There are traditions I hold myself to, things to give comfort or perspective. One is a bi-annual rewatch of The West Wing. Not only one of the smartest and most gracefully written shows in TV history, it is also a show that offers a more optimistic reality, one that is a stark contrast to the more hateful rhetoric in the current electoral cycle. As you’d expect, the biggest treat for me at this year’s ATX TV Fest was a 10 year reunion panel for the show.
The panel brought together writer/creator Aaron Sorkin, director Thomas Schlamme and a significant portion of the cast in Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman), Dulé Hill (Charlie Young), Janel Moloney (Donna Moss), Joshua Malina (Will Bailey), Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler) and Melissa Fitzgerald (Carol Fitzpatrick). What unfolded was a insightful, free flowing conversation, aided no doubt by the moderator Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC) having also served as a producer and writer on the show for a number of years.
The occasion opened with the very first “walk and talk” from the pilot episode. A sequence that within a few minutes introduced us to many of the cast, the intelligent, loquacious quality of the writing and that famous framing device the show became renowned for. A perfect way to kick things off as the panel answered questions, told stories and showcased the banter and camaraderie that made it seem like not even a day had passed, let alone 10 years since they headed up the Bartlet administration. Following a standing ovation for Sorkin and he graciously sharing credit with everyone involved, the panel began.
- Referring to the clip used to open the panel, O’Donnell remarked how it “summarizes the show perfectly and predicts the next 154 episodes”. Sorkin again passed off a lot of credit, explaining that while he wrote it, the version that ended up on screen came largely from Schlamme’s choreography saying he “read it the right way”. He took Sorkin through the half built set and showed him how he intended to film the show. He also praised the cast, “with an ensemble cast, you’re lucky if you feel good about two or three, we went eight for eight”. As a writer he has “eight mouths to feed” and it was a “glorious problem”.
- Amidst the applause, Whitford said, “It’s a miracle to get a job. It’s a miracle to get a job that’s not humiliating. It’s a miracle to get a job that is the creative experience of your life. It’s a miracle to get a job that is the creative experience of your life that is about something.” The whole cast realized pretty quickly that what they were doing would be “the first line in their obituary”.
- In what became a recurring theme, the cast was compared to a symphony with Sorkin as the conductor. When asked what instrument he would be, Schiff replied “”an oboe, in that they play the entire music, but until everything else stops, you don’t know it’s even there” and how it “offers deeper undertones and squeaks once in a while”. Hill said, “For me, coming as a dancer to the whole television world, connecting to Aaron’s work, I heard the rhythm. I realized that this is a dance. This is music. This is one big symphony, and all you have to do is come in and play your song.” Malina later commented that he would be “the triangle. Overlooked, little used, but an important part, nonetheless.”
- O’Donnell commented that he read the script early on (1998) and NBC sat on it for around a year before he saw the filmed pilot. Sorkin revealed that it came close to not happening, minutes after typing ‘fade out’, the Monica Lewinsky story broke. As he put it, “we’ve got to wait a little bit.” This coincided with a management change at NBC that seemed to better understand the direction they wanted the show to go in. The previous regime made comments on the pilot script such as “can Josh get in a boat and go out to the refugees?”, Whitford exclaimed “like Rahm Emanuel in a speedo!”.
- Despite their happiness with the pilot, it apparently didn’t test well. In response, Warner Brothers invented 4 new demographics; Households earning more than $75,000 a year; households with at least one college graduate; households who subscribed to The New York Times; and households with Internet access.” That last one being crucially important, the majority of the ad-buy for season one came from ‘dot-coms’.
- Sorkin praised how much he got back from the cast, but in the beginning found it incredibly difficult to crack Toby and CJ. They knew how good they were as characters and actors but just didn’t get a handle on them. Schlamme insisted Sorkin write a scene between them for an early episode (The Crackpots and These Women) because they had “insufficient meat on the bone” in the pilot. Apparently O’Donnell “found the true North on Toby” by suggesting he wasn’t first choice for his position as Communications Director. Sorkin broke it down, “if Bartlet was cowardly and knew it, he backed into politics. It took one look from Toby to remind him and feel small”. Once he had that realization, that he was some sort of conscience, he “got Toby”.
- Melissa Fitzgerald touched on her current position as Senior Director of the nonprofit Justice For Vets, an organization that helps veterans deal with legal issues stemming from their service, ensuring they get the treatment and support they need to reintegrate into society and rebuild their lives and connections with their families after service. A very noble cause and one supported by the West Wing cast. See the end of this article for more information and how you can get involved.
- Sorkin proclaimed “I’m not a politically sophisticated person, I have a degree in musical theater”, as a way to share the credit for the more weighty subjects tackled amongst the staff, frequently knocking on O’Donnell’s door with questions like what do you know about the census?”. Patrick Caddell was another consultant who gave a lot of detail to ideas. Sorkin said his mind didn’t work in a political way so he needed support to bring these topics into the show.
- Sorkin drew inspiration from the cast too. Bradley Whitford’s comments that he found it “weird to just move on after being shot” led to Noël, Schiff suggested “stumping Toby” and having him bounce a Spaldeen on his desk as a homage to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape became a big character trait and one of the finest scenes in the show and finally, overhearing Allison Janney singing “The Jackal” in her trailer meant it was in the script for the next episode.
- Kevin Falls ran the writers room, Sorkin likened him to Hoover from Animal House, keeping everybody in line. For them to tackle things on the show, “Big ideas have to get small,” said Sorkin. Kevin and the writers room made that happen.
- Whitford commented that “2 million people watched the news, at its peak, 19 million would watch The West Wing where we’d give the bulletpoints of a very serious issue… and still get Rob Lowe laid”. He described Sorkin as the “collision of C-Span with an impatient showman”.
- The example of a “big issue” that was explored in most detail was that of the death penalty, and the idea of putting the President into a situation like many Governors where it’s one minute to midnight and they can make a call to stay an execution. O’Donnell proposed the bones of the idea and as he was finishing both he and Sorkin said in unison “but we gotta kill the guy”. Thomas Schlamme pointed out the reality that people are not executed on the Sabbath thus spawning the episode Take This Sabbath Day. Exemplifying one of many team efforts to take a big idea and make it small and more importantly, about someone on the show.
- Trivia time. Actor Karl Malden who guest appeared in Take This Sabbath Day as Father Thomas Cavanaugh used his own Bible in the episode, the same he had used when filming On The Waterfront.
- Janel Moloney had apparently decided to quit show business just weeks before being cast as Donna. She said she was unaware of the seed being planted between Josh and Donna as she was “just so focused on being asked back, making every moment as rich, free and great as she could”.
- She had however decided after reading the pilot, that her character would “die for Josh from day one”. Something she decided BEFORE she met Whitford, provoking laughter especially from Schiff who commented “so now you know how good an actress she is!”.
- Moloney also told a story about her first big scene, a “walk-and-talk” with Whitford. She felt good about the take but was dissatisfied. While they were packing up to move on to the next take, Bradley noticed her expression and asked “do you want another?”. She said yes and he shouted “I need another one”. His support gave her freedom on the show. Schlamme said that was the kind of set they had, where if you needed one more, they let you have it.
- The panel had plenty to say about the guest appearance of Yo-Yo Ma on the show in the episode Noël. The musician turned with his $2 million Stradivarius strapped to his back, allowed anyone to play with it and when touring the set got excited to see name tags on chairs set out for the characters.
- Schiff told a tale of how “Yo-Yo Ma’s sitting there, playing with his cello, and Dulé walked up to him and said, ‘Can you play that thing you were playing earlier?’ And Yo-Yo Ma, one of the most outgoing, generous people you’ll ever meet, goes ‘sure,’ and Dulé starts trying to tap along to this classical piece that doesn’t have a ba-ba-ba. But he’s trying to find it, and Yo-Yo Ma goes, ‘this is cool.’ Before you know it, Dulé is shuffling along to Yo-Yo Ma, and it’s one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever seen in anything.”
- Schlamme as director required lots of ‘expanded coverage’, the same scene from multiple angles/takes to show different people. Ma declined the offer to have his playing recorded once and repeated for each take, instead playing it again and again, each time ‘for’ a different person. Schlamme again expressed the difficulty of editing it together and Ma responded with “you’re worried I won’t play with the same rhythym… don’t worry about that”. He was apparently right, the different takes lined up perfectly.
- An audience member suggested that with the season 4 finale, Sorkin’s last episode, he threw “story grenades” at the show. He responded by first stating that he had never seen the show after he left because of Larry David, who had also left his own show Seinfeld before it finished. “If the show’s good, it’ll make you miserable; if the show’s bad, it’ll make you miserable”. Sorkin listened as David “is professionally miserable”. He did glimpse 20 seconds of the season 5 opener but and he said it “felt like watching someone else making out with his wife”. His motivations for throwing so much up in the air was to help the incoming writers, he “didn’t want them to come to a blank piece of paper”. He was “not trying to burn the earth, but seed it”.
- Addressing the introduction of MS to the show, Sorkin explained, apologizing if the response seemed glib, but it stemmed from a need to enhance Stockard Channing’s role on the show. The pair met over lunch and discussed how to develop her role, in Sorkin’s mind he considered how she should perhaps be a professional of some sort, perhaps a doctor and that he needed a good way to bring that into the show without just spelling it out. He combined this with an idea he had where he wanted to have the President be sick, bedridden and has to watch daytime TV. He tasked Kevin Wells with finding “just the right illness”, something that could be one thing but may hint at another and they came back with MS. It was only a day after the episode aired and a annual press address was happening that he realized from all the MS questions, how important it was.
- What’s next?”Another recurring line on the show was given its origins because at the end of the pilot, Thomas Schlamme didn’t want to just fade to black, he wanted to give the impression “the world goes on”.
- One of many mentions of John Spencer came when O’Donnell recalled seeing him in a play during the first season and though “oh my God, we’re using 10% of his talent”. Schlamme added, “there was a loving quality about him that superseded his professionalism. His craft was so important, but it never took away from the kindness he showed for people”.
- In one of the final remarks of the day, Melissa Fitzgerald quoted Martin Sheen. “They say college years are the best years of your life, but you don’t know it. The West Wing is the best years of our life, and we KNOW it”.
- Perhaps the big take home message came from Bradley Whitford, commenting on Sorkin’s four-year tenure, “No human being will ever again write 22 one-hour episodes for four years — beautifully written, complicated verbally, complicated personally, funny, about something, as 11 feature films a year. It is extraordinary. It will never, ever happen again!”
As I mentioned, the warmth and respect was evident from both the panel and entire audience. Sorkin took the lead with answering many of the questions but never failed to be gracious in praise feted out to him not hesitant in sharing it with his cast and crew. He applauded the (surprising) number of young people in the audience, commenting how happy he was the show has inspired people to write and give to public service. It was a wonderful gathering, one that more than ever made the audience yearn for the Bartlet years.
Photo Credits: Jack Plunkett/Picturegroup
Melissa Fitzgerald is Senior Director of the nonprofit Justice For Vets. You can learn more about the organization via their website http://justiceforvets.org/.
