Aaron Sorkin

I am an unabashed Aaron Sorkin fan. So I really enjoyed How to Write an Aaron Sorkin Script, by Aaron Sorkin.

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing— when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. In the pilot of The Newsroom, a new series for HBO, TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) emotionally checked out years ago, and now he’s sitting on a college panel, hearing the same shouting match between right and left he’s been hearing forever, and the arguments have become noise. A student asks what makes America the world’s greatest country, and Will dodges the question with glib answers. But the moderator keeps needling him until…snap.

From there he shows the musical beats of the long monologue that marks the first episode of The Newsroom. A good read.

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Photo credit: Eric Weiss