Aaron Benjamin Sorkin (born June 9, 1961) is an American screenwriter, producer and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men , The American President , The West Wing , Sports Night , Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip and The Farnsworth Invention .
After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre in 1983, Sorkin spent much of the 1980s in New York as a struggling, largely unemployed actor. He found his passion in writing plays, and quickly established himself as a young promising playwright. His stageplay A Few Good Men caught the attention of Hollywood producer David Brown, who bought the film rights before the play even premiered.
Castle Rock Entertainment hired Sorkin to adapt A Few Good Men for the big screen. The movie, directed by Rob Reiner, became a box office success. Sorkin spent the early 1990s writing two other screenplays at Castle Rock, Malice and The American President . In the mid-1990s he worked as a script doctor on films such as Schindler's List and Bulworth . In 1998 his television career began when he created the comedy series Sports Night for the ABC network. Sports Night' s second season was its last and in 1999 overlapped with the debut of Sorkin's next TV series, the political drama The West Wing , this time for the NBC network. The West Wing won multiple Emmy Awards, and continued for three more seasons after he left the show at the end of its fourth season in 2003. He returned to television in 2006 with the dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , about the backstage drama at a late night sketch comedy show, once again for the NBC network. While Sorkin's return was met with high expectations and a lot of early online buzz before Studio 60's premiere, NBC did not renew it after its first season in which it suffered from low ratings and mixed reception in the press and on the Internet. His most recent feature film screenplay is Charlie Wilson's War .
After more than a decade away from the theatre, Sorkin returned to adapt for the stage his screenplay The Farnsworth Invention , which started a workshop run at La Jolla Playhouse in February 2007 and which opened on Broadway in December 2007.
He battled with a cocaine addiction for many years, but after a highly publicized arrest he received treatment in a drug diversion program and is reported to have recovered. In television, Sorkin is known as a controlling writer, who rarely shares the job of penning teleplays with other writers. His writing staff are more likely to do research and come up with stories for him to tell. His trademark rapid-fire dialogue and extended monologues are complemented, in television, by frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme's characteristic visual technique called the "Walk and Talk".
Early years
Sorkin was born in Manhattan to Jewish parents, and raised in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale, New York. His mother was a school teacher and his father a copyright lawyer; both his older sister and brother went on to become lawyers. Sorkin took an early interest in acting. Before he reached his teenage years, his parents were taking him to the theatre to see shows such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and That Championship Season . At that age, Sorkin did not always comprehend the plot of the plays; nevertheless he recalls enjoying the sound of the dialogue.
Sorkin attended Scarsdale High School where he became involved in his high school drama and theatre club. In eighth grade he played General Bullmoose in the musical Li'l Abner .
In 1979 Sorkin attended Syracuse University. In his freshman year he failed a class that was a core requirement. It was a devastating setback because he wanted to be an actor, and the Drama department did not allow students to take the stage until they completed all the core freshman classes. He returned in his sophomore year determined to do better, and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre.
Unemployed actor, promising playwright
After graduation, Sorkin moved to New York City where he worked odd jobs ranging from delivering singing telegrams, driving a limousine, touring Alabama with the children’s theatre company Traveling Playhouse, handing out fliers promoting a hunting-and-fishing show, to bartending on Broadway at theatres such as the Palace Theatre. One weekend, while house sitting at a friend's place he found an IBM Selectric typewriter, started typing, and "felt a phenomenal confidence and a kind of joy that had never experienced before in life."
He continued writing and eventually put together his first play Removing All Doubt which he sent to his old theatre teacher, Arthur Storch, who was impressed. In 1984, Removing All Doubt was staged for drama students at his alma mater, Syracuse University. After that, he wrote Hidden in this Picture which debuted off-off-Broadway at Steve Olsen's West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theatre Bar in New York City in 1988. The contents of his first two plays got him a theatrical agent. Producer John A. McQuiggan saw the production of Hidden in this Picture and commissioned Sorkin to turn the one-act into a full-length play called Making Movies . His reputation as a playwright was quickly gaining stature on the New York theatre scene.
A Few Good Men
Sorkin got the inspiration to write his next play, a courtroom drama called A Few Good Men , from a phone conversation with his sister Deborah, who had graduated from Boston University Law School and signed up for a 3-year stint with the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. She was going to Guantanamo Bay to defend a group of Marines who came close to killing a fellow Marine in a hazing ordered by a superior officer. Sorkin took that information and wrote much of his story on cocktail napkins while bartending at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. He and his roommates had purchased a Macintosh 512K so when he returned home he would empty his pockets of the cocktail napkins and type them into the computer, forming a basis from which he wrote many drafts for A Few Good Men .
In 1988 Sorkin sold the film rights for his play A Few Good Men to producer David Brown before it even premiered, for a deal possibly worth a sum well into six-figures. Brown had read an article in The New York Times about Sorkin's one-act play Hidden in this Picture and found out Sorkin also had a play called A Few Good Men that was having off-Broadway readings. Brown produced A Few Good Men on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre. It starred Tom Hulce and was directed by Don Scardino. After opening in late 1989, it ran for 497 performances.
Sorkin continued writing Making Movies and in 1990 it debuted off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre, produced by John A. McQuiggan and directed by Don Scardino. Meanwhile, David Brown was producing a few projects at TriStar Pictures and tried to interest them in making A Few Good Men into a film but his proposal was declined due to the lack of star actor involvement. Brown later got a call from Alan Horn at Castle Rock Entertainment who was anxious to make the film. Rob Reiner, a producing partner at Castle Rock, opted to direct it.
Screenwriting career
Working under contract for Castle Rock Entertainment
In the early 1990s, Sorkin worked under contract for Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. He wrote the scripts for A Few Good Men , Malice , and The American President : the three films grossed about $400 million worldwide. While writing for Castle Rock he became friends with colleagues such as William Goldman and Rob Reiner and met his future wife, Julia Bingham, who was one of Castle Rock's business-affairs lawyers.
Sorkin wrote several drafts of the script for A Few Good Men in his New York apartment, learning the craft of screenwriting from a book about screenplay format. He then spent several months at the Los Angeles offices of Castle Rock, working on the script with Rob Reiner. William Goldman (who regularly worked under contract at Castle Rock) became his mentor and helped him to adapt his stageplay into a screenplay. The movie was directed by Rob Reiner, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, and Kevin Bacon, and was produced by David Brown. A Few Good Men was released in 1992 and was a box office success.
Goldman also approached Sorkin with a story premise, which Sorkin developed into the script for Malice . Goldman oversaw the project as creative consultant while Sorkin wrote the first two drafts of Malice . Sorkin had to leave the project to finish up the script for A Few Good Men , and screenwriter Scott Frank wrote two drafts of the Malice screenplay. When production on A Few Good Men wrapped up, Sorkin took over and continued working on the script for Malice through until the final shooting script. Harold Becker directed the film, a medical thriller released in 1993, which starred Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin. Malice had mixed reviews. Vincent Canby in The New York Times described the film as "deviously entertaining from its start through its finish". Roger Ebert panned it, and Peter Travers in a 2000 Rolling Stone review summarized it as
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