Aaron Sorkin

• 1. Introduction

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  Aaron Sorkin, born in Manhattan on the 9th of June 1961, discovered his calling by accident. One weekend he was house-sitting for a friend, found a typewriter, and started typing. Years later he described the feeling as "a phenomenal confidence and a kind of joy that he had never experienced before in his life". At that moment he was an actor with no steady work. He would go on to win an Academy Award, a BAFTA, three Golden Globes and five Primetime Emmy Awards. His characters talk quickly, argue in long speeches and rarely pause for breath. How did a bartender who scribbled plays on napkins become a writer whose style people can recognise on sight? What did it cost him, and what do his collaborators say about how he works?

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• 2. The Understudy

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  Sorkin has called himself the understudy, because his older brother Daniel died at birth. He grew up in Scarsdale, a New York suburb, in a house full of lawyers. His father was a copyright lawyer who had fought in World War II and attended college on the G.I. Bill. His mother taught school, and his sister and surviving brother both became lawyers. His paternal grandfather helped found the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

  The theatre pulled him in early. His parents took him to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and That Championship Season. In eighth grade he played General Bullmoose in the musical Li'l Abner. At Scarsdale High School he was vice president of the drama club in his last two years, and he graduated in 1979.

  Syracuse University began badly. In his first year he failed a core class, and the drama department barred students from the stage until the core requirements were finished. Since he wanted to act, the setback stung. He came back for his second year determined to do better and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in musical theatre. His teacher Arthur Storch kept telling him he could be far better than he was. On the last day of classes, Sorkin asked how, and Storch answered, "Dare to fail".

  The 1980s were lean. In New York he took whatever work came: delivering singing telegrams, driving a limousine, handing out flyers for a hunting-and-fishing show, and touring Alabama with the children's company Traveling Playhouse. He also tended bar at Broadway's Palace Theatre. Out of that scramble came a first play, Removing All Doubt, which he mailed to Storch and which students at Syracuse staged in 1984.

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• 3. Cocktail Napkins

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  In 1988, a one-act play called Hidden in This Picture opened off-off-Broadway at the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theatre Bar in New York. Together with his first play, it earned Sorkin a theatrical agent. Producer John A. McQuiggan saw it and asked him to expand it into a full-length play, Making Movies.

  His next play grew from a phone call. His sister Deborah, a Boston University law graduate, had joined the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps for three years. She told him she was headed to Guantanamo Bay to defend Marines who had nearly killed a fellow Marine in a hazing ordered by a superior. Sorkin began sketching the story on cocktail napkins during his shifts at the Palace Theatre. At home he typed the scraps into a computer and rewrote them many times. The result was A Few Good Men.

  Producer David Brown bought the film rights in 1988, before the play had even opened, in a deal reported as well into six figures. Brown had read a newspaper article about Hidden in This Picture and then learned of Sorkin's courtroom play. Directed by Don Scardino and starring Tom Hulce, A Few Good Men opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre in late 1989 and ran for 497 performances. Making Movies reached the Promenade Theatre in 1990.

  Hollywood was slower to commit. TriStar Pictures turned down Brown's pitch for a film because no star was attached. Then Alan Horn of Castle Rock Entertainment telephoned, eager to make it, and the producing partner Rob Reiner chose to direct.

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• 4. The Castle Rock Apprenticeship

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  Sorkin taught himself screenplay format from a book, drafting his adaptation in his Manhattan apartment. Castle Rock then put him under contract and flew him to its Los Angeles offices for several months of work with Reiner. There he befriended the veteran screenwriter William Goldman, who became his mentor and helped him turn a stage play into a screenplay. He also met Julia Bingham, a lawyer in the company's business affairs department, who later became his wife.

  A Few Good Men reached cinemas in 1992 with Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon. It earned $243 million worldwide.

  Goldman next handed Sorkin the premise for a thriller, Malice. Sorkin wrote two drafts, then had to step away to finish the first film. Scott Frank wrote two drafts in his place, and Sorkin returned to carry the script through to the final shooting version. Harold Becker directed the 1993 film with Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin. Reviews were mixed. Vincent Canby called it deviously entertaining, Roger Ebert gave it two stars out of four, and Peter Travers later wrote that it had suspense but no staying power.

  The American President was his last Castle Rock screenplay, again with Goldman advising. It took several years, and the draft began at 385 pages before shrinking to a shooting script of about 120. Kenneth Turan called the finished film genial and entertaining. Together, the three films grossed roughly $400 million.

  In the second half of the 1990s Sorkin worked as a script doctor. He wrote quips for Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage in The Rock, contributed to the comedy Excess Baggage, and rewrote scenes for Will Smith in Enemy of the State. He also worked with Warren Beatty on several scripts, including Bulworth in 1998. Another Beatty project, Ocean of Storms, never went into production, and Sorkin once sued Beatty over pay before settling and returning to the script.

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• 5. Three Series

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  During the writing of The American President, Sorkin lived at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles and worked late with ESPN on the television, watching SportsCenter replays on a loop. He wanted a film about a sports show but could not shape it, so he built a television comedy, Sports Night, instead. It premiered on ABC in the fall of 1998. Sorkin fought the network over its laugh track. Salon's Joyce Millman called it "the most unconvincing laugh track you've ever heard". It was dialed back and gone by the end of season one. ABC conceded the point in season two, but cancelled the series after two seasons for low ratings.

  The idea for The West Wing came in 1997, when Sorkin arrived at a lunch with producer John Wells with nothing prepared. In a panic he pitched a show about the senior staff of the White House, recycling ideas from his research visits there. Wells took it to NBC, which asked him to wait because of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. A year later the network said yes, and the pilot aired in the fall of 1999.

  The debut season won nine Primetime Emmy Awards, then a record for one season. The writing prize went to the episode "In Excelsis Deo", credited to Sorkin and Rick Cleveland. The story drew on Cleveland's father, a Korean War veteran who spent his last years on the street. Afterward, a newspaper reported that Sorkin hustled Cleveland off the stage before he could speak. Sorkin argued online that he assigns story credit on a rotating basis "by way of a gratuity", and later apologized.

  Sorkin wrote 87 screenplays for the show, nearly every episode of its first four seasons. He joked that of 88 episodes he worked on, they were on time and on budget "never, not once". In 2003 he and executive producer Thomas Schlamme left, and Wells took over. Sorkin said watching the fifth season was "like watching somebody make out with my girlfriend". He did return for a cameo in the finale, as a guest at the inauguration of Matthew Santos.

  In October 2005 a pilot script titled Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip started circulating in Hollywood and online. NBC bought the series after a bidding war with CBS, for a near-record license fee. Renamed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, it aired on the 18th of September 2006 to more than 12 million viewers. Then the audience fell away. In January 2007 Sorkin criticised the press for stressing low ratings and for leaning on blogs and unemployed comedy writers as sources. The series lasted one season.

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• 6. Walk and Talk

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  "You can't handle the truth!" is the line most people connect with A Few Good Men. The West Wing episode "Two Cathedrals" produced another, a partly Latin tirade against God that ends with the words "You get Hoynes!" Sorkin's trademark is dialogue that moves fast and monologues that run long.

  The visual counterpart is the walk and talk, a technique Schlamme made famous. It is a single long tracking shot in which several characters talk while moving through a set. People join and leave the conversation while the camera never cuts. Goldman observed that visual media normally avoids speeches, yet Sorkin gets away with them.

  The working relationship behind it was a division of labor. Sorkin met Schlamme in early 1998 while Sports Night was being prepared. Schlamme handled the look of the shows, worked with other directors, made casting and design decisions, and attended budget meetings. Sorkin stuck to writing. Their partnership lasted nearly a decade across three series.

  His process is physical. He stands up and speaks his dialogue aloud as he builds it, and he once chain smoked through long hours plotting scripts. He rarely plans far ahead. A New York Times writer reported that The West Wing was never plotted more than a few weeks out. Sorkin said there simply was not time, and that he prefers not to answer questions until he must. One critic argued this habit can produce ill-advised plot turns. Former West Wing writers complained that he was stingy with writing credit. Sorkin told GQ in 2008 that his staff offers great ideas but the scripts "aren't written by committee".

  Criticism has also targeted his scripts for sometimes being overwrought. Several commentators have faulted his female characters as subordinate, scatterbrained, or overly emotional and in need of rescue by men. In 2012 and 2013 a fan posted a YouTube compilation of Sorkin reusing lines of dialogue. The creator called it a playful excursion rather than a critique, and Sorkin contacted him personally.

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• 7. Real People on Screen

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  Producer Fred Zollo first approached Sorkin in the 1990s about adapting a memoir by Elma Farnsworth, wife of the inventor Philo Farnsworth. By 2003 Sorkin was writing a script about the patent fight between Farnsworth and RCA's David Sarnoff over television technology. New Line Cinema acquired the film version, but Sorkin reshaped it as a play after Dublin's Abbey Theatre commissioned a work from him. The Farnsworth Invention ran at La Jolla Playhouse from the 20th of February to the 25th of March 2007, with Steven Spielberg producing. On Broadway, a stagehand strike delayed it, and it opened at the Music Box Theatre on the 3rd of December 2007 and closed on the 2nd of March 2008.

  In 2004 Universal commissioned him to adapt George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War for Tom Hanks's company Playtone. It follows a Texas congressman who funded the CIA's secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Mike Nichols directed, and the 2007 film earned five Golden Globe nominations, including one for Sorkin's screenplay.

  In August 2008 Sorkin agreed to write for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about the start of Facebook. David Fincher's The Social Network, drawn from Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, opened on the 1st of October 2010. It brought Sorkin an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. A year later he was nominated in the same categories for co-writing Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis's account of the Oakland Athletics' 2002 season and general manager Billy Beane. Peter Travers called the script "dynamite".

  Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle in 2015, adapted Walter Isaacson's biography. Sorkin hesitated, comparing it to writing about the Beatles, with so many knowledgeable and devoted fans that he saw "a minefield of disappointment". He won a Golden Globe, though some journalists were surprised he drew no Oscar nomination.

  His television attempt at realism came with The Newsroom. Sorkin shadowed the crews of Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball with Chris Matthews, quizzed the Parker Spitzer staff, and watched programs at Fox News and CNN. He set the show in the recent past so that it could follow real stories as they unfolded. HBO ordered a ten-episode first season in September 2011, and the series premiered in June 2012. It ran three seasons.

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• 8. Setbacks and Second Acts

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  In 1987 Sorkin started using marijuana and cocaine, and he later said cocaine eased nervous tension. In 1995, on the advice of Julia Bingham, he went to the Hazelden Institute in Minnesota for rehabilitation. He and Bingham married in 1996. Their daughter Roxanne Sophie, called Roxy, was born in November 2000. A son they planned to name Charlie had died before birth.

  In early 2001, Sorkin, John Spencer and Martin Sheen received the Phoenix Rising Award for overcoming drug abuse. Then on the 15th of April 2001, security guards at Hollywood Burbank Airport found hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, crack cocaine and a pipe in his possession. A court ordered him into a drug diversion program while he kept working on The West Wing. In a Syracuse commencement speech on the 13th of May 2012, he said he had been off cocaine for eleven years. He and Bingham divorced in 2005, and his workaholic habits and drug use were reported as partial causes.

  In November 2022 a stroke caused by hypertension struck him. He called it a loud wake-up call and responded by quitting smoking, changing his diet and exercising daily.

  His career, meanwhile, turned toward directing. Molly's Game, adapted from Molly Bloom's memoir and starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, marked his debut in December 2017 and earned him his third Oscar nomination. The Trial of the Chicago 7 took far longer. Spielberg first raised it in 2006, and Sorkin recalled leaving that meeting not knowing what the hell he was talking about. After years of delay and an announced plan for Paul Greengrass to direct, Sorkin wrote and directed it himself. It reached Netflix in 2020 and won him a Golden Globe for screenplay. Being the Ricardos, about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, opened in December 2021 with Nicole Kidman, who replaced Cate Blanchett, and Javier Bardem.

  On Broadway, his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird opened at the Shubert Theatre on the 13th of December 2018, with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch and Bartlett Sher directing. A revised book for Camelot followed at Lincoln Center in April 2023. In September 2025 came the official announcement of The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network built on the documents known as the Facebook Files.

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