me to plays that I was too young to understand. Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when I was nine years old. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the sound of dialogue. It sounded like music to me. And I wanted to imitate that sound. As a result, what a line of dialogue sounds like is as important to me as what it means.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO: When you write, do you say the lines out loud?

AS: Yes, I do. I’m very physical when I’m writing. I do play all the parts. I’m talking out loud. I’m up and down from my desk, and I’m walking around—that is, if it’s going well. If it’s not going well, I’m just miserable, facedown on the couch. I’ve been asked if I get writer’s block—writer’s block is my default position.

JG: How old were you when you wrote A Few Good Men?

AS: When I started writing it I was twenty-four, and I was twenty-seven when it opened on Broadway.

JG: I read that it came out of a conversation with your sister, and I’ve always wanted to know what kind of research you did.

AS: A Few Good Men came out of a conversation with my sister at a family dinner. She had just graduated from law school and joined the Navy JAG corps and was involved with this case. I remember her saying, “You don’t know this, but the U.S. has a Navy base in Guantánamo Bay.” This was before Guantánamo Bay was the world’s most famous prison. The government's attorneys were all majors and captains, very high-ranking officers. My sister, who had just been in the JAG corps for seven months, was a lieutenant, as were the other defense lawyers. And I said, “Why are all the defense lawyers junior officers and all the prosecutors senior officers with years of experience?” And she said something that would end up being a line in the play and the movie. She said, “Probably to make sure it never sees the inside of a courtroom.” And then, suddenly, I had a play that I wanted to write. After that I got hold of transcripts from other court marshals and handbooks, things that I could grab some terminology from—the goal being that the audience thinks these guys know what they’re talking about.

JG: How long did it take you to write A Few Good Men, with all that research?

AS: I wrote it about twenty-five or thirty times. It took several years. This was my first play, so it was also me going to school. I was kind of learning how to write a play. While I’m very proud of it, and I had a great time doing it, it still feels a little like my high-school yearbook picture.

JG: How do you break down the spine of your lead character?

AS: I do worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something, and something is standing in the way of them getting it. The tactics that your protagonist uses to overcome the obstacle, that’s the character. Whether they succeed or fail doesn’t really matter.

JG: I think you’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who had William Goldman as a mentor, and I’m curious what you learned from someone who said that film writing is all action and no dialogue. What did you learn from Bill that makes him so important to you?

AS: I started learning from Bill Goldman before I even met him. He wrote a book that I strongly recommend to anyone who wants to be a screenwriter, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to be a dental hygienist. It’s just a fun read. It’s called Adventures in the Screen Trade. Before A Few Good Men went into rehearsal, and the script was kind of making its way around town, Bill Goldman read it and called me out of the blue and said, “You know, I’ve read your play, would you like to meet for lunch?” He took me under his wing, and until he passed away, just a few years ago, he was the first person I showed pages to, he was the person I talked to. JG: One of the things that you have become most famous for is pictures of worlds. What are you looking for when you’re setting out a world that you may not know very much about?

AS: Let’s assume we’re talking about nonfiction. At the beginning of the process, you don’t know what you’re looking for yet. You’re poking around with a flashlight and hoping you’ll trip over something that will give you some questions to ask. I like a place to feel real—but there’s a difference, from a dramatist’s standpoint, between truth and accuracy. Accuracy is what a journalist needs. I’ll give you a tiny example. Mark Zuckerberg was liveblogging on a Tuesday night when he was a sophomore at Harvard, because he had just had a date that didn’t go well and he was very angry, and he was drinking—and drinking to get drunk. I know this, because he tells us this in the live blog. So I imagined the date, and that’s what we open The Social Network with. Then we go to his dorm room, where he begins drinking and liveblogging and hacking into the student directories, or Facebooks, as they call them at Harvard, grabbing pictures of women students and using them to set up a Web site he called FaceMash, which is what they call a hot or not Web site that became so popular in just a matter of a few hours in the middle of the night on a Tuesday that it crashed the school’s whole computer system. Now, here’s my point. The way I started the scene in the script was we’re on his computer screen. He walks through the frame, powers up his computer, comes back in the frame, puts a glass down. Ice goes in the glass, vodka goes in the glass, orange juice goes in the glass—all while we’re hearing the voice-over of what he’s blogging. About two weeks before we started shooting, we found out that he was actually drinking beer that night. Beck’s, to be exact. And David Fincher, our director, whom I love, said, “Aaron, you know we’ve got to change it to beer, we’ve got to change it to Beck’s.” I urged David not to do that. It’s not just that the screwdriver is more visually interesting to make than opening a beer. It’s that having a beer doesn’t necessarily read to the audience as drinking to get drunk—that could just be a college kid who’s thirsty on a Tuesday night. What was important was that he was drunk. What was important was that he was drinking to get drunk. We needed that. I lost the argument, by the way—it’s a beer in the movie. And that was accurate. But what would have been more truthful was the vodka and orange juice. AG: What is it like to work on Camelot and be able to live in the truth part and not have to worry so much about the accuracy?

AS: Well, you’ve brought up an interesting thing. When Bart asked me if I wanted to write a new book for Camelot, I answered yes about as fast as a person could say yes. I knew that one of the things that I wanted to do was tell the story without any supernatural elements. The legend of King Arthur has been around for hundreds of years, centuries, and there are all kinds of tellings of the story, but in all of those tellings, as far as I know, there is magic involved. Merlin is a magician—he can turn Arthur into a hawk who flies above and see things. Morgan le Fay can build an invisible wall around Arthur to trap him in the forest. It’s a fairy tale. And it’s a really good fairy tale, but I thought it might be interesting to see how this story lands if it feels real, if it feels like it’s taking place in the world that we’re living in. In fact, Guenevere debunks the whole origin story of Arthur’s being able to take a sword out of a stone because he was the chosen one. She says that 9,999 people loosened it for him. I wanted them to be humans. Because, as sad as the end of the story may be, it is also meant to be inspirational—look what humans are capable of if we reach high. This is what I mean by I’ll try to write Don Quixote as many times as I can get away with.

AG: When I first heard that you were doing this show, it didn’t automatically make sense to me—Aaron Sorkin writing a musical set in a mythological place in the Middle Ages—but when I read the script, with its exploration of democracy and idealism, it seemed quintessentially Sorkin. So now that we’re speaking, the through line from Man of La Mancha to A Few Good Men to The Newsroom to Camelot feels so clear. Once the magic is stripped away, we are really talking about humanity and progress. AS: If magic is involved, I feel like the stakes aren’t as high. I found it exciting to turn a magical character into someone real. For instance, Morgan le Fay, Mordred’s mother. Traditionally, she’s magical and can do bad things to Arthur, but it also turns out, if you do some research, that she’s a scientist at a time when science hadn’t quite been invented yet. People who were scientists were just scary; they were like conspiracy theorists. So I thought it would be fun if she had no magical powers, but was a scientist, and also an opium addict and an alcoholic, so she talks through a kind of stoned haze about the new century, and how science is going to crack the world wide open. Also, I should mention that we’re not finished with the script yet. Well, for me scripts are never finished; they’re confiscated.

JG: By whom?

AS: By the director or the producer— somebody comes in and says, “Pencils down.” It’s either because the critics are coming, so we’ve got to freeze the show, or we’ve got to start shooting now.

JG: James Joyce would say that manuscripts were never finished, they were abandoned. But I like confiscated.

AS: I take a slightly more optimistic view.

JG: Another Lincoln Center playwright, Tom Stoppard, who is famous for writing about worlds outside himself, is at this point in his life writing plays that face up to something in his own life. You are one of the few playwrights who have not dipped into his past. Is there a Glass Menagerie waiting inside you somewhere?

AS: I’ll answer that. But first I’ll say really good weekend golfers look at professional golfers and say, “Those guys are playing a different game.” Professional golfers look at Tiger Woods in his prime and say, “That guy is playing a different game.” Tom Stoppard is playing a different game. Okay. As a playwright, he and Tony Kushner are simply in a league of their own. They are both Mozart living today. When we were rehearsing To Kill a Mockingbird, which we were doing at Lincoln Center, in the doorway, one day, came Tom Stoppard, who wanted to meet me and wish me luck. He had a play rehearsing down the hall. This guy that I worship, and I’m terrified of, was being really friendly to me. And then the first day of the first workshop of Camelot, Tom Stoppard shows up like Marley’s ghost. So, if nothing else, I kind of live to not embarrass myself in front of Tom Stoppard. Now, to answer your question, I am aware—and I’ve been aware for a long time—that I don’t write autobiographically, or don’t consciously write autobiographically, and I wonder if that’s a weakness of mine. Why can’t I get in touch with the kind of blood that’s running? Do I just not have an interesting story? I don’t know the answer. But you asked me is there a Glass Menagerie in my future—I hope so, because a lot of times when a playwright does that he ends up writing some of his best work. I think that my only connection to autobiography is that the protagonists that I write are my father. He’s no longer alive, but my father, like Don Quixote, always lived with one foot in a different century. He was just a good man, and a very intelligent man, a lawyer. Goodness and civility were always important to him.

JG: He sounds like Atticus Finch.

AS: Atticus was one of his favorite characters. Yes, he’s like Atticus Finch. He’s like Jed Bartlet. And, in this iteration of Camelot, King Arthur. AG: Is he the reason that you’re such a Romantic?

AS: Yes, I’m happy to give all the credit to my father. Romantic, idealistic. And that’s another reason the whole idea of Camelot is a good fit. I tend to write romantically and idealistically.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, 1964, by Salvador Dalí, watercolor with pen and ink © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society.

Photo: Private Collection, courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries/Bridgeman Images.

Aaron Sorkin © Miller Mobley / AUGUST