Aaron Sorkin Makes Few Writer Friends With Strike Talk
Last night showed what hot showrunners Joss Whedon and Lorne Richards did on their WGA strike-ations. Today comes another story about using your time as a hot commodity wisely — from an interview Aaron Sorkin on GQ’s blog, via Nikke Finke’s “Deadline Hollywood Daily”.
Sorkin, who actually benefitted from the situation initially as his play “The Farnsworth Invention” previewed on Broadway, said to Finke, “For three and a half weeks I was in the unique position of being on strike and being struck against (by Broadway stagehands) at the same time.”
Once done with that distraction, Sorkin said he attended a dinner meeting hosted by “House” exec-producer Paul Attanasio and several other TV show helmers that took place the day after the Directors’ Guild reached an agreement with the major studios that had been holding out against WGA demands.
“We all agreed that we had been irresponsible and that, in an effort not to seem elitist, we had remained quiet during this strike,” Sorkin said. “We hadn’t voiced our objections. We hadn’t put pressure on (WGA prez) Patric Verrone and the other heads of the union to end this thing. It wasn’t a strike we were passionate about.”
After that dinner, Sorkin says the participants went to the Guild and said “that we feel strongly that the DGA deal is fair, That we should accept from the studios and networks what they’ve given to the DGA.”
They said that if the leadership didn’t accept that, they would make their voices heard within 48 hours. Magically, the writers and the studios made peace and the TV villagers danced.
“I have no idea if it worked or not,” Sorkin said. “I know that the strike ended. It could have been for entirely different reasons.”
If you look on the comments attached to that post, there were some hardcore picketers who seem pretty peeved (to use the nicest word possible) that Sorkin would claim that he and his fellow lofty perchers would backhandedly almost claim that it was they who were the victors, not the guys manning the picket lines all over LA and New York.
This is one I’d like to see a take from Ken Levine, who has written on everything from “Cheers” and “Frasier” to “M.A.S.H” to…well, look at his profile. He’s someone who has worked on as big of projects as Sorkin, but who was a must-read during the strike on his blog. He’s also an extremely nice guy who doesn’t mince words (read his reaction to Katharine Heigl’s Emmy noms remark. I wonder how much he thinks Sorkin and his band of head honchos really made for the writers at the end.
But in the end, Sorkin also feels really bad about something else — everyone connected to “Sunset 60 on the Sunset Strip“.
“I felt like I had let so many people down—from Warner Bros. and NBC to the cast and crew,” he said to GQ. “You live and die with these things. It is a feeling that you can’t look these people in the eye anymore.”
But Sorkin, who says he “would give anything to go back and get another bite of that apple,” with “Studio 60″, also said he “had a great meeting with Sue Naegle” at HBO recently. Maybe he’ll get a chance to make friends and influence people with his next project.
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