Episode 987 - Aaron Sorkin
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:Everybody good?
Marc:I'm alright, I guess.
Marc:I don't know why I can't change.
Marc:There's some things I can't change.
Marc:Aaron Sorkin is my guest today.
Marc:We recorded the conversation upstairs at the Schubert Theater in New York City where To Kill a Mockingbird is currently running.
Marc:We recorded it a while back.
Marc:I did want to put this out there before you guys get to that.
Marc:There's a lot of conversation about the screenwriter and novelist William Goldman, who was a...
Marc:A mentor to Aaron Sorkin.
Marc:He passed away.
Marc:William Goldman passed away about a week after Aaron and I had this conversation.
Marc:Great writer.
Marc:Great guy, apparently, according to Aaron.
Marc:But I just wanted you to know that Aaron was not being glib and not recognizing his passing.
Marc:Obviously, it was because this was recorded a couple months ago.
Marc:All right.
Marc:You got that?
Marc:I just need you to know that.
Marc:For those of you who have been like, wow, he seems sort of kind of like he's just not acknowledging it.
Marc:That's because it hadn't happened.
Marc:The sad passing of Mr. Goldman.
Marc:That said, I'm also beginning.
Marc:I've just done.
Marc:I don't know how it went yet because I'm recording this before I do it.
Marc:But last night was the first of the series of shows.
Marc:I'll be doing a dynasty typewriter here in Los Angeles.
Marc:If you'd like to come, there's dates up on the website at WTF pod dot com slash tour.
Marc:I'm doing a series.
Marc:I think I'm doing five.
Marc:including last night.
Marc:Let's see.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it'll be February 10th, February 17th, February 24th and March 17th here in Los Angeles at a small theater called the Dynasty Typewriter.
Marc:You can go to WTF pod dot com slash tour to get tickets for those shows.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That's out there.
Marc:Also, I guess I can go ahead and push the other dates.
Marc:Wheeler Opera House, Aspen, Colorado, March 23rd and Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado on March 24th.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I'll be honest with you.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I just, I've gotten myself just all strung out again.
Marc:I'm just like, I'm doing nicotine lozenges and I'm on about a gallon of black tea a day.
Marc:I'm just like, and it's amazing because I'm sitting around and I'm wondering why am I so anxious?
Marc:Why am I so jacked up all the time?
Marc:Why am I so fucking aggravated?
Marc:And I just refuse to acknowledge what's causing it.
Marc:I mean, seriously, this is a it's just patterns, man.
Marc:It's patterns.
Marc:I mean, I'm like I'm I'm a caffeine and nicotine sponge that I have to keep soaked all day, every day, all the time.
Marc:I am a nicotine and caffeine sponge.
Marc:I figured out a way to ride a T high, a loose T high.
Marc:And, you know, I was a while back.
Marc:I think I told you about it.
Marc:I was smoking a few cigars.
Marc:I don't do it socially.
Marc:I don't do it for affectation.
Marc:I do it for the buzz.
Marc:And I was doing two or three a day.
Marc:And I'm like, fuck this.
Marc:I got to get back on the lozenges to get off the cigars.
Marc:And now I'm just...
Marc:fucking soaked in it cellularly soaked nicotine and caffeine but i just it it takes me forever to realize that's it man that's it and that that in and of itself is the beautiful denial mind inside the addict head
Marc:anything to protect my desire to stay jacked to protect my process this is my process this is my job is to figure out how to stay jacked and ride that high ride that balance between caffeine and nicotine
Marc:Without coffee.
Marc:So there's a lot of exotic teas going on.
Marc:Many different kinds.
Marc:Today I have had Earl Grey Irish breakfast.
Marc:Earl Grey creme.
Marc:And now I'm doing English breakfast.
Marc:And these are two cup glasses.
Marc:12 ounce motherfuckers.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Why do I keep doing this?
Marc:It's just, oh, you know, there's there's time in between.
Marc:But Jesus, I always get to this point.
Marc:I mean, why keep doing it if it is clearly uncomfortable?
Marc:Good question.
Marc:Well, at least that's consistent.
Marc:That must it's the consistency of the discomfort.
Marc:right but also it's the habit the ritual i mean tea like if you get into it it's got a lot of you know got you got certain strainers you got you know teaspoons how much steam in the milk got an amazing frother i think they don't even make it anymore i think it's a norelco frother and it's the best thing so i'm frothing putting that in the tea
Marc:It's just the habit, the ritual, man.
Marc:It's just the... What it really is, it's the discomfort that you experience without anything, but then you add that layer of festering.
Marc:The festering.
Marc:Festering for the relief.
Marc:And then the relief.
Marc:Getting well.
Marc:And you just, like, you earn it.
Marc:You earn it by needing the shit.
Marc:I mean, thankfully, it's just this shit, not other shit, but it's just, man, it's just...
Marc:Round and round.
Marc:Patterns of life.
Marc:Circling the drain and I'm the drain.
Marc:The hole.
Marc:Come on.
Marc:I gotta get it from the outside.
Marc:I can't get it from the inside, right?
Marc:I mean, do we really change?
Marc:I mean, I'm 55 and I've been beating the shit out of myself lately.
Marc:Do we really change?
Marc:Can we really change?
Marc:I think yes.
Marc:The bottom line is eventually we get tired, right?
Marc:You get tired of the repetition, tired from age, tired from the distractions, and eventually something gives or we just give up.
Marc:Then we change, relax, humbled, or maybe just don't do things anymore.
Marc:That's really, I think, the most obvious way that you change.
Marc:We stop ourselves from
Marc:from taking the action, from saying the thing, from making the face.
Marc:You stifle yourself, right?
Marc:That's a learned thing.
Marc:It's called behaving yourself.
Marc:So that's changing, right?
Marc:You can change by knowing your choices and making the right one.
Marc:But see, even that, that can get exhausting, right?
Marc:Indecision.
Marc:Then you're back to giving up.
Marc:Tired.
Marc:Letting go.
Marc:Fuck, man.
Marc:Too thinky.
Marc:It's just like the longer you live, the clearer it becomes that change is just sometimes this gradual thing.
Marc:It has nothing to do with anything but age and being humbled by the wheel of time.
Marc:Which is good.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:Let it happen.
Marc:Be aware of it.
Marc:Conserve that energy you have left for the last few laps.
Marc:And, you know, sex and running and engaging in what your passions are, if you know what they are.
Marc:I don't want this to be a cynical, dark thing.
Marc:Because I'm not always aware of that, man.
Marc:I'm just going fast.
Marc:Going fast all the time.
Marc:Yeah, I just backed my car.
Marc:It was rainy, and I backed my car into another car, and I dented it.
Marc:The plastic bumper just buckled in.
Marc:Is that the word?
Marc:It's dented, but it's plastic.
Marc:Maybe it'll pop out.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:It's just I can't have nice things.
Marc:I turn everything to shit within months or days even.
Marc:New boots, I fuck those up.
Marc:I get shit on them somehow.
Marc:Scratch them up.
Marc:New car.
Marc:I have no luck with that.
Marc:I just have no luck with it.
Marc:I don't know if I have generally... I don't have good luck in general.
Marc:I know that about myself.
Marc:I think the only luck that I really had, to be honest with you, was the timing of this podcast.
Marc:Oddly, Aaron Sorkin talks a bit about luck and about patronage and about it's just if you really think about your life, I don't know what life you're living, but I know this from from both sides of it, that when you think about people who have helped you along during the way, why would they do that?
Marc:It's weird that most of the time the things that change your life are just people that choose to show up for you somehow or to give you time, to give you attention, to give you some sort of lesson.
Marc:But they don't have to do that.
Marc:It's weird because I experience it now.
Marc:People approach me for advice and, you know, I don't, what do I know?
Marc:What do I know fucking about anything?
Marc:I know what I did.
Marc:I know how, you know, what happened to me, but there's no system to it.
Marc:But, you know, if I think about the people when I was wandering through...
Marc:Trying to figure out who I was.
Marc:I mean, I had teachers that were impressive, but like there was a guy who owned a bookstore, Gus, and I don't know why he chose to talk to me, but he did and he changed my life.
Marc:I don't know if it was effortless on his part or if I was annoying or something, but he didn't have to do it.
Marc:And it's sort of like even meeting my producer, Brendan McDonald.
Marc:We did a radio show together, and then we ended up working together now for almost a decade on this show and then another bunch of years before that.
Marc:Is it fortuitous?
Marc:Is that the word?
Marc:Yeah, I think that's the word.
Marc:If you really look at these moments in your life, I guess these can cut either way, really.
Marc:They can be bad luck or good luck.
Marc:I've had my share of both, but the fortuitous moments are usually relationships.
Marc:They're meetings.
Marc:They're people that change your life.
Marc:And they don't have to, but sometimes they do.
Marc:You should have gratitude for that.
Marc:You know, because if you've got the goods, that doesn't necessarily mean it's enough.
Marc:Whatever the goods you have.
Marc:I'm not an advice guy, but I'll tell you, man.
Marc:Yeah, you can do all the work.
Marc:You can put all the work in and it might not manifest, man, because you need you need you need someone to go.
Marc:Let me help you out.
Marc:Let me give you a leg up.
Marc:Or you need that weird bit of timing where you just sort of like you got in the pocket.
Marc:The best luck we ever had was we put this podcast up when the landscape was pretty sparse.
Marc:It was still sort of the wild frontier.
Marc:There had been podcasts generation before and we got in the game and we kind of carved out our niche and it had an impact and it inspired a lot of other people.
Marc:And that just that timing was good.
Marc:The cosmic timing of my incredible bottoming out financially and emotionally.
Marc:just happened to coincide with the amazing opportunity of getting this thing out there.
Marc:That was fortuitous.
Marc:But there's also those relationships like with my producer, Brendan, or people I've met in my life.
Marc:A lot of times those are work relationships.
Marc:A lot of times you have belief in each other and you want to work together.
Marc:But sometimes there's just some people that drop into your life.
Marc:They don't have to help you.
Marc:They don't know that they're helping you.
Marc:And they change the entire fucking direction of it.
Marc:Thank those people if you know who they are and you still can.
Marc:So as I said before, I talked to Aaron Sorkin at the theater in New York.
Marc:The Schubert Theater was upstairs in a very sort of nice, antique, old room that I believe it was the Schubert family.
Marc:It was the main guy's office or one of their brother's apartment.
Marc:I don't know, but it was old-timey and old New York, and it was very exciting to be in the structure.
Marc:And I didn't know what to really expect from Aaron.
Marc:Rarely do I make assumptions that are correct.
Marc:I thought he would be intimidating.
Marc:I thought he would be hard to to sort of connect with.
Marc:But it was not the case.
Marc:He seemed to be very humble and very engaged, you know, and talking about this play, which is still obviously very relevant.
Marc:And, you know, certainly on this day, Martin Luther King's day.
Marc:Something to remember is that equality exists and that intolerance that that's that's the thing, really, not just equality, but tolerance is necessary for democracy to function.
Marc:You know, and whatever you think is going on in this country, whether you're like, it's never really been a democracy or you believe in it.
Marc:The thing that seems to have gone by the wayside with this administration, with this monster and his type of I don't need I don't even think I don't think you can call it leadership.
Marc:His example is that tolerance is no longer necessary, that you can say what you feel.
Marc:If you feel hate and you feel racism or you feel sexism or you feel that you're being constricted by diversity, you should just say it and act on those impulses.
Marc:Tolerance of diversity is necessary.
Marc:Tolerance of people in general is necessary for democracy to work.
Marc:It just is.
Marc:But now we live in an age where many people, too many, are tired of it.
Marc:They've exhausted themselves of their ability to be tolerant.
Marc:which is a, you know, it's a learned thing.
Marc:And it's a good thing to know and have and eventually feel.
Marc:Look, this conversation with Aaron, you know, covers a little bit about the play, a little bit about his life, a little bit about politics here and there.
Marc:Obviously, the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird are totally relevant today.
Marc:The play was terrific.
Marc:And as I said earlier, we talked a lot in this conversation about William Goldman, who passed away about a week after we had this conversation.
Marc:To Kill a Mockingbird starring Jeff Daniels and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on Harper Lee's book, is now playing on Broadway.
Marc:I would highly recommend it.
Marc:And this is me talking to Aaron Sorkin.
Marc:the fucked up thing about it is like is that you wake up and you look at that news and you have to realize like i still have to have a fucking day that's right you know like what what do i do now right listen here's yeah here's my thing okay um
Guest:One day Trump is going to not be president.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Two years from now or four years from now or six years from now or two weeks from now.
Marc:We're hoping that it doesn't change so drastically that he's there for much longer.
Guest:What then do we do about the tens of millions of people who voted for him?
Guest:You know, his whole campaign began with our worst problem is political correctness, right?
Guest:And our worst problem is everybody's too polite.
Guest:And I understand that political correctness can be irritating sometimes, but that's probably the worst thing it is, and it's certainly a silly thing to base a presidential campaign on.
Guest:But as long as it's on the table—
Guest:isn't the worst form of or the most dangerous form of political correctness right now not calling out america's academic epidemic of dumbness that we have a huge huge dumb problem that is a a plain threat to national security and the only thing i can think of
Guest:To combat that is, well, we have to take teaching civics seriously.
Guest:You know, it has to be taught the way we teach math.
Guest:And I think that people are starting to catch on to this.
Guest:Every time I hear the word strategy applied to anything that Donald Trump does,
Guest:There is no strategy.
Guest:He's not playing a game of chess.
Guest:It's exactly what it looks like.
Guest:It's a man with an observable psychiatric disorder, which I also understand because we're not doctors.
Guest:We're not supposed to say it.
Guest:But I'm a parent.
Guest:Every parent knows isn't a doctor and can say my kid is sick and can't go to school today.
Guest:You don't need to be a doctor to recognize when someone is bleeding or someone is limping, and you do not need to be a doctor to recognize.
Guest:that the man has a serious psychiatric disorder and is stupid as hell.
Guest:So I don't know what we'd do about the dumb problem because that's the last PC wall to come down.
Guest:I didn't like it when Democrats jumped up and down on Hillary Clinton for a basket of deplorables.
Guest:It was a self-evidently truthful statement.
Marc:The problem with the dumb problem is now with conspiracy theories and the access to the Internet and the sort of weird, almost spiritual satisfaction that they get from the closure of
Marc:that conspiracy theories provide them is that there's an empowered dumbness, is that now they're just putting those things in their head and they're like, I got an answer to that.
Marc:This false equivalency is masquerading as intelligence.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Guest:It's all about the
Guest:The unseen, unnamed they.
Guest:They do this.
Guest:They want this idiot notion of the deep state.
Guest:The crazy conspiracies that...
Guest:are going to get somebody killed if they haven't already.
Guest:A guy showed up to the pizza place with a gun to the synagogue.
Marc:It's so funny.
Marc:As a lefty guy who had a different they, that whatever my assumptions about deep state were, when it started to be revealed that there wasn't one, I was a little disappointed.
Yeah.
Marc:I felt like all the weird CIA conspiracies we had when we were kids, it's sort of like, well, why aren't they doing something?
Guest:Well, as a lefty who had that they, how do you feel when suddenly the right is accusing an organization like the FBI of being run by liberals?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because we always thought the CIA, which were up to no good to begin with, and, you know, taking and making assassinations, restructuring foreign governments or whatnot, that, like, I thought, well, if those are the same ones and they're pissed off about Trump, they should do something about it.
Marc:And when they failed, I'm like, no, fuck, there's no they, is there?
Guest:Why are some people... I am...
Guest:I grew up surrounded by people smarter than I am.
Guest:Where was this?
Guest:Just up in Scarsdale in Westchester.
Guest:Everyone in my family was smarter than I am.
Guest:My circle of friends, they were smarter than I am.
Guest:I mean, in measurable ways.
Guest:I think I was the mascot or something in the group.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:smart people don't make me feel dumb I don't resent it I enjoy it I'm entertained by it and the characters I you know some people some writers write characters who are tougher than they are cooler than they are yeah have superpowers where they don't yeah I write characters who are smarter than I am yeah
Guest:I always enjoy the sound of smart people arguing.
Guest:Have you thought about it this way?
Guest:That kind of thing.
Guest:So what is the difference between people who admire smart people, who want the president of the United States to be smarter than they are?
Guest:That gives them a feeling of security.
Guest:And people who are who hate people who are smarter than they are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's the difference between I want Barack Obama and I want Donald Trump?
Marc:Well, I think there's something about the people who trust their guts.
Marc:That there's a sort of like, you know, like I got good instincts.
Marc:I know better for me.
Marc:You know, we've always done it this way.
Marc:You know, and it was just a matter of time before these smarties fucked everything up and we can finally show them how it's really done.
Guest:Well, I think that you've put your finger on something.
Guest:I think, by the way, that that I think that George W. Bush and Donald Trump did not get elected for the same reasons at all.
Guest:I think with W. there was a guy you want to have a beer with factor.
Guest:And I think with Donald Trump, first of all, the man was not elected because he tapped into the anxiety, the economic anxiety of the forgotten middle class.
Guest:He has never mentioned ever the economic anxiety of the forgotten middle class.
Guest:He only ever talks about himself or his enemies, ever.
Guest:Donald Trump, I think, simply was an excellent stick with which to poke liberals in the eye.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:And I think that it's not about hope.
Marc:It's not about...
Guest:being uplifted i think the nihilism at the core of it all that there's enough people in this country for whatever reason have been shattered uh spiritually emotionally and psychologically that they're at the core of it is like fuck them let's get it over with well there's and now i'll bring it to kill a mockingbird there's a moment uh in the second act when jeff when atticus uh snaps uh and says to bob yule um i mean through great teeth um uh
Guest:There's nothing I can do about your debilitating inferiority complex, and I've decided it's no longer my problem.
Guest:I think that there are millions and millions of people in this country who have a debilitating inferiority complex that all they can think is you think you're better than me.
Guest:You think you're better than me.
Guest:You look down your nose at us people in the flyover states.
Guest:And if you think that way, it will eat you alive, and you will elect Donald Trump.
Marc:No, no, I think that's absolutely right.
Marc:I saw the show last night.
Marc:I thought it was great.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:Like, you know, it was one of those moments where they're there.
Marc:It brought a lot of clarity to both sides of the struggle in a way.
Marc:It was at least a bit humanizing of that side.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that must have been a struggle.
Yeah.
Guest:Listen, it wasn't a struggle to humanize the other side.
Guest:The play doesn't forgive the other side.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:It's not apologizing for the other side.
Marc:It's putting a human face on the other side.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But there's moments in it that I was going to ask you about because…
Marc:You know, I'm a smart guy, but I don't know that I've read the book and I'm not sure I saw the movie.
Marc:So I'm literally coming to the story through your show in a lot of ways.
Marc:That was my first full experience of the story of Atticus and the story of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Marc:Now...
Marc:my question is how much, because I know obviously the, the timing of this is, is essential.
Marc:I mean, you made a decision that, you know, this was the adaptation you were going to make because it spoke to what we're going through.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And what was that process?
Guest:That process was this, first of all, um, uh, it, it's interesting talking to somebody who didn't walk into the theater with any preconception of what's going to happen.
Guest:And ask me what you need.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'd love to.
Guest:Um, uh, uh,
Guest:the process was this the the the first thing i did uh was uh that my first draft wasn't good at all uh because all i did was really was take the book kind of take the best of the book the the all-star scenes yeah um uh stand them up and and say it was a play uh and it it was a
Guest:It was the greatest hits album done by a cover band.
Guest:Really, the best you could say about it was that it was harmless, which is, I think, the worst thing you could say about a play.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was our producer, Scott Rudin, who gave me the following note.
Guest:Atticus can't be Atticus for the entire play.
Guest:He has to become Atticus.
Guest:And I thought, you know, that's obvious, of course.
Guest:I understand plays.
Guest:The protagonist...
Guest:has to be put through something.
Guest:He has to have a flaw and he has to be changed by the end of the play.
Guest:How did Harper Lee get away with having Atticus be the same person for the entire book?
Guest:How did Horton Foote, who wrote the movie, get away with having Gregory Peck be the same person for the entire movie?
Guest:And the answer was, well, Atticus isn't the protagonist in the book or the movie.
Guest:Scout, his daughter, is.
Guest:And Atticus is a kind of...
Guest:Father knows best, godlike figure.
Guest:In the book and in the movie, Atticus has the answers.
Guest:In the play that I wrote, he struggles with the other questions.
Guest:I wanted him to be the protagonist.
Guest:So I needed to give him a flaw and what would that be?
Guest:How do you take one of the most iconic characters in literature who has no flaws and give him a flaw and expect to get out alive?
Guest:Well, so I reread the book
Guest:for the 19th time now and uh and something really struck me it Atticus keeps saying to his kids that there's goodness in everyone that to really understand somebody you got to crawl around inside their skin yeah for a while he defends Bob Yule who's a member of the Klan by saying you got to understand he just lost his WPA job he defends this woman Mrs. Henry DuBose who is uh just the most
Guest:Cruel kind of old lady racist.
Guest:You got to understand she's sick.
Guest:She stopped taking her morphine recently.
Guest:He even tries to defend the jurors.
Guest:They're neighbors.
Guest:Yeah, they're our friends and neighbors.
Guest:We got to understand them.
Guest:This is the deep south.
Guest:It's going to take time.
Guest:OK, it's just going to take time.
Guest:And I thought.
Guest:I'm not sure I buy that, and I hate to say it, but it sounds an awful lot like there were fine people on both sides.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there, that's what I'm going to do.
Guest:I'm going to take this thing that when we were taught the book in seventh, eighth, or ninth grade, that we were always taught was a virtue, and I'm going to challenge those beliefs in the play.
Guest:And by the time Atticus gets to the end of the play, he is going to come to the point where...
Guest:he realizes that what he considers, what, what you and I might consider a kind of liberal high mindedness that we're going to understand everyone.
Guest:Um, um,
Guest:is bullshit.
Guest:And there are some times when you just have to roll up your sleeves and fight.
Guest:And it was just serendipitous that we have this president right now.
Marc:You started working on this before Trump?
Guest:I started working on it before Trump and when Trump was, not before he started running, before he was inaugurated.
Guest:But it was definitely this new world that we're living in that fueled this play, this classic piece of literature where there is no event that happens in the play that doesn't happen in the book.
Guest:I haven't made up new events.
Guest:We just look at it a different way and I press on different things.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, because I've been dealing with some of that myself, maybe you have as well.
Marc:The idea that, and it's a liberal idea, maybe not.
Marc:I think it's probably a Christian idea that there is good in everybody.
Marc:Because you start to think, that may be true, but if it's so easy to brainwash so many people simultaneously—
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Listen, I believe that there's no such thing as a baby who's born bad.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think that our instincts are good.
Guest:Our instincts might lean toward greed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Probably.
Marc:Seven deadlies.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But not evil.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Unless you commit to them shamelessly.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:They're supposed to be there as a check.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They're like one of the checks on humanity.
Guest:Now...
Guest:Listen, you've got to take the bitter with the better because we liberals, we want people, for instance, to understand that a lot of crime is the product of poverty, okay?
Guest:And there are plenty of people who say, I don't need to understand anything.
Guest:They committed a crime, they go to jail forever or just kill them, okay?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But you and I, we want people to understand there's a problem that caused this that wasn't their fault.
Guest:So we ought to be able to say the same thing about
Guest:Every single person who voted for Donald Trump.
Guest:But I have a hard time doing that.
Guest:I need someone to help me get there.
Marc:Well, there's a problem of rationalization, justification, you know, apologize.
Marc:Like, I've gotten to the point where on stage I say, like, I think at this point, if there's still people in your family that, you know, are somehow still supporting this for whatever reason, you they're shitty people.
Guest:Yeah, I agree with that.
Guest:And they are shitty people.
Guest:And like I said, it's generally the motivation behind it.
Guest:And I think, listen, I think everything you need to learn about why someone is drawn to Donald Trump can be learned.
Guest:It doesn't even need to be five minutes.
Guest:Three minutes reading the comments section at Breitbart.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:Any comment section.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Get a full education of the emotion behind this.
Guest:Donald Trump hates the people they hate.
Guest:He hates me and you.
Guest:They hate me and you.
Guest:Donald Trump makes us crazy.
Guest:They're all for that.
Marc:But then like the liberal, psychologically and intellectually, the place the liberal goes in a way is like, well, they hate themselves and we haven't really addressed that.
Guest:Psychologically, the place the liberal goes is the economic anxiety that the coastal elites don't understand the shrinking middle class.
Guest:I understand it perfectly.
Guest:I'm capable of empathy without the experience.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:But then I ask, why isn't Bernie Sanders the president of the United States?
Guest:He was the one talking about the shrinking middle class.
Guest:It's got nothing to do with that.
Guest:It was entirely emotional.
Guest:There's something else in the play.
Marc:They also think, a lot of them think like, well, I can be Donald Trump.
Guest:Yeah, that's maddening as well.
Guest:And this notion of if he's able, yes, if he's able to be a billionaire, he can make me a billionaire too.
Guest:If he's able to create a successful company, he can run the country.
Guest:One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
Guest:The United States is not a private family company.
Guest:What were you going to say about the play?
Guest:I was going to say this about the play.
Guest:Suddenly, once I kind of turned this corner with, oh, here's a new way to dramatize this story.
Guest:Suddenly, it was like Harper Lee throughout the book was foreseeing the future and leaving these clues to stuff.
Guest:Boo Radley, who's an incredibly important character, though we never see him until the very end of the play, but he's talked about a lot.
Guest:Boo Radley everybody in town knows his name everybody is terrified of him you know he lives in a kind of haunted house he's got this mysterious history which is mostly rumor but she says in her description of Boo Radley one of the things that Harper Lee said and it's in the play is that from time to time these crimes would be committed in town like
Guest:Terrible crimes like chickens would be mutilated.
Guest:And things like that.
Guest:And anytime it would happen, Harper Lee says, people would always blame Boo Radley.
Guest:Even when it would be proven that it was Crazy Carl who did it, people would still say it was Boo Radley.
Guest:That sounded exactly to me like immigrants.
Guest:That even when we're told that an undocumented immigrant is considerably less likely to commit a crime than someone who's born here...
Guest:we are still told to be afraid of these immigrants because they're committing these crimes, that the facts just don't matter.
Guest:So I thought...
Guest:My fear was, will this thing be as relevant in 2018 as it was in 1960?
Guest:Because we've come a long way in 58 years.
Guest:I think it's more relevant now than it's ever been.
Marc:How much did you, in the cross-examination scenes, where, I don't know if it's cross-examination or just the initial questioning, when Jeff Daniels as Atticus is questioning Ewell,
Marc:Now, did you – how much of that dialogue is informed by exactly what's happening now?
Marc:Did you add the Semitic stuff?
Guest:Did you add – I added the Semitic stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like you might have a little Jew in you, that kind of stuff.
Guest:Might have a little Jew in you.
Guest:Isn't it the glasses of the condescension?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That kind of thing.
Guest:I noticed we're both wearing the same glasses.
Guest:Oh, not today.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I added that in.
Guest:I'm not sure why exactly it was important to me.
Guest:It might be because I felt like I want to throw my lot in with the marginalized people in this.
Marc:No, I don't think it's off.
Marc:I think it's part of historical stereotyping that feeds this machine.
Marc:My friend, the novelist Sam Whipside, we had a conversation.
Marc:He's a very brilliant guy, funny guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But we had the same realization like I didn't quite understand why those guys at Charlottesville were saying the Jews will not replace us.
Marc:Is that because they think that the sort of liberal democratic global order is about taking away all national boundaries?
Marc:And so it's a puppet master thing.
Marc:And I never put that together.
Marc:Growing up.
Guest:In Scarsdale.
Guest:In Scarsdale.
Guest:And then I went to school in upstate New York.
Guest:And then I moved here to Manhattan to start my life as a struggling writer.
Guest:Movies took me to L.A.
Guest:But I'm thrilled to be back.
Marc:Always a writer?
Guest:When I was in high school, I thought I was going to be an actor.
Guest:And for me, writing was just a chore to be gotten through for a school assignment.
Guest:I'd never written for pleasure before.
Guest:And then it was right after I got out of college, I came to New York.
Guest:I was living in a tiny, very, very tiny studio apartment with my ex-girlfriend.
Guest:I don't mean that she's my ex-girlfriend now.
Guest:I mean, she was my ex-girlfriend then.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Dating my best friend.
Guest:But for $250 a month, I could sleep on her futon.
Guest:And quietly suffer?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What, you listen to them fuck in the other room?
Guest:Happily, they did that at his place.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:One weekend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One Friday.
Yeah.
Guest:A friend of mine I went to high school with had with him his grandfather's semi-automatic typewriter.
Guest:This was literally weeks before the Mac was introduced, a computer just called the Macintosh.
Marc:Right, the 127, the little.
Guest:It was 128K, yes.
Guest:I had one, yeah.
Guest:Greeting cards have more power than this thing had, but we thought it was amazing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Cut and paste was just amazing.
Guest:Man, if you're a writer, cut and paste is fantastic.
Guest:Look, just the delete key.
Guest:Before that, it was either white out or that tape.
Guest:Anyway, he had his grandfather's semi-automatic typewriter, which electric keys and a manual return.
Guest:He was going out of town with his girlfriend.
Guest:He didn't want to schlep it with him.
Guest:He asked me if I could hang on to it.
Guest:My roommate, ex-girlfriend, she was out of town for the weekend.
Guest:And it was one of these Friday nights in New York that everybody has experienced.
Guest:It just feels like everybody you know has been invited to a party you haven't been invited to.
Guest:I didn't have $3 in my pocket.
Guest:And for some reason, nothing in this tiny apartment exists.
Guest:was that that requires electricity was working that not the television not the stereo um the only thing that was working was this semi-automatic typewriter and I stuck a piece of paper in it uh and began for the first time ever writing dialogue which I my parents took me to plays all the time growing up I loved the sound of dialogue it sounded like music but was it the dialogue of a guy sitting alone full of resentment and
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:It was the dialogue of a guy who loves the sound of dialogue, doesn't have a story to tell.
Guest:The reason that happened is because, like I said, thankfully my parents took me to see plays all the time.
Guest:Lots of times they took me to see plays.
Guest:that I was just too young to understand, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf when I was nine.
Marc:I still can't understand it.
Guest:I can understand most of it now because I've read it so many times and I love it so much.
Guest:But back then it was just, it sounded like music to me, like this phenomenal phrase and these words and the musicians, the actors, they were incredible.
Guest:Because I didn't understand it,
Guest:The plot for me has always kind of been this necessary intrusion on what I wanted to do.
Guest:I just want to do the talking, but I know I need a plot in order to do that.
Guest:So I stuck the piece of paper in the typewriter, and I started writing dialogue, and I loved it.
Guest:I feel like that night has never ended.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And what were you heading towards with the Jew thing?
Guest:Here's what I was heading toward with the Jew thing.
Guest:Growing up and hearing, always hearing the cliche of, you know, the Jews run everything.
Guest:And the problem is, historically, the problem being the Jews, Jews getting run out from everywhere.
Guest:My grandparents got chased out of Russia to here.
Guest:I thought that America was 50% Jewish.
Guest:I was shocked when I found out that 3.1% or something.
Guest:Yes, I understand that the entertainment industry is, that most of the leaders in the entertainment industry are Jewish, that most of the leaders in the banking industry are Jewish, and in media are Jewish.
Guest:But those things didn't happen.
Guest:Nobody stormed the gates with guns.
Guest:Broadway was founded by two Jews from Syracuse who didn't have 10 cents in their pocket, who said, you know, if you put two theaters next to each other, they'll help each other sell tickets.
Guest:And so I've never quite... To this day...
Guest:Will once I get comfortable enough with someone who's Jewish and S and smarter than I am I'll say I don't get it.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why do they hate us?
Guest:I don't really understand this Jews will not replace this thing who's there are like six of us What are you afraid of we're running everything area?
Guest:And we're frightened of guns.
Guest:Yeah, well, um, so honestly I
Guest:I'd be afraid of other people.
Guest:I wouldn't be afraid of us.
Marc:Well, they think we're the man behind the curtain.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:How Jewish were you growing up?
Guest:Not.
Guest:I have no religious education at all.
Guest:I have a brother.
Guest:And so the boys in my family, on our 13th birthday, we'd have a big party.
Guest:But in seventh grade, when pretty much every Saturday you're going to a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah where I grew up, it was just when I was starting to get my love of theater.
Guest:And I would go to these bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs and really regret that I wasn't having a bar mitzvah.
Guest:For the speech?
Guest:For the speech, for the singing, for the audience.
Guest:And so about six weeks before my 13th birthday, I opened the local phone book and called the local rabbi and said, Rabbi, I'm turning 13 in six weeks.
Guest:I'd like you to teach me the Torah.
Guest:And he said, kid, I can't teach you the Torah in six weeks.
Guest:And I said, no, that's okay.
Guest:I have a very good ear.
Guest:You can say it into a tape recorder.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, I don't think that's the point of being a part of it.
Guest:So I have— It actually is the point.
Guest:Is it?
Marc:In middle class American Judaism, what do I got to learn?
Marc:I don't need to know what it means.
Guest:I guess so.
Marc:I want to sing it right.
Guest:But I do come from a long line of people who got their ass kicked for being Jewish.
Guest:So I stand proudly with them.
Guest:in what way like just what your father your grandfather yeah yeah going back to Russia my father my father fought in World War II and
Guest:And there are a lot of us.
Guest:I am a cultural Jew, a Jew for the reasons I just told you.
Guest:I have no relationship with God at all.
Guest:I don't believe things that defy the physical laws of the universe.
Marc:No, I find that if you fill your days with a lot of compulsive behavior, you don't have to worry about spiritual matters until about an hour before bed.
Marc:And if you get to bed in a half hour, you're good.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:And the last thing I want to do, listen, I know genuine people of faith.
Guest:I do.
Guest:And I have enormous respect for them.
Guest:And I love the conversations that I have with them.
Guest:And there are times when I wish I had what they had, just like there are times when I wish I got from a cup of coffee what other people get from a cup of coffee.
Guest:When I hear people say, you know, once I've had that first cup of coffee in the morning, I'm ready to go.
Guest:I drink a cup of coffee.
Guest:There's simply no difference in the before and after.
Marc:I need to drink two pots of coffee, and then now I'm back on nicotine lozenges, so I have to have four of these.
Marc:So by 11 in the morning, I'm exhausted.
Guest:I imagine.
Guest:So true men and women of faith, I have enormous admiration for them.
Guest:I have nothing but contempt for posers when it comes to that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, there's actually, when you're around those people, and I think it's part of the gig, is that you feel a sense of grounded spiritual peace of mind.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That there's an acceptance of the things that are very hard to accept about being mortal.
Marc:Not because you think you're going somewhere else.
Marc:It's just that's the way it is, and we're here to do good if we can.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They say that in the play.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:It's funny because I tend to...
Guest:Not always, maybe not even often, but from time to time, I will write about religion.
Guest:You know, Atticus in the play is devout, and the play ends with a quote from the Bible.
Guest:Martin Sheen's character on the West Wing, Bartlett, a devout Catholic.
Guest:Yeah, in real life too, I think.
Guest:Yes, indeed.
Guest:The character almost went to the seminary, but he met Stockard Channing and fell in love.
Guest:So I do like the idea of it in a romantic way, but I find that the notion...
Guest:That but for the Ten Commandments, I would be fine committing murder or stealing or coveting my neighbor's wife is insane to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I but, you know, it's weird that now like you see.
Marc:the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments as being some sort of checks on you know for uh you know with the commandment societal civilization and with the seven deadly sins you know personal uh uh you know moral decency right you know i i don't know but like where i go sometimes now is the rwanda model where like you know what does it take to trigger half a population and just start killing the other half right
Marc:Because they think it's the right thing to do.
Marc:So I think that that's what that's really buttressing.
Marc:It's not that we would just innately start murdering people.
Marc:But hopefully, if it came down to it, it would be some sort of check on our behavior, societally and personally.
Guest:And I would imagine that a couple of thousand years ago that was important.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:It might be important again, Aaron.
Marc:It might be important.
Marc:There's a presidential alert now.
Guest:There sure is.
Guest:But I guess here's what it comes down to for me.
Guest:I'm not arguing.
Guest:No, I know you're not.
Guest:I don't need to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ to believe in the morality of Jesus Christ.
Guest:And not knowing anything from anything, what I always imagined happened was that about 2,000 years ago, a Martin Luther King-type figure
Guest:lived in Palestine, and had a lot of followers.
Guest:And a couple of centuries later, in order to continue teaching to an uncivilized world, to a barbaric world, what this man was teaching, they added some magic to it.
Marc:Yeah, Jewish writer rooms.
Marc:Jewish writer's rooms.
Guest:And they added magic.
Guest:They add a reward for good behavior and punishment for bad behavior.
Marc:But you deal with this on a personal level.
Marc:You deal with the parameters of individual morality in a lot of the stuff that you deal with, in a lot of the stuff that you create and that you write, even if it's mundane or whether it's big.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It tends not to be about the difference between good and bad as the difference between good and great.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Usually it's about...
Guest:A good person and a capable person, somebody you'd enjoy having dinner with.
Guest:We're not talking about Scrooge turning into a good guy overnight after he's been visited by three ghosts.
Guest:But that person generally has to put comfort on the line or popularity on the line.
Guest:He or she's got to take some sort of risk to become a great person.
Guest:How do you behave when nobody's looking?
Guest:Doing the right thing when nobody's looking.
Guest:That kind of thing.
Guest:I enjoy those things.
Guest:I have, I think, ever since I read Don Quixote.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It's a great one.
Marc:So you get out.
Marc:You get down to New York.
Marc:You give up the acting dream.
Marc:You get this electric going.
Marc:And what are your role models?
Marc:What are your models for?
Marc:Because you're writing initially plays.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the first play I wrote was A Few Good Men.
Guest:My older sister got out of law school, wanted to get trial experience right away, and we had been taught public service is important.
Guest:I'm the only one in my family who didn't heed that, and I feel bad about that.
Marc:You were taught that by your parents?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What did your dad do?
Guest:Well, my dad, everybody's a lawyer except my mother and myself.
Guest:My mother taught public school here in New York for 40 years.
Guest:She taught fourth grade.
Guest:My father, after he got out of World War II, my father really is the American story.
Guest:His parents were chased here.
Guest:He was a tailor.
Guest:She was a seamstress, my grandparents.
Guest:He and his friends didn't like the sweatshop working conditions that she and her friends were working in.
Guest:And they formed something called Workman's Circle, which would later become the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.
Guest:And it was really easy because being a Russian Jewish union organizer back then was very popular.
Guest:I mean, he got his head beaten a lot.
Guest:They had a son and a daughter.
Guest:The son is my father.
Guest:When he turned 18, he enlisted in the Army.
Guest:He went to – he lived in Brooklyn.
Guest:He went to a high school for smart kids who were poor, a public school.
Guest:And they took him and right away they put him in counterintelligence.
Guest:And he served in both theaters, in Europe and the Pacific, came back, went to college and law school on the GI Bill.
Guest:So now the taxpayer has made an investment in my father, four years of college, three years in law school.
Guest:Here's where that investment went.
Guest:He and my mother would have three kids.
Guest:My parents were able to pay for college and law school for two of them all on their own.
Guest:Those three kids have five kids, all of whom are going to college.
Guest:We're all taxpayers now.
Guest:That investment has—they went from lower middle class to upper middle class in one generation.
Guest:That's what government can do.
Guest:The idea that government is the problem, the smaller government is, the better, that government is intrusion is nonsense.
Guest:Government is a place where we can all come together.
Guest:That's what government can do.
Marc:So they had all these kids and all this taxpayer money coming in, but then they had you, the one they had to worry about.
Guest:Then they had the one they had to worry about, the one who said he wanted to be a ventriloquist.
Guest:Is that where that started?
Guest:Did you have a doll?
Guest:No, Mom, Dad, I want to be a playwright.
Guest:Look, they were incredibly supportive.
Guest:They had to be terrified.
Guest:But my sister, when she got out of law school, joined the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one day she called me.
Guest:She said, you're never going to believe where I'm going tomorrow.
Guest:We have a Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This was way before it was the world's most famous prison.
Guest:And she told me this story.
Guest:And it gave me an idea.
Guest:And I wrote my first play.
Guest:And it was a one in a million thing.
Guest:I was 26 years old.
Guest:The play has 22 people in it.
Guest:You can only produce it in a Broadway theater.
Guest:It's too big to do it anywhere else.
Guest:Legendary producers came along to do it.
Guest:A fellow who died just a few years ago named Robert Whitehead.
Guest:was the lead producer.
Guest:Bob Whitehead produced the Broadway debuts of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, and in a stunning anticlimax, me.
Guest:You did all right.
Guest:Then I was brought out to L.A.
Guest:to do the movie.
Guest:This is a familiar story.
Guest:I've only ever...
Guest:Considered myself a playwright.
Guest:I never thought about writing movies or television shows.
Guest:I watched movies and television shows.
Marc:You didn't really think about it ever?
Guest:Ever.
Marc:You liked the theater?
Guest:I loved the theater.
Guest:I didn't have anything against movies and television shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just, for some reason...
Guest:It wasn't until I saw the movie Broadcast News that Jim Brooks wrote and directed where I said, hey, I love the writing in this movie.
Guest:I'd like to do that, too.
Guest:I wish I'd written this.
Guest:So I went out to L.A.
Guest:to do the movie of A Few Good Men.
Guest:I was going to come right back and write my next play.
Guest:The coming right back and writing my next play was 14 years later.
Guest:I stayed in L.A., did another two movies.
Guest:Then I had an idea that my agent said, you know, I think that's a television series.
Guest:And then I did several, several of them.
Marc:When you got to L.A., you know, with this play and, you know, with, you know, you were aligned with Castle Rock, which is a production company.
Marc:Now, that must have been where the education began.
Marc:in terms of like, well, this is a new form.
Marc:I did this one thing, but you didn't have a history of storytelling.
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:And all my friends who do what I do, they're all the ones who at camp, when you're around the campfire, I got a million of them.
Guest:They're the ones telling the stories.
Guest:I'm not like that.
Guest:I don't have a million of them.
Marc:What'd you do around the campfire?
Guest:Listen to other people's stories.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So, yes, my education began there.
Guest:It was on the job training.
Marc:How'd that manifest?
Guest:First of all, again, I got very lucky.
Guest:And the phrase I got very lucky could apply to kind of every day of my life.
Guest:A hero of mine, William Goldman.
Guest:Bill Goldman won the Academy Award for incredible screenwriter, incredible novelist, and a great writer of nonfiction too.
Guest:I would recommend – and I don't get a royalty from this.
Guest:I would recommend for anybody, not just people in the movie business, anybody –
Guest:The book Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Guest:You'll read it in two nights.
Guest:You won't want to put it down.
Guest:A book called The Season, which explores all of Broadway through one season, the 1968-69 Broadway season.
Guest:And he also has a great book called Hype and Glory.
Guest:In one year, he was a judge at both the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant.
Guest:And he uses that as two tent poles or hammock poles, I guess, to talk about his divorce.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Sounds like a Terry Southern book.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Anyway.
Guest:Bill Goldman decided to take me under his wing.
Guest:How do you like that?
Guest:So he read the play before it went into rehearsal.
Guest:And he said, I think you can write movies to do everything I tell you to do.
Guest:And I've obeyed that ever since.
Marc:And what were those things?
Guest:Still very much in my life.
Guest:He is?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He wrote All the President's Men.
Guest:He wrote All the President's Men.
Guest:He wrote Marathon Men.
Guest:He wrote Butch Cassie and the Sundance Kid.
Guest:If that's all he had done is write Butch Cassie and the Sundance Kid.
Guest:That would have been enough.
Guest:What did we say?
Guest:Diana.
Guest:It would have been sufficient.
Marc:So this guy, he's what?
Marc:30 years older than you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or so.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he just... He's obviously a worker.
Marc:It doesn't seem like he has much time.
Marc:He is a worker.
Marc:By the way, we didn't mention one title, The Princess Bride.
Marc:Oh, right.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And if you... Again, I'm not in business with William Goldman.
Guest:No, I get it.
Guest:No.
Guest:If you like the movie, The Princess Bride, this second...
Guest:Get the book.
Guest:The book is such a wonderful ride.
Marc:So he's brought in by Castle Rock?
Marc:Castle Rock.
Guest:This is a production company.
Marc:I've been told lately that I don't explain things enough.
Guest:Castle Rock.
Guest:At the time, it was actually a small studio, strictly speaking.
Marc:With Glenn.
Marc:What's his name?
Marc:Glenn.
Marc:Paddock.
Marc:Paddock.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:That's a name for the past.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The flagship of Castle Rock was Rob Reiner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was one of the owners.
Guest:Castle Rock had bought a pitch.
Guest:Someone came in and pitched them a story based on a rumor that had been going around Beverly Hills.
Guest:That a Beverly Hills surgeon had conspired with a young woman to defraud a medical malpractice insurance company.
Guest:That he was going to operate on her.
Guest:Screw up the operation on purpose in some non-life-threatening way.
Guest:He was going to be sued for $30 million and they were going to split the money.
Guest:Well, I don't know if the rumor is true or not, but it's certainly the beginning of a great thriller.
Guest:I love that pitch.
Guest:Castle Rock bought the pitch.
Guest:It didn't work out with him.
Guest:They bought the pitch and they hired him to write the screenplay.
Guest:It didn't work out.
Guest:So they went to Bill Goldman, with whom they had a relationship because he had written Misery.
Guest:He had written The Princess Bride for them.
Guest:And they said, start all over with this pitch.
Guest:A surgeon and a woman conspire.
Guest:And he said, this sounds great to me.
Guest:I don't have time to do it.
Guest:But here's what you should do.
Guest:Identify some young, meaning cheap, some young writer who you think I'll like.
Guest:And I will guide that writer through the process.
Guest:And my play script, A Few Good Men, was kind of being passed around.
Guest:People were reading it.
Guest:And they identified me.
Guest:And my phone rang one day.
Guest:And my hero was on the other end.
Guest:Aaron, this is Bill Goldman.
Guest:You want to have lunch tomorrow?
Guest:I said, sure.
Guest:And I put on...
Guest:like the one suit uh that i owned uh i met him at the restaurant he told me to meet him at uh on the upper east side i walked in and i'm telling you before i even sat down he said i don't think this is going to work out uh great opening yeah and my heart sank um and he said i i think you are a very talented young writer but uh you've never written a screenplay you you've
Guest:We've never even written a bad TV pilot.
Guest:I don't think we're going to have a vocabulary together.
Marc:You're not bitter enough yet.
Marc:You haven't dealt with it.
Guest:And I thought, well, what do I do now?
Guest:They haven't even brought the bread.
Guest:Am I supposed to stay here?
Guest:I don't know what to do.
Guest:And all I could think of was to say was, listen, I can't pretend I have more experience than I do.
Guest:But maybe I can convince you that I don't need the kind of experience that you're talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And by the end of the lunch, having bonded over our mutual lower back problems, he reached his hand across the table and said, I'll tell you what.
Guest:We got a deal.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Now, that movie did not turn out the way I had hoped.
Guest:It's not my finest hour.
Marc:What movie is it?
Guest:It's a movie called Malice with Nicole Kidman and Alex Baldwin.
Yeah.
Guest:But while all that was happening, the play had opened on Broadway, A Few Good Men.
Guest:And Rob Reiner came to see it and decided he's going to direct it.
Guest:And then Nicole Kidman came to see it.
Guest:And she called her then-husband, Tom Cruise, and said, you should really come to this theater.
Guest:There's a part I think you're going to want to play.
Guest:And it all came together very quickly.
Marc:So now you've got to write the movie.
Guest:And so, yes, the first thing I did when I had to write the movie, I went out and I bought a screenplay format book.
Guest:Screenplays are format intensive.
Guest:Like Sid Field's book?
Guest:It wasn't even Sid Field's book.
Guest:It was just, here's what screenplay formatting is.
Guest:And it took me like a week to write two pages because I'm constantly dealing with the margins.
Guest:The actual format?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The actual format.
Guest:Before Final Draft?
Guest:This is way before Final Draft.
Guest:I pick up Bill's screenplay, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he ignores all the format rules.
Guest:He comes face to face with the fact that many screenplays, or at least the way screenplays used to be written, are unreadable because they're not written to be read.
Guest:They are a set of instructions for the making of a movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Bill decided, that's not good enough for me.
Guest:I want the person who reads this, not just George Roy Hill in directing, I want the person who reads this, I want them to come as close as possible to the experience of watching this movie.
Guest:So he...
Guest:He makes the format much simpler.
Guest:It flows.
Guest:He writes stage directions that are fun.
Guest:You really get into the ride.
Guest:I called him and I basically said, are you allowed to do this?
Guest:Do you have to be you to do this?
Guest:Can I do this?
Guest:He said...
Guest:Throw out that format book.
Guest:Don't even keep it on your shelf.
Guest:Write the experience you want the reader to have.
Guest:It's going to be the only time this is read.
Guest:It's going to be performed after that.
Guest:But write the experience for the director, for the actors, for the studio that you want people to have in the theater.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And that's what I've done ever since.
Marc:And that was the big lesson.
Guest:That was a big lesson.
Guest:There have been many big lessons.
Guest:Some of them are just shut up.
Guest:He's a good disciplinarian too.
Guest:And some of them have been a strong pat on the back.
Marc:And some of them about story.
Guest:A lot of them about story.
Guest:And a lot of them simply by example.
Guest:By the way, I'm not the only person who has this...
Guest:relationship with Bill, whether he knows the writer or not.
Guest:Here's what I mean to say.
Guest:There are a number of us that Bill has taken under his wing.
Guest:Tony Gilroy, for instance, Scott Frank, really fine writers that Bill has coached up.
Guest:But
Guest:Many, many more writers that Bill has never met that he doesn't know have looked at.
Guest:He's very much the dean of American screenwriting.
Marc:Now, when did you decide?
Marc:Because, I mean, it's interesting that your passion started in theater and now you're back doing this show.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But there was a point where you must have realized that people don't have to necessarily talk like people talk.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It's never been a goal of mine to have characters talk the way people talk.
Guest:There are writers...
Guest:who in visual art, the equivalent would be photorealism, I guess.
Guest:A painter whose goal is to get it to look like a photograph.
Guest:And so there are writers who write...
Guest:dialogue that's meant to be photorealism that that's meant to sound exactly like the way people talk and it's not what i do i i do like writing verbal hiccups uh and and stuttering i i like scripting every sound the actor makes right uh that kind of thing yeah um but last year i i i directed for the first time i know it's great thank you very much yeah
Guest:We were shooting a scene one day with Jessica Chastain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And... Molly's game.
Guest:It's Molly's game.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And... Jeez, I'm trying to think of the line now.
Guest:The way it's printed in the script, the line is... The line is, I was a brat.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:But the way it's printed in the script is I, I, I, I...
Guest:dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot was a brat.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:In other words, it's, I was a brat.
Guest:And on the first take, Jessica did it and she was wonderful.
Guest:But I told her there are five eyes and I think you're doing four.
Guest:And she laughed, but then she did it with five eyes.
Guest:And it was, I write like that.
Guest:I'm not trying to get closer to the way someone talks.
Marc:But you expect that out of the actor too.
Guest:You want them to honor the... I do, but the actor wants to do it that way.
Guest:They're doing it on their own and they know when...
Guest:And it's not because what I'm writing is so good they want to do it that way.
Guest:It's just that they're recognizing that just like the dialogue when I was going to see the plays, and still when I go to see plays, sounds like music to me, it's written that way.
Guest:And in music, there are strict rules.
Guest:Like if something is in four or four time, there have to be four beats in a measure.
Guest:There can't be three.
Guest:There can't be five.
Guest:It works out with comedy too in a way.
Guest:Of course it does.
Guest:You know exactly where a pause has to go, exactly where a – so anyway has to go.
Guest:Eventually I know.
Guest:After a lot of work.
Guest:But you started out with an instinct, right?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And –
Guest:Just an instinct of if I take a sip of water right here, that's going to give them the opportunity to laugh.
Guest:And it's putting a button on the punchline without going ding, ding.
Guest:It's a more sophisticated rim shot.
Guest:You take that instinct and years and years and years of honing it at 2 a.m.
Guest:at Catch a Rising Star is what gets you where you are.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But like recently with the Steve Jobs movie, you know, that there was some, you know, criticism that like this isn't really what happened.
Marc:And I was the one who said, you know, I was always sort of like, who gives a fuck?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And the thing that I, the analogy I make to it is that there is a particular way, there is a way that Sorkin dialogue works.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And for me, the analogy was like 1930s movies.
Right.
Guest:It's yeah, I'm definitely influenced by 1930s.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Like Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Banter.
Guest:Steve Jobs.
Guest:You mentioned that.
Guest:And if you were to ask Steve Wozniak, for instance, he would tell you.
Guest:No, that conversation between Waz and Jobs never took place.
Guest:But a hundred conversations like that took place.
Guest:I say to people all the time, it's meant to be a painting.
Guest:It's not meant to be a photograph.
Guest:I would never, because I've written nonfiction a lot now.
Guest:I would never do something that damages someone.
Guest:I'll give you an example from the social network and Mark Zuckerberg.
Guest:The movie begins with Mark on what appears to be a second or third date with a woman who was played by Rudy Mara.
Guest:And it's not going well.
Guest:This is going to be the last date they have for sure.
Guest:She says something kind of mean to him at the end after he has said a number of mean things to her.
Guest:Goes back to his dorm room.
Guest:And at that point, when he walks into his dorm room, he begins blogging.
Guest:And I have, I'm writing this movie, I have his blog post from that night.
Guest:A night in which he gets drunk, hacks into the Facebooks or student directories, the Facebooks of the different houses or dorms at Harvard.
Yeah.
Guest:And comes up with this website called Facemash, which compares two women side by side who's hotter.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Sort of a hot or not thing.
Guest:And he tells us how he's doing it.
Guest:I'm going to use JavaScript here and do that.
Guest:So I knew I wanted to start the movie with what preceded that because his blog post begins in the movie I call her Erica.
Guest:I'm not going to say who the person is in real life.
Guest:I'll just call her Erica.
Guest:The blog post begins, Erica Albright is a bitch.
Guest:So I wanted to write what caused him to say that, what caused him to come up with this kind of misogynistic website.
Guest:I walk into the dorm room.
Guest:The stage direction, screen direction calls for where we're just on the laptop as he walks by, powers up the laptop, walks out of the frame, and he tells us that he's drunk as he's blogging.
Guest:Comes back in the frame, puts a glass down, ice goes in the glass, vodka goes in the glass, orange juice goes in that.
Guest:And over this, we're hearing the voiceover from the blog post.
Guest:Well, a few weeks before shooting started, we found out that he was actually drinking beer that night.
Guest:In fact, we knew he was drinking Beck's.
Guest:And David Fincher, the director, I love, said, Aaron, you know, it's going to have to be beer.
Guest:It's going to have to be Bex, not the screwdriver that you called for.
Guest:And I begged him, please, the screwdriver is so much more cinematic with the ice and the stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a story in the glass.
Guest:There's a story in the glass.
Guest:And it reads as drinking to get drunk as opposed to a college kid just thirsty.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I'm drinking a beer.
Guest:What does it matter?
Guest:Why the authenticity?
Guest:Just for authenticity's sake, we're not doing, I would never have him shooting up instead of drinking.
Guest:That's entirely different.
Guest:But we know that he's drunk.
Guest:What does it matter what he's getting drunk on?
Guest:We're making a movie.
Guest:Let's do the most cinematic thing possible.
Guest:I respect David.
Guest:If you watch the movie, you'll see it's a beer.
Guest:I mean, it was inevitable.
Guest:He was going to win that argument.
Guest:But that's the kind of... When I say that my fidelity is to the story and not to the truth, that's what I'm talking about.
Guest:Not, I would make up... No, I get it.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:It's something I made a note here.
Marc:It said, filling the gaps of the mundane.
Marc:Right.
Guest:People do not...
Guest:live their lives in a narrative they don't live their lives in a series of scenes they don't speak in dialogue far less interesting yeah that's why we go to the movies that's why we watch television that's why we listen to music and it's mostly it's why we go to the theater to get what Lily Tomlin calls the goosebump experience
Marc:Well, what is it with the obsession to also, you know, thematically, if I'm going to look at everything of the, you know, the sort of, you know, pulling back the curtain, you know, whether it's politics or a sports show or the newsroom or Saturday Night Live or even Facebook to some degree, given the reality of Facebook.
Guest:You know, I've I've been asked that question before that, you know, why do you like to go behind the scenes?
Guest:Jobs movie, too.
Mm hmm.
Guest:I always try to come up with an answer for it.
Guest:And it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me, doesn't everything do that?
Guest:I mean, aren't we behind the scenes in an emergency room at a hospital drama or behind the scenes at a police precinct at a cop drama?
Marc:I guess so.
Guest:Or behind the scenes in somebody's living room in a family drama?
Guest:I guess I'm asking, I'm finally asking after all these years, what's the question?
Guest:How is what I'm doing?
Guest:I'm really not being defensive.
Guest:I'm honestly asking,
Guest:In what way am I going behind the scenes that's standing out?
Marc:I'll tell you.
Marc:Is that, you know, what's being presented to us in front of the scenes of, say, a newsroom or the White House.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:That's being presented as a reality.
Marc:I get it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now I understand.
Guest:Actually, I appreciate that.
Guest:I do like writing about places where there is a facade and a behind the facade.
Guest:And I would say at the West Wing in the writer's room that we're doing a show about the two minutes before and after what we see on CNN.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Because that stuff should come into question.
Marc:What did we just see?
Marc:Why did we just see it?
Marc:And what's the integrity of it?
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I always... Listen, the...
Guest:The West Wing, it was a workplace drama that took place at a very interesting, glamorous workplace where a lot of interesting things can happen.
Guest:Drama, we know, is friction.
Guest:It's intention and obstacle.
Guest:The kind of friction I generally write about is ideas crashing into each other.
Guest:The impetus behind the West Wing was that generally in pop culture, when we write about our leaders, our elected leaders, they're either Machiavellian or they're dolts.
Guest:I am a huge fan, both of Veep and House of Cards.
Guest:On one, they're dolts.
Guest:On the other, they're Machiavellian.
Guest:A little Machiavellian on Veep as well.
Marc:Machiavellian dolts.
Guest:But I want to be clear.
Guest:Those are two brilliant shows.
Marc:Oh, yeah, great.
Guest:Brilliantly written and performed and produced.
Guest:So that was the impetus behind The West Wing.
Guest:But, and so I wanted to do a show where they were seen as very competent people who they were going to slip on banana peels from time to time, but we understood they got up in the morning wanting to do the right thing.
Guest:Okay, trying to work hard to do the right thing.
Guest:They were going to lose as much as they were going to win, but they were going to try to do the right thing.
Guest:My favorite moments always on the show was when we got to see...
Guest:That the president is a guy with a temp job.
Guest:That he's a father, that he's a husband, that he's a person.
Guest:Usually.
Guest:Usually.
Guest:Yes, usually.
Guest:So...
Guest:You know, those moments when he's having a husband-wife argument, I would like, or when he's being a dad to his kid, or just when he would step out on the portico and have a cigarette because, you know, his day involved putting people in harm's way or deciding what fatal disease research money should go to.
Guest:That kind of thing.
Guest:I always liked those moments.
Guest:Those moments where you pull the curtain back.
Guest:Yeah, the humanity.
Guest:And you get to see what's behind the facade.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:Now I understand the question.
Guest:Where were you 20 years ago when I just couldn't understand the question?
Guest:I did the same thing with a cable newscast with the newsroom.
Guest:Same thing with an SNL-type show or a SportsCenter-type show.
Guest:And I've done the same thing in movies.
Marc:yeah and the thing is is that you heighten it too i mean you explore the ideas of who these people are as people behind the facade of whatever it is they're manufacturing for for you know as as information or entertainment or whatever and and elevate that i enjoy writing very idealistically and romantically yeah no it's great so we're both uh people that have a long history with uh drugs
Guest:Yes, I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not.
Marc:What was it that because like you were working your ass off on West Wing and you know, you needed to get a lot of stuff done.
Marc:Was were you on a relief pursuit or intellectual pursuit?
Guest:as uh efficiently as i can as economically as i can here's my history with drugs i never so much as uh took a hit off a joint yeah in high school or college yeah i was 25 the first time i tried uh marijuana and the first time i tried cocaine it happened in the same night oh good night um and uh
Guest:Then from time to time, three friends of mine and I would each kick in $25 and we'd buy a gram of Coke.
Guest:And I distinctly remember thinking, it's a good thing I don't have any money.
Guest:Because if I did, this could be a problem.
Guest:And I was right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Years later, and so I was writing high, and I couldn't imagine writing straight.
Guest:I couldn't imagine writing when the sun was up.
Guest:Years later, somebody would show me how to cook the cocaine into a rock and smoke it.
Guest:That's when the brakes came off.
Guest:And I have to say to anyone out there who's listening that the AA is the most extraordinary thing that there is.
Guest:There are...
Guest:There are theologians, religious scholars who believe that Bill Wilson's book, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the most important book written in the 20th century.
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:Intellectually, spiritually, psychologically.
Guest:I've never seen something work as well as this.
Guest:And it's not brainwash.
Guest:You're not part of a cult or anything.
Guest:I went to rehab.
Guest:I went to a place called Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota.
Guest:And I went there.
Guest:I didn't think this was going to do anything.
Guest:I don't buy into this stuff.
Guest:There are fortune cookie slogans on the wall at 12 steps.
Guest:What are you crazy?
Guest:I was going to go there for 28 days.
Guest:Bad writing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the first thing is giving yourself up to a higher power.
Guest:I spent my entire life saying there is no such thing.
Guest:But I went there because I could hear the footsteps.
Guest:I knew that I was about to get caught.
Guest:Or die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:uh i didn't think i was ever gonna die wow no i always thought i can stop anytime i want just too many people knew um and i thought it won't be bad to put 28 days between me and the last time i used but mostly i'll get a clean slate i'll come back and i'll have earned the trust of everyone and nobody will bother me anymore but i'm definitely on day 29 i'm i'm calling my dealer yeah um
Guest:And somewhere around day nine of the 28 days, I just started to feel like this is making sense to me.
Guest:This is really making sense to me.
Guest:Just the fact that I'm getting up in the morning and making my bed, showing up to breakfast, doing whatever chore I was assigned, cleaning up the coffee mugs or something.
Guest:This is working.
Guest:I feel good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:By day 27 of the 28 days.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I went to my counselor and said, listen, are you sure I'm ready to go home?
Guest:I can stay longer.
Guest:I can stay longer.
Guest:He said, get out.
Guest:You're done.
Guest:Get out of here.
Marc:But it's stuck.
Marc:It's stuck.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:Now, listen, it's not magic.
Marc:No, you have to work at it.
Guest:And people relapse.
Guest:And that's fine.
Guest:I'll just give you one more commercial for AA.
Guest:I'm all about it.
Guest:And by the way, you don't need a reservation or anything.
Guest:It's not scary.
Guest:Just walk.
Guest:There is, I promise you, a meeting going on right now with a one-mile radius of wherever you are, okay?
Guest:And just walk in.
Marc:What I like to say, and to protect the traditions, neither Aaron or myself are representatives of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it has worked in our lives.
Marc:We do need to say that.
Guest:One of the many great things about AA, it's not judgmental.
Guest:If you go to an AA meeting, you're going to see somebody who's high or drunk, and they stumbled in there.
Guest:They may have had four years clean, and they just went out.
Guest:They fell out.
Guest:AA doesn't say, you screwed up.
Guest:They said, you did the right thing.
Guest:You came back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you're in this room, you're doing the right thing.
Marc:The amazing thing is for me, and maybe, I don't know, maybe you had it more than I did going in, is that when you hear people's stories, there's a very specific context.
Marc:It taught me empathy, I think, in a very real way.
Guest:I know exactly what you're talking about because when you hear people's stories, you realize that it doesn't matter what social or economic strata you are from.
Guest:The common denominator of using their story is exactly like your story.
Guest:And a story in a place like Hazelden, and I think this is true for pretty much any rehab, you're not going to come in contact with anyone who isn't an addict.
Guest:From the chairman of the board of trustees to the person who serves the lunch in the cafeteria, everyone is a recovering addict because they're the only ones who get it.
Guest:you'll hear some crazy story about how somebody took a crowbar and ripped their drywall down because when the house was being constructed, just as a joke, they hit a gram in there.
Guest:And you'll think, I would have done the exact same thing.
Guest:That doesn't seem crazy at all.
Marc:We're all just people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And in parting here, what's your hope for this play?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I know I'm going to hear it when I get out of here that I didn't talk enough about it.
Guest:No, you talked a lot about it.
Guest:And it's not because I'm not incredibly excited about it.
Guest:No, you talked a lot about it.
Guest:My first and last hope always for anything that I write is that you don't regret having spent the last two hours and 15 minutes in a theater doing this.
Guest:That you're happy that you did it.
Guest:I hope people have a thrilling night in the theater.
Guest:We began previews on November 1st, and so far the audiences have responded in that way.
Guest:Laughing out loud during the first act and sobbing out loud during the second, big, robust standing ovations.
Guest:They've really been responding in an amazing way, in a thrilling way.
Guest:Beyond that, I hope that people are able to see that To Kill a Mockingbird is right now not a museum piece.
Guest:It's not an experience in nostalgia.
Guest:That this book was written in 1960, but it could have been written yesterday.
Guest:And the play was.
Marc:yeah and yeah and and and the sort of what we're dealing with on the level of the malignant humanity yes uh is is ever present it is the more present the play is very much about decency and what it is to be a person and uh nowadays i think we're all looking at that yeah thanks for talking aaron thanks so much for having me mark i appreciate it
Marc:So that was Aaron Sorkin and the play To Kill a Mockingbird is now playing on Broadway.
Marc:See if you can get some tickets.
Marc:It's worth seeing.
Marc:Okay, I guess I'm going to play.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:My hands!
Marc:Boomer lives!