Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to 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.
I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.
The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I'm writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.
To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line. Plus a show about politics, a show that took place in Washington, had just never worked before in American television. So the show was delayed for a year.
I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five.
But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.
I don't have personal experience and knowledge about anything but theater. I've been tutored very well on the subject, but ultimately I'm going back to the rules of drama. There are genres that I like as an audience member that I can't write as a writer. I can't write crime, and I like a good thriller as much as anybody.
If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.
Decisions are made by those who show up. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world.
The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven't started yet.
Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one.
Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.
I think that if I couldn't write, I would be unemployable.
We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. Now none of this is the fault of 20 year old college student, but you nonetheless are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world I don't know what the f...k you're talking about.
There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them.
It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. 'The West Wing' isn't meant to be good for you.
I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing, and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works.
The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.
This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.
President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I'm writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.
Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.
It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them.
My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 9\11, at all until the time felt right but that wasn't an option.
