ONE
ORIGIN STORY
The West Wing Pilot
In 1998, Aaron Sorkin, acclaimed Broadway playwright and the writer of lauded films like A Few Good Men, Malice, and The American President, had never really considered writing for TV. But, as Aaron alludes to in his Foreword, on the advice of his agent, he had agreed to meet up with John Wells, a producer who had come off the critical darling China Beach to executive produce and write another critical darling, the ratings-monster hospital show ER. The night before the meeting, Aaron had been hosting some friends, among whom was screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. Just a few years later, Akiva would win the Academy Award for his feature screenplay A Beautiful Mind. On this night, though, he was slipping down to the basement to sneak a cigarette with his friend. Mid–smoke break, Goldsman turned to Aaron and said, “You know what would make a good television series? That.” He was pointing at a poster of The American President. Akiva remarked that “there doesn’t have to be a romance, just focus on a senior staffer.” To Aaron this sounded like a good idea, but…“I’m not going to be doing a television series.” That declaration lasted less than eighteen hours.
As Aaron would tell The Hollywood Reporter more than a decade later—as he’s told members of the West Wing family over the years—his expectations for the meeting with John weren’t remotely career oriented. He approached their get-together as more of a fan.
“I wanted to hear stories about China Beach and ER,” but, the former musical theater major confessed, “I especially wanted to hear about his years as stage manager for A Chorus Line.” The moment Aaron walked into the restaurant, though, he realized that the meeting was going to be something more than a “Hello, how are you?” affair. In what you might call a friendly sort of ambush, waiting there with John Wells were a pair of agents and some Warner Bros. studio executives.
“Right after I sat down, John said, ‘So what do you want to do?’ and instead of saying, ‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding, I don’t have an idea for a television series,’ which would’ve been honest, I said, ‘I want to do a television series about senior staffers at the White House.’ John just looked at me and said…‘You got a deal.’ ”
Years later, John reflected on the first of what would become myriad conversations about the project. “We talked about how Aaron had spent a lot of time preparing the script for The American President with the staffers who worked in the [actual] West Wing, and how he hadn’t been able to write about them as much as he wanted to in the movie.” (MELISSA: In The American President a recently widowed commander in chief, played by Michael Douglas, jockeys over matters of policy and politics, all while single parenting a teenage daughter and falling for an environmental lobbyist who bears an uncanny resemblance to Annette Bening. President Shepherd is supported by a team of hyper-articulate, passionate, overworked, and idealistic staffers—sensing a trend?—and a best friend–cum–chief of staff fans of The West Wing would find eerily familiar.)
Aaron was intrigued by the hallowed halls he’d gotten to know while working on the movie. He was interested in a political narrative that took place, as he has often put it, “during the two minutes before and after what we see on CNN.” And it wasn’t just that. “I like things that take place behind the scenes,” he says, “whether it’s behind the scenes at the White House, behind the scenes at a naval courtroom, or behind the scenes at a national cable sports show.” Aaron had always been attracted to workplace shows, and this—the West Wing of the White House—was undeniably a glamorous workplace in which to plant his flag. “I thought I would tell a contemporary story of kings and palaces,” he says. “It appealed to a sense of romanticism and idealism that I have.”
Now it was just a matter of getting started, which, for Aaron, is always the hardest part. “If I’m writing a script, really ninety percent of it would be walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. The final ten percent would be writing it.” Fortunately, his first draft of The American President had been extremely long. Typically, a screenplay runs anywhere from 90 to 120 pages. This one came in at 385 pages, about the length of four screenplays! Choosing from several “tiny shards of ideas” woven into those nearly four hundred first-draft pages, he landed on one involving Cuban refugees. From that kernel, Aaron began to sketch out the underpinnings of the pilot.
Selecting a handful of key senior White House jobs, starting with the president’s chief of staff, press secretary, and communications director, Aaron looked to populate his “palace.” To a harried, thriving, whirling-dervish ecosystem within these halls of power, he added a collection of well-intentioned if flawed deputies, assistants, and staffers and gave it all a propulsive verbal energy. This West Wing, Aaron knew from the start, would be marked by a collegial group of fast-talking, whip-smart, highly competent people, who would, as he put it, “lose as much as they win, but we’re going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good. That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.”
The people that I have met have been extraordinarily qualified, their intent is good. Their commitment is true. They are righteous, and they are patriots…and I’m their lawyer.
—AINSLEY HAYES TO HER REPUBLICAN FRIENDS, “IN THIS WHITE HOUSE”
Armed with a six-series deal at NBC, and excited by Aaron’s idea, executive producer John Wells took it to the network, telling them he wanted to make the pilot as part of his deal. It didn’t go well. “The American audience isn’t interested in politics,” Wells was told. Additionally, given the political climate at that time, the subject was, in the view of the executives, nothing short of toxic. Plus, Sunday mornings were wall-to-wall politics on all the major networks. Was there really an appetite for more? It was a fair question.
At that moment, the White House was mired in a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. During the time Aaron was writing the pilot, every newspaper, magazine, and cable news show was breathlessly reporting the sordid “presidential intern” story around the clock. “It was hard, at least for Americans,” Aaron says, “to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line.”
By early 1999, Aaron had finished writing the pilot and submitted it to Warner Bros. What happened next may constitute the most important step in the development of The West Wing. On February 22, 1999, veteran studio executive Peter Roth left his post at Fox and 20th Century Fox Television to become president of Warner Bros. Television. Given a stack of scripts representing the potential slate for the upcoming season, he pored through them all. He wasn’t exactly wowed by most of what he read, but a silver lining came shining through. This one script—The West Wing—knocked him out.
“I thought, ‘This is brilliant,’ ” Peter told us. “ ‘This is as smart, as powerful, as well written as anything I have ever read!’ ” That was the weekend of February 22. That Monday, Peter picked up the phone and dialed the writer.
“Hey, Aaron,” he said. “You don’t know me—I’m the new guy. I just want you to know, I read your script and it may be one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. The only thing that I feel sort of compelled to tell you is that in the history of broadcast television, there has never been a successful series set in Washington, DC.”
As a real student of television, Peter Roth believed he knew why. “People don’t want the institution of the presidency to be sullied or to be ballyhooed. Whatever the reasons”—and this he said to Aaron—“Washington just hasn’t worked.” Aaron’s near instantaneous response, according to Peter, went something along the lines of “Well, why the fuck should I care about that?” Today, Peter laughs at the memory with a sense of admiration. “I sat back in my chair,” he told us, “and said, ‘You know what, Aaron? I’m embarrassed. You’re absolutely right. The fact that it’s never worked doesn’t mean that it can’t work.’ ”
Setting aside Aaron’s bravado and Peter’s unbridled support, the project, it seemed, had its back against the wall. Luckily, the structure of John Wells’s deal was such that NBC had to either make the show or give it back to him to set up someplace else. But between the subject matter’s meager past performance and the current state of political affairs, an uphill battle was the best they could hope for. Ultimately, a deal was struck. NBC would make the show. There was just one catch—they wanted to wait a year.
In the meantime, Aaron had followed up his West Wing pilot by writing another fast-paced workplace show, the half-hour dramedy Sports Night. Set in the world of a fictionalized SportsCenter (ESPN’s nightly highlights program), Sports Night aired on ABC for two critically acclaimed seasons. The success of that show was due in no small part to what would become one of TV’s most celebrated dynamic duos—Aaron Sorkin and his new and trusted creative partner, producing director Tommy Schlamme. Tommy had come on board at the recommendation of John Wells, who had hired him years earlier as a director on ER.
To this day, Tommy looks back fondly on the evening of not-so-light reading that changed his life forever. “My agent sent me Aaron’s scripts for both The West Wing and Sports Night. I read them the same night, called [my agent back] at, like, twelve thirty, and went, ‘These are the two best scripts I’ve ever read!’ ”
Even two decades later, Tommy’s effusiveness for the writing remains unbridled. “When I read his words, there was just energy, I would read standing up!” Even on a page with a big block of monologue, without another person talking, to Tommy both scripts still felt…almost musical. “I loved Sports Night, but everything I wanted to do was in the West Wing script, everything I wanted to say about America…about my immigrant parents coming to this country…my sense of patriotism…was there. I saw this show right away. It just was so clear to me.”
To that point in his career, Tommy had been best known for directing in the half-hour space, so the timing—on his end anyway—couldn’t have worked out better. Since The West Wing was delayed by the Clinton sex scandal, he started working on Sports Night, a show squarely in his dramedy wheelhouse.
With Tommy excited about being on board, Wells went to NBC with a compelling “dream team” pitch: “It’ll be Aaron and Tommy and me. Aaron’s going to write them, Tommy’s going to direct them, and I’ll produce. You told me if I signed this six-series deal with you, you were going to make stuff, I want to make it, so let’s make it!”
And with that, the West Wing pilot got the green light.
Looking back, it’s hard to fathom anyone seeing Aaron’s initial pitch as anything but a dead-perfect fastball down the heart of the plate. A crew of quick-witted, passionate, unsung public servants sacrificing the prime of their lives for the betterment of their country? It’s an idea so patriotic that it’s practically romantic, and uniquely American. At the time, though, even after the project got the go-ahead, in the halls of NBC there was a lingering skepticism that this “dream team” could pull it off.
Aaron was Aaron, sure, and he’d teamed up with John and Tommy. Still, even if the series were flawlessly written, directed, acted, and produced, a nagging doubt persisted. Could a show about not-so-glamorous civil servants navigating cramped hallways and discussing policy minutiae command a large audience, let alone hold it week to week? And could a clarion call to public service, however rousing and romantic, compete with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll–scape prime-time viewers had come to expect?
They were fair questions. But while the “rock and roll” would have to wait, Aaron’s pilot script came armed with a little “sex and drugs” up its sleeve. That was thanks to a certain dashing deputy communications director, who can wear the hell out of a suit but can’t quite manage to keep his pants on or his pagers straight. Yes, God bless Sam and that mix-up with Laurie the call girl. Without them, we would’ve been robbed of his succinct—if hilariously desperate—sum-up of pretty much everything that went down in the pilot:
Ms. O’Brien, I understand your feelings, but please believe me when I tell you that I am a nice guy having a bad day. I just found out the Times is publishing a poll that says that a considerable portion of Americans feel that the White House has lost energy and focus, a perception that’s not likely to be altered by the video footage of the President riding his bicycle into a tree. As we speak, the Coast Guard are fishing Cubans out of the Atlantic Ocean, while the governor of Florida wants to blockade the port of Miami, a good friend of mine is about to get fired for going on television and making sense, and it turns out that I accidentally slept with a prostitute last night!
—SAM SEABORN TO LEO’S DAUGHTER, MALLORY, “PILOT”
To sidestep the reality that real West Wing conversations typically take place in small offices with the doors closed, Tommy suggested setting the script’s wide-ranging policy debates on the move. Winding in and out of hallways and offices, passing the baton from this character to that, and then to another…and another, Aaron and his director endowed the “world” of the show with a whirlwind feel. This stop-and-go-go-go choreography had the added benefit of showing off production designer Jon Hutman’s breathtaking set, which actual West Wing staffers would later marvel “looked better than the real thing!”
If you go to the real West Wing it looks like a boring law office…. The moulding is frayed, the carpet is a little dirty…. By putting windows in the Roosevelt Room…they created this maze of rooms you can see through. The bullpen has glass, where the writer’s bullpen in the real West Wing is on the bottom floor and it looks like a series of closets.
—RICHARD SCHIFF, EMPIREONLINE
Despite all the pop of the dialogue, punctuated by soaring speeches, the pilot script—early on, anyway—still drew concerns at NBC. In a meeting with the network, Aaron got the distinct impression that they were having trouble following the various plot lines. There was, the executives suggested, “too much dialogue” and not enough time spent on each story. One pitched the alternative of a populist celebrity president, along the lines of Minnesota’s then governor Jesse Ventura (the former pro wrestler turned Reform Party politician) or maybe “a…race car driver?” Another mused that perhaps instead of talking about the plight of the Cuban refugees, one White House staffer could rent a boat, jump in, and speed off to save the immigrants himself. The network note, according to Brad Whitford, lived somewhere in the vicinity of “We need to get Sam and Josh in the water.”
“I honestly didn’t know if I was being messed with or not,” Aaron later recalled. “And I didn’t want to insult the executive or appear to be difficult to work with. So I said, ‘That’s worth thinking about.’ ”
On the other hand, to anyone remotely familiar with the inner workings of the White House, the teleplay was nothing short of a masterpiece. Indeed, when the West Wing pilot script made its way to longtime Senate aide and seasoned politico Lawrence O’Donnell, it floored him. “I read it and I’m kind of stunned,” the future MSNBC host (and West Wing writer-producer) remembers. “I’ve been in that room…the interior Oval Office…in a governing meeting. Aaron Sorkin never has. He’s just imagining this stuff. How did he get this so right?”
Down the road, of course, the script would be praised as one of the great pilots of all time. Critics, historians, and film school professors would celebrate the groundbreaking ways in which it established character, braided storylines, and conveyed a palpable sense of stakes and urgency. This, despite the fact that President Bartlet wasn’t an alum of NASCAR or the WWE, just an old-fashioned New England governor, and Josh didn’t rescue fleeing Cuban refugees personally, he just relentlessly worked the levers of power to help make it happen.
A surrogate for President Biden’s 2020 campaign, Kevin Walling is a leading Democratic voice on Fox News who often references The West Wing in his political analysis. (He’s also these three things: a dear friend, a fan of the show since high school, and the first and most persistent voice pushing us to write this book.) “The story arcs of The West Wing were, for many of us now working in politics, our first introductions to public policy,” he says. “Whether it involved serious issues like immigration, gun control, military interventions, or navigated the intricacies of a government shutdown, every episode provided a crash course in what governing could actually look like without ever having to dilute the complexity of each issue.”
To Kathleen York (congresswoman Andrea Wyatt, aka Toby’s ex-wife), that level of sophistication, and the level of trust The West Wing would show in its audience, stood out. “It was a broadcast network series that didn’t spoon-feed information or emotional moments. That was really novel. In network television,” Kathleen continued, “the note you always get is: clarify, explain…simplify, so no one’s left out. But Aaron Sorkin is a rocket—you get on or you don’t.”
Before that rocket had a chance to take off, though, Aaron’s script was put into the proverbial “graveyard drawer,” alongside a depressingly large number of other unproduced pilots. And it may well have stayed there, if not for a change of network leadership. The new president of NBC West Coast, Scott Sassa, pulled the script out, read it, and called Aaron to say NBC was going to shoot the pilot. “I was inexperienced enough in that job,” Sassa would tell The Hollywood Reporter, “that I didn’t know why I should not like it, so we set it up.”
To any writer almost anywhere on the planet, the president of the network issuing a pilot order for your script would be pretty big news. And we imagine it must have been for Aaron as well. But it also had to have posed a bit of a dilemma. By then, he and Tommy were hip-deep in production on Sports Night for ABC. Could Aaron handle the chaotic slog of writing two weekly series simultaneously? After all, a single TV schedule turns a showrunner’s life upside down. But two series, especially when you’re doing the vast majority of the writing on both? Fortunately, Aaron was armed with support from Tommy and John, along with an impressive team of writers, consultants, and research assistants.
Act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given to you. Put another way: Fake it ’til you make it.
—LEO TO GOVERNOR BARTLET, “IN THE SHADOW OF TWO GUNMEN: PART I”
Even setting aside the Sports Night double duty of it all, when it came to getting the West Wing pilot on its feet, there were still countless details on the creative team’s to-do list. Now that plans were falling into place for this “contemporary story of kings and palaces,” now that this world of columns and corridors—of outer offices and busy bullpens—was under construction, now that Leo and Jed, Toby and Sam, C.J. and Josh and everyone else, had walk-and-talked their way onto the page…one to-do loomed larger than all the others:
Who the hell were they gonna get to play these guys?