Laura's West Wing Page | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "Inside the West Wing's new world." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Election? What election? The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is tipped back in his chair, feet propped on the desk, Merit cigarette in one hand, the other running through the fringe of brown hair that makes him seem-mmmm, what is it? Nervous? No, cautious. Kind of like a politician. "If Bush is elected in November, I can't imagine how it would affect the show at all," Sorkin declares with deliberate nonchalance. "it hasn't played in my mind at all' Of course it hasn't. Why would the fact that there could be radical changes in the political culture in Washington-the backdrop of his popular show-cause Sorkin the smallest moment of concern? Why would the fact that his show is currently embraced by the entire media and political elite as a fantasy version of the Clinton White House-not an Al Gore or a George W. Bush White House-cause him the slightest hiccup of indigestion? The West Wing has never been more flush. It has not only brought NBC critical acclaim plus 13 million literate, upscale viewers every week, but when Sorkin's cast members visit the nation's capital, they are-as he puts it-"more popular than the Beatles?". His actors were the stars of the Democratic National Convention in August, and in September they triumphed at the Emmys, where The West Wing won nine statues, compared with only one for its rival drama, The Sopranos. So the reality that a new administration is about to sweep into Washington-perhaps a conservative GOP administration with a thick Texas drawl-is no cause for concern, right? "It's silly. Ridiculous," Sorkin says, holed up in his office on the Warner Bros. lot, writing episode five of the new season. Sorkin adds that he's tired of the people who say that his characters are drawn from real life-that fictional deputy chief of staff josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is derivative of former White House aide Paul Begala; that hunky, single speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is inspired by single former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos; or that neurotic press secretary C.I. Cregg (Allison Janney) is somehow related to former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, one of Sorkin's script consultants. "Those connections are really nonsense,' Sorkin continues. "I'm a fiction writer. I make those people up." Whew, well, that's a relief. So Sorkin obviously won't mind if we hear what Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet, has to say about George W., the real-life Republican candidate (Caution: Step back from flying invective): "I think he's a bully. I don't think he has any heart. That scares me," says Sheen heatedly, hunched over some melting frozen yogurt in a mess tent on location in downtown Los Angeles. The show has set up in a parking lot for a shoot at a veterans' hall. It is Sheen's sixtieth birthday and he is wearing a T-shirt that reads, WHAT'S NEXT?-the mantra of his television character. He's not done. "I've seen him. I've watched him-he's like a bad comic working the crowd," Sheen goes on. "He's too angry. He talks too loud. He's acting compassionate-it's not real. it's not there." Pause. "I think he's full of shit, frankly." Sheen is not too hot on Republicans in general. He says: "if a Republican showed me a heart, I'd respond to that heart. I have not seen much heart coming from Republicans." Sheen is not the only rabidly anti-Republican cast member. Listen to Whitford, who offhandedly describes himself as "a white-bread pinko liberal." Whitford is livid that during one of the primary debates, Bush dared to name Jesus as the political philosopher who has influenced him the most. "You offer up Jesus Christ in a debate-and then you execute more people than the other governors combined?" Whitford rages, lounging in his trailer between takes. "Do you really believe that Jesus, who himself was killed because of the death penalty, would be pro-death penalty? I think Bush is a hypocrite, and I think he's proudly uninformed." If it isn't exactly a revelation that the producers and cast of The West Wing are liberals-this is Hollywood, after all-it is still rather curious that no one seems to think that a Bush victory would affect the show in any way. Won't they at least need new parking permits when they go to D.C., or something? "It will make no difference," affirms Whitford, echoing the sentiments of Sorkin and most others in the cast. "West Wing is first and foremost about relationships, about people-the backdrop is, politics." And yet, for all the reluctance to admit that a change in ad- ministration might matter, West Wing has been making moves to the contrary- getting ready for whomever gets elected-and what- ever the new administration might bring. If Al Gore wins, the shift in the political culture may be subtle, though even Clinton's heir apparent will bring his own style and tone, not to mention his own staff, to the White House. But if George W. wins, there will be nothing less than a seismic shift in the capital. And in that case, the cast of The West Wing may feel, less like the Beatles when they visit D.C. and more like ... the Flintstones. Maybe it is just pure coincidence, but The West Wing has hired two high-profile Republicans as consultants this season: former Reagan and Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Was Fitzwater surprised to get the offer? He was. "They probably wanted a Republican viewpoint," he says. Not so, says Sorkin: "They're very smart people. They were hired not so much for their Republicanness as much as for their wisdom." Coincidence, too, that there will be a new character introduced to the White House staff-a blond, leggy, in-your-face Republican ad- viser called Ainsley Hayes (played by Emily Procter)? She may re-, mind some of the blond, leggy, in-your-face Republicans like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter who pop up and pop off on the talking- head circuit. -Wait a minute. An Ingraham or a Coulter huddled over policy options with a Clinton in the Roosevelt Room? What could Aaron Sorkin be thinking? "Ainsley Hayes has an extraordinary sense of duty. When her president asks her to serve, she agrees," Sorkin says, grinning in his it's-my-world-get-used-to-it sort of way. "Which makes her perfect for us." Sorkin says he's relishing the upcoming tension between his Republican addition to the White House staff and the Democratic regulars. In fact, he's asked returning consultant Dee Dee Myers for a memo on how the White House staff might torture the new recruit. Myers's answers: They could stick her in a horrible office. David Gergen, a Reagan and Nixon consultant who joined the Clinton staff, was put in the old White House barbershop. The White House cafeteria might refuse to serve the newcomer. You can't eat there if the proper paperwork hasn't been filled out. AND IT'S EASY to get lost in the White House if no one guides you. Political shows have long been considered ratings poison in prime time, and Sorkin took an even greater risk by writing a political drama with a dis- tinct point of view, the Democratic one. Whitford says Sorkin made a good pragmatic choice: it's better TV. "People respond to progressive Demo- crats,' he says. "It's more heroic to fight for civil rights legislation than a tax cut. ' But there's also a more personal angle to the decision. At age 11, Sorkin volunteered to help out at George McGovern headquarters, mostly to im- press a girl in his class. Incumbent Richard Nixon was on his way to White Plains, New York, for a rally, and the McGovern volunteers were deployed with signs that read, MCGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT. just as Nixon's motorcade came around the bend, an old lady came up behind Sorkin, grabbed his sign, beaned him with it, and then stomped on it. Part of him, Sorkin says, has been trying to get back at that lady ever since. Whatever the motivation, The West Wing has become that rarest of rarities on the pop-culture landscape: a zeitgeist show, a reflection of the tenor of our times. "Every three or four years, a show hits a pop sensibility," says The West Wing co-executive producer John Wells, who produced another block- buster hit, ER. "People forget that ER came on in the middle of the Clinton health care debate. When we were on the cover of Newsweek, the headline was, A health care plan that really works.' That was what we tapped into. "And that's what happened when West Wing came on. We'd reached a point in the culture where we assumed that people who want to choose public service have the basest of motives of self-aggrandizement and financial gain." However, Wells believes that the public knows intuitively that not all politicians are like that. He says, "The public wants to believe in the political process, wants to believe in politicians. Wants to believe that the people who are leading us are doing so -even if there are ideological differences-to make the country better. Slowly, subtly, The West Wing has become as much a reflection of the current White House as a reflection upon it. Last winter, Sorkin wrote a moving episode about the death penalty in which a tormented President Bartlet decided not to commute the execution of a federal prisoner. This summer, Clinton went the other way- choosing to postpone the execution of federal prisoner Juan Raul Garca, on whose case the episode was based. Near the end of last season, The West Wing featured a story about campaign finance reform, with Bartlet deciding to buck special interests and appoint reformers to the Federal Election Com- mission. The New York Tirnes then wrote an edito- rial proclaiming that Washington should imitate The West Wing. The West Wing has detractors, and they consider the show comy. "Human beings? These characters aren't human beings-they're noble soldiers in a noble cause, and they have been washed clean of every impurity because of it," sneered writer John Podhoretz in a cover story in the conservative Weekly Standard last March. But most of the press reaction has been glowing. For its admirers, The West Wing has become an example of television that can entertain and educate and-in some mea- sure-elevate viewers above the prevailing forces of political cynicism and ennui. The show is particularly appreciated in Wash- ington these days, where public servants often see themselves as underpaid and underappreci- ated. Nowhere was this fan base more in evidence than at the Democratic convention in Los Ange- les. The West Wing party on the show's Warner Bros. set the Sunday before the convention-os- tensibly a thank-you gift from the show to those in the nation's capital who've helped them-was a who's who of Hollywood meets Washington. Everyone-including Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, Chelsea Clinton, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and the editors of the Washington Post- were oohing and aahing at the authenticity of the ceiling-less Oval Office. Even Republicans consider The West Wing a guilty pleasure. "I was prepared not to like it be- cause it was about my sacred White House,' says Fitzwater. "But from the second show on, I've loved it. It very accurately portrays so many elements of presidential life-the frantic urgency about issues and decisions.' Fitzwater acknowledges that the show has detractors in the GOP. "'Yes, it's liberal-oriented,'l tell all my conservative friends,'but that's the way the presidency works,"' he says. "And the truth is, my friends all love the show." Over at Building 146 on the Warner Bros. lot, the signs of a show in its successful second season are everywhere. Outside, a 2ooo black Porsche Carrera, top down, is gleaming in thea. Sorkin'reserved parking spot. His office has been transferred from the small, hutch-like suite it was in last year to a sprawling second-floor lair. The design is aggres- sively masculine-wooden desks, leather sofas, framed maps, and forest-green walls-lots of ex- pensive stuff for a writer who spends most of his life occupied by his Power Mac, gummy bears, and Merits. There is a bar-Art Deco, stacked with un- used martini glasses-and an of-the-moment U- Line stainless-steel fridge. There is also a publicist occupying a back corner of the office, yet another nod to the show's newly acquired media heft. The seat-of-the-pants ethos of season one-when a visitor could wander from the set to the writing offices and back again-is long gone. On the wall closest to Sorkin's desk is a bulletin board with memos about story elements for whatever episode he's writing. The elements come from the writing staff and SoTkin's political strategists, who include, in addition to Fitzwater, Noonan, and Myers, Democratic consultant Pat Caddell and Lawrence O'Donnell, a former aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.). Sorkin rewrites every line that's given to him, but the staff provides the material that makes up the sub- stance of the show. Sorkin keeps their memos and research papers in a blue binder that he calls, with great feeling, "a book of goodness.' Despite the death penalty show and a few others, Sorkin says he generally tries not to rip ideas from the headlines. 'But every once in a while we want to remind you of something in reality," he notes. The driving force of the show is Sorkin's larger message about politics and public service-his deep, and deeply sentimental, sense of patrio- tism. In July, people from The West Wing were in- vited to a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, and Richard Schiff caught Sorkin staring, enraptured, at the sight of a row of American flags rippling in the breeze of the stadium. "'Look how beautiful that is,"' Schiff recalls Sorkin saying. "It struck me how much that man loves America, loves the Constitution, the Decla- ration of Independence. If a Republican president comes in, that's not going to change. We're more like a White House world that he'd like to see.' Indeed, one West Wing staffer-speaking on condition of anonymity-says, "Aaron Sorkin really doesn't like Clinton. He's very convincing on this subject'' The question is put to Sorkin: Does he despise Clinton? Sorkin laughs, and then he squirms in silence. Finally, he protests weakly: 'I like Bill Clinton. I voted for Bill Clinton twice. It would be silly for me to say anything more than that.' Beyond his political sentimentality, it is Sorkin's unerring dramatic instincts that shape the show. Even as a kid growing up in Scarsdale, New York, sneaking into Manhattan to go to the theater, Sorkin found he had an ear for the ebb and flow of dialogue, a knack for sensing the emo- tional hinge between serious and comic. He dreamed of being an actor and majored in musical theater at Syracuse University. But then he began to write, starting with A Few Good Men a play about a snotty Navy lawyer who learns the value of public service. It was based on a case he learned about from his sister, a Navy lawyer. The play was on Broadway before being bought for the movies by director Rob Reiner, who cast Tom Cruise as the lawyer and lack Nicholson as the cor- rupt colonel. Reiner then commissioned Sorkin to write the romantic comedy The American Presi- dent, starring Michael Douglas and Annette Bening, which took the writer on research visits to the White House. That, in turn, propelled Sorkin to write a TV pilot, a behind-the-scenes drama/comedy about the White House-which sat ignored on the desks of network executives for two years. Meanwhile, Sorkin wrote Sports Night for ABC, a behind-the- scenes dramedy about a sports news show. After the Monica 'Lewinsky scandal, with its media frenzy, NBC suddenly thought there might be an audience for politics after all. And The West Wing was born. In last season's cliff-hanger finale, a fusillade of bullets felled the presidential entourage as Bartlet left a speaking engagement. The faces of three teenage skinheads in the crowd were identified as the perpetrators. "So what's next?" Sorkin is asked during the summer. Who are the survivors? And what about romance? Will Josh date his secretary? Will C.I. get married to reporter Danny Concannon? Will presidential daughter Zoe carry on her interracial romance with presidential gofer Charlie? And what about President Bartlet's multiple sclerosis? Sorkin, canny dramatist that he is, says we will have to wait until the end of a two-hour episode to learn how badly the victims were hurt. He also says that Anna Deavere Smith (who played the White House spokeswoman in The American President) will join the cast as the new national security adviser. Finally, we will see no more of Moira Kelly as political consultant Mandy (and no, of course she had no connection to real-life Clinton consultant Mandy Grunwald). Other than that, Sorkin says, he doesn't know exactly where the show is going, since he's only up to episode five. He says he writes an episode for eight days at a stretch, and takes about five minutes to pat himself-on-the back before plunging into the next script. The central conflict of the episode he is working on involves the president and his wife, played by Stockard Channing (who had a memorable showdown with Bartlet in the Oval Office during the first season: "You don't handle me, Jed!"). They are trying to find time in their schedules to have sex. "The writers came to me and said, 'Here's an idea you're gonna hate. But sleep on it,"' says Sorkin, pulling off his geek-chic horn-rimmed glasses and rocking back in the leather chair be- hind his desk. The locks that fall across his forehead are brown, but his sideburns have gone gray. He is lean, wearing a green, button-down polo shirt and jeans, and chain-srnoking. "They were right. It seemed silly to me Pause. "And now I'm having the best time writing the story." Does he think it wise to mix -the presidency with sex given, y'know, the Clinton thing? "Well, you think about it," he acknowledges, "but I have faith in the show.... I believe that people will see episode five with Martin Sheen trying to have sex with Stockard Channing and not say, 'Well, why doesn't he just grab an intern in the hallway?"' Dee Dee Myers has given Sorkin a memo detailing appointments that might keep a first lady busy (and thus unavailable for sex). Myers has suggested a dedication of a statue, among other things, which Sorkin has seized upon. He plans to have the first lady lecture the president for his off-hand put-down of the statue subject, nineteenth- century journalist-adventurer Nellie Bly. There are other strands in the works: one about military readiness in which press secretary C.J. faces down a general. There's also a story line related to the civil rights activist organization Southern Poverty Law Center, which Sorkin declines to discuss. Could it relate to our skinhead shooters? The new Republican-era consultants are pro- viding more than political balance. They bring with them behind-the-scenes anecdotes from previous administrations. Fitzwater, for example, who had an extraordinary 10-year run with Rea- gan and Bush, has already detailed an insider's version of Boris Yeltsin's first visit to the White House. Yeltsin was in Parliament at the time, chal- lenging Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He wanted to meet President Bush, but the president thought Gorbachev would take offense if he re- ceived Yeltsin in the Oval office. "Yeltsin refused to come in the building, in effect, unless he could meet the president," Fitzwater recalls. A compromise was struck: Yeltsin agreed to meet Bush in the national security adviser's office, "so he could say he met the pres- ident and we could say he never got into the Oval office. Sorkin loves the anecdote-and says it may show up in an episode. Still, he insists that he has no GOP-inspired contingency themes for after the election. Bartlet is Bartlet, he's a Democrat, he'll stay in power. "I don't want to overstate our impact," says Cad- dell. "We're a TV show, after all. But a lot of people in politics and the press watch it intensely. I think its [influence is] more on a subconscious level than a conscious one.' "It's pretty easy to get too big for your britches Sorkin demurs. "There's so much praise being heaped on us. it's easy to start believing it. He pauses and plays again with his glasses. "A show that got this much praise this fast is setting itself up for an ass-kicking,' he finally offers. "We?d like to not hasten it at all by suggesting that we're good for you: like, 'Thank God we came along to tell you what to think about this-and Barbra Streisand will be out in a minute."' The magnitude of The West Wing's influence hit cast members when they were given a tour of the actual West Wing on the night of President Clinton's last State of the Union speech. The moment was- already surreal enough, and suddenly the president dropped by to chitchat and suggested a story line: something having to do with a journalist and an information leak. Sheen also sensed the show's power when they were shooting late at night in Georgetown and making a bit too 'much of a commotion for the neighbors. A middle-aged lady came down to in- quire about the noise. And by the way, she said, why the heck doesn't the show have a secretary of state? And-it should be a woman, she added. The woman with the complaint was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.  Click to subscribe to west_wing_fans
AHHH!
|
| 
SPOILER FOR THIS WEEK'S SHOW!
|
Next West Wing Episode: | 3.08 THE WOMEN OF QUMAR Original Airdate 11-28-01
| 
U.N. TREATY BANNING PROSTITUTION INCITES SHARP DEBATE; MAD COW DISEASE POSES UGLY THREAT -- At the First Lady's (Stockard Channing) urging, Josh (Bradley Whitford) meets with a powerful women's caucus over the proposed language of a U.N. treaty banning prostitution while the President (Martin Sheen) grapples with the possibility of a Mad Cow epidemic and ponders how much the public should know. Meanwhile, staffers are stunned at C.J.'s (Allison Janney) emotional outburst concerning the administration's renewal of its air base lease in a Mideast country that abuses its women. Some World War II veterans come to the White House to protest a pending Pearl Harbor exhibit at the Smithsonian and Bartlet is sued by an angry woman who intends to raise a public fuss over his remarks regarding the hot-potato issue of a national seat belt law. John Spencer, Rob Lowe, Richard Schiff, Dule Hill and Janel Moloney also star.
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Thanks to everyone who has come by!
|
