Aaron Sorkin

The critics support him, although some actors have exhibited T-shirts on which they said “I survived a Sorkin script”, a joke that refers to the amount of text that they have to learn… and the speed with which they have to declaim it! Despite the fact that it is difficult for him to start a conversation.

Born on June 9, 1961 in Manhattan, Aaron Benjamin Sorkin comes from a Jewish family, made up of a teacher and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. A stutterer, as a child he did not like to talk because he was afraid that his classmates would laugh at him. When at the age of nine his parents took him to see a theatrical performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” with which he was fascinated, especially when listening to the actors reciting, for which he began to write dialogues. He soon realized that he had an enormous capacity for this discipline.

Despite everything, at first he was more interested in devoting himself to acting. He enrolled in Art, at the University of Syracuse, where he went through a crisis when he failed a class in the first year, since without having completed this course, he was not allowed to join the theater group. This forced him to apply himself, so that he not only managed to remedy the problem right away, but he became an outstanding student. Upon graduation he moved to New York, where he worked as a driver and delivery man, while occasionally working as an actor.

“One weekend, a friend hired me to watch his house,” he recalls. “While I was there I noticed that he had an IBM electric typewriter. I felt phenomenal confidence and a kind of joy that I had never experienced before. I continued writing until I finished “Removing All Doubt”, my first work”. After sending it to Arthur Storch, his college drama teacher – whom he cites as one of his great influences – he was so impressed that he organized the performance with students. He was soon placing a couple of plays on the New York alternative scene, and was forced to recruit an agent.

One day his sister, Deborah Sorkin, a Navy attorney, told him about a complex case she was working on. Some recruits had nearly killed a comrade in a hazing commanded by a superior. She wrote the story down on napkins, and when she hung up she thought she had to buy a laptop. That’s how she came up with the script for A Few Good Men , which she first gave rise to as a play on the off-Broadway circuit. His own style, characterized by the fact that everything almost always takes place inside a room, and because different versions of the same story are offered, fits well with the judicial genre. “In the best exponents of the genre, the viewer is constantly changing their opinion about who is telling the truth”, she has commented. “For example, I am passionate about 12 merciless men, you start thinking what everyone in the room except Henry Fonda. It seems like a clear case, but then details come out, and little by little the jury goes from having eleven negative votes against one, to twelve in favor.

After selling the film rights, the story ended up in the hands of director Rob Reiner . For his work as a screenwriter on the film – in which Demi Moore plays a character inspired by Deborah, along with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson – he earned a Golden Globe nomination. So the production company behind the film, Castle Rock, He commissioned two new jobs, the thriller Malice , and The President and Miss Wade , his first approach to the White House, for which he was again nominated for the same award. At the company he became close friends with veteran screenwriter William Goldman ( Two Men and One Fate ).) –who became his instructor when he taught him how to structure for film, and to whom he has always sent his work for review–, and he also became intimate with Julia Bingham, a business director, with whom he would begin a relationship. Finally, both got married in 1996, although after having a daughter, they divorced in 2005.

Throughout the 90s, he did minor or food work, for example, some lines for Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage in The Rock , or lines for Will Smith in Public Enemy . After writing for Warren Beatty   Bulworth , he reprized this star in Ocean of Storms , which ultimately failed to get filming financed. He also made his debut on television with the series about a sports program in low hours Sport Night , which despite good reviews was canceled immediately due to lack of audience.

His most recognized work was born to order, during a lunch in 1997 with producer John Wells, who asked him if he would be willing to write another series, this time about the White House staff. Interested in the world of politics – and a militant democrat – Aaron Sorkin made a rehash based on material that he had left over from the aforementioned The President and Miss Wade , to send it to Wells. This managed to excite the NBC executives, who however preferred to wait to release a series on this subject, since the Monica Lewinski scandal was in full swing. As Wells took the story to other networks, which also showed interest, NBC changed their minds and decided to quickly greenlight  The West Wing of the White House .

The fiction describes the daily work of the subordinates of Josiah Bartlet, the Democratic president played by Martin Sheen . 9 Emmy Awards endorsed the quality of the first season of the series, which it would obtain in total over 26 years, tying with Sad Song from Hill Streetas the top winner in these awards. A prolific author, Aaron Sorkin took charge alone or intervened in all the episodes of the first four seasons, a total of 87. But he later left his job due to problems with his superiors. “From the fifth season I only saw the opening seconds of the first chapter, but it was like watching someone else having sex with my girlfriend.” Despite everything, he returned in the last installment, for a cameo as a member of Bartlet’s staff, since it is common for him to make small appearances in the films in which he has worked.

He went through hard years due to drug problems. He was arrested at the Bob Hope airport in Los Angeles for possession of marijuana, crack and other drugs, a matter that caused a great scandal in the United States press. When he barely managed to rehabilitate himself, he wrote the sketch comedy series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , which only had one season due to lack of viewers. He returned to the stage writing “The Farnsworth Invention,” and also to the movies, first with Charlie Wilson’s War , which told the true story of a half-hearted Democrat who played a prominent role in America’s covert support of the Mujahideen of Afghanistan. He is more interested in Moneyball , a baseball film based on a book byMichael Lewis where not a single game appears, which reconstructs the real feat of manager Billy Beane ( Brad Pitt ), who launched an innovative system to sign undervalued but cheap players.

He received the worst criticism of his career for the excessive idealism of his newspaper series The Newsroom . He has showcased his innovative ability in both of his tech jobs. In The Social Network , by David Fincher –with which he won the Oscar–, he manages to make understandable –based on contradictory accounts in parallel statements by the protagonists (that’s nothing)– the complex history of the creation of Facebook, despite the fact that he doesn’t use it, what’s more, he finds it disturbing. “I see my own daughter more concerned with the image she gives on the Internet, a place where popularity can be measured in ‘likes’, than with her real life,” she explained. “I am also concerned about the anonymity of a conversation that for that reason tends to become petty and green.” InDanny Boyle ‘s Steve Jobs traced the life of Apple’s founder, through introductions to three of his major products, based on the comprehensive biography, written by Walter Isaacson .

Soon after, he set to work on another adaptation of an autobiographical book, this time about skier-turned-politician Molly Bloom, organizer of an underground poker tournament involving Hollywood stars. While she was working on the script, Sony suggested that she also take over the making of Molly’s Game , an offer she decided to accept, with Jessica Chastain under her command in the leading role.

In the future, he is clear that he will continue to bring real characters to the screen who are smarter than him. “Whenever I write to my protagonists, I do it as if he were presenting his case before God arguing why he should allow him into heaven,” he clarifies. It is quite probable that he will at some point accept the permanent offer that NBC launched to resume The West Wing of the White House at any time , since he sometimes ponders the question. In an interview, he was asked if he would now put a Donald Trump-like figure in charge of his fictitious White House, but he replies that the current president is not attractive to him. Apparently, he would rather focus on a black, Barack Obama-style president, and he even has the perfect candidate, Sterling K. Brown., an actor who has won the Emmy twice in a row, for American Crime Story and later for This Is Us , who after reading the idea in the media has offered himself unconditionally. “There would be some kind of problem, an emergency or delicate situation involving the threat of war or something, so I would consult Bartlet, who would be long retired.”