753 - The One with Aaron Sorkin

20:11Even though I have felt this way after every single thing that I've written, including in television. I wrote 88 episodes of The West Wing, the first four seasons. And 87 times after I finished, I've just turned to everyone and said, guys, I think that's it. I've used every word I know in every order I can think of to put it. I think that's it for the show. It happens every time. It happens after every movie. It happens after every play. And as you and I speak now, we're four weeks away from the premiere of The Social Reckoning. And I don't have an idea for anything. Wow.

20:50John August:Okay. All right. So I'm open. Write me suggestions. Throw things your way. A couple months ago, Curry Barker, who wrote and directed Obsession, was sitting in the show you're sitting in right now. And he was saying that something that was incredibly important for him was watching the Aaron Sorkin masterclass that you taught. And it was really, really meaningful. So his dad got him that. His dad also got him the Script Notes book. And so a young filmmaker who was doing things. And tell us about the masterclass. Well, first of all, I want to take the Curry Barker masterclass. Seriously, this man has got game.

21:21Yes. He really does.

21:23John August:I mean, he has got a breaking ball. He's going to be so excited when we clip this and send it to him. Oh, okay. Well, he's the real deal. So the masterclass, I had a lot of fun doing that. It was one of the - You were one of the first ones. Yeah. I didn't know anything about it. These guys came to me and I liked them. They are bright guys. Doing the masterclass, I think we shot it over two or three days. Fantastic crew. I mean, their artistic vision was great. There were four or five students in the room. They were all really bright. Yeah. Every time I hear from somebody who said they took the master class and they really like it, I really wish I could go back and do it again.

22:06I'm sure I could do it better. Yeah. I didn't know that anybody would be watching.

22:10John August:Yes. So I'd like to do it again. All right. Hear it here first. We had some listeners who wrote in after the Curry Barker episode who had taken the master class. And one of them wrote, one of the great quotes from there was that you should be waiting for the pitches you can hit. Do you remember saying that? Yeah, I do. I don't remember saying it, but I believe that I said it. Yes, it feels like an Aaron Sorkin thing. Here's what I mean. I found out doing Moneyball, writing Moneyball, that in the—I'm going to get the stats wrong now. I'll get the numbers wrong. But in the course of a nine-inning game, on average, a baseball player will see something like 20 pitches.

22:47And on average, one, just one of those 20 pitches will be what the player considers his pitch. it's low and away it's high and inside it's breaking ball that doesn't break that kind of it's their pitch that they love most of the time a baseball player gets out they only get out two thirds of the time they're going to the hall of fame but most of the time when a player gets out that's it they go back to the dugout every once in a while you'll see a player get out and smash the Gatorade thing it's because they blew it on their pitch they were waiting for their pitch and they swung a moment too early a moment too late a moment too high, a moment too low.

23:26What I mean by the writer waiting for their pitch, when I'm asked, you know, what am I looking for for the next project? It's not, well, I'm looking for a romance. I'm looking for a comedy. I'm looking for a bank robbery, a period piece. I'm looking for my pitch to hit. I'm looking for an idea where I feel like I have a chance, a chance of doing well writing this. Doing well or hitting a home run? Because that's the difference. Because like, you're not going to bunt. I'm not going to bunt. I want to hit a home run every time. Everybody wants to hit a home run every time. However, we're going to stick with this baseball metaphor.

24:03Well, sure.

24:04John August:And Craig, again, Craig is so angry he's down here for the baseball metaphor. Oh, I'm sorry. If home run hitters, for a long, long time, the strikeout king in Major League Baseball was Babe Ruth. just because home run hitters are apt to strike out more than people who are just trying to hit a single, trying to hit a double. So what am I doing? I'm trying to write a good first scene and then trying to write the next scene. Another piece of Mike Nichols' advice, go from something that works to the next thing that works to the next thing that works. Continuing the metaphor, you can't hit anything if you're not connecting.

24:41John August:And so it's finding what the connection is, that your bat will be able to hit that ball and send it flying. If I look back at my career and the frustrations I have is I was swinging on some things I shouldn't have swung on. Where it's like even the best version of my doing that project, it wasn't going to be worth my time. And those things happen. And so it's recognizing I wish I'd basically taken that piece of advice 20 years ago. Well, listen, a lot of writers, especially early in their career, don't have the luxury of waiting for their pitch. They've got to eat. oftentimes writers, again, especially young writers at the beginning of their career, they're going to be writing things that are, you know, outside their wheelhouse, that aren't in their comfort zone, that it's very hard to get enthusiastic about.

25:26John August:Over the course of your career, you've written so many movies, but some of them, I'm thinking about like A Few Good Men, which gets reduced down to a soundbite. Like, you can't handle the truth. And that movie is chock full of fantastic scenes, but that's the one thing people hold on to. Is it all frustrating that you have a movie that is so good on every other level and like, that's the one moment. Did that ever bother you? It is not in any way demonstrating, you know, that Jack Nicholson was in that movie and delivered the line memorably. By the way, I should mention the play. Yes. Oh yeah, you're doing the play again.

26:00Yeah. Well, it begins previews on October 8th at Lincoln Center the night before. The month of October has such potential for career implosion.

26:10John August:Yeah. I have a hunch that both will be successful. Thank you. I hope you're right. Let's take a look at a scene from the West Wing. And so I want to get into this idea of conflict choreography. And so obviously the West Wing is full of people wrestling with political ideas, but I'd love to look at a scene which is just a two-character relationship scene and the conflicts that are involved in there. So we're actually looking, listening to the back half of the scene. This is season two, episode 18. It's a two-hander between Josh and Donna. The first part of the scene is a walk and talk through the office, but the second part is the two of them sitting down in an office and having this conversation.

26:46John August:Before we get into this, the first half is the walk and talk. You're so associated with walk and talks, but is that a Sorkin thing or is that a West Wing director thing that gets associated with you? It's a Tommy Shlomi thing. I'm happy to take credit for it, but it's a Tommy Shlomi thing. The executive producer of the show, the director of the pilot, the director of a number of episodes, but he created the look of the show So a few days before, maybe a week before the shooting started on the pilot, they were building the set. We shot it at Warner Brothers over on stage 17. And we were building the set, and he came into my office and said, come with me to the set.

27:26I want to show you something. And he had the pages, like the first 10 pages of the pilot, which, you know, we're going to be in this room and then this room and then this room. And he said, would it be okay with you if I just brought in a Steadicam operator and we took Leo from here to here to here? I said, sure. And that's how that started.

27:45John August:That's how it happened. But also, it had to be a plan to some degree because you're building sets in ways that you can, everything does connect. Yes. Everything connects. Also, we put more windows, more glass on the set than we actually have in the West Wing just because we knew we needed a lot of throw. Tommy understood that the things that I write don't have a lot of visual interest. And so we just, he wanted background moving. Fun fact, Tommy Shalami was attached to my very first ever screenwriting project, How to Eat Fried Worms, over at Imagine Pictures a zillion years ago. He talks about how to eat fried worms.

28:23John August:Yeah. Yeah. What happens? We never shot. We should have shot, but never shot. It never got to the place. And I learned so much doing that. and I got to work with Tommy on different drafts of it. So, great. So, it just never happened. But that was one of those cases where I had sold it as a pitch. I got, you know, my first draft, a rewrite, and two polishes all paid. And I just learned so much about screenwriting and studio screenwriting from that project. So, not a failure. No. Not at all. Let's get to this scene. This is this two-hander between Josh and Donna. We'll play it here. Okay. I'm going to give you a little gift right now, which you don't deserve.

28:59John August:Donna, if you've got your old Catholic school uniform on under there, don't get me wrong. I applaud the thought. Okay, what I need is for you to stop being like you for a second. Okay. When I came back, you remember I had a bandage on my ankle? Yeah. I told you I slipped on the ice on the front walk. Yeah, you know why? Because you didn't put down the kitty litter. I was actually in a car accident. You were in a car accident? It was... Seriously, you were in an accident? It was no big deal. You told me it was a late thaw. Yes, I did. Anyway, they took me to the hospital, and I called him, and he came down to get me.

29:32John August:And on the way, he stopped and met some friends of his for a beer. He stopped on the way to the hospital for a beer? Yes. And so I left him, which was the point of my telling you this. I left him. So stop remembering that. What I remember is that you took me back when you had absolutely no reason to trust me again, and you didn't make fun of me or him and you had every reason to. Donna. You're gonna make fun of him now, aren't you? No. Because that's why I didn't tell you in the first place. I'm not gonna make fun of him. Good. But just what kind of a dump kiss were you... He was supposed to meet some of his friends.

30:10John August:He stopped on the way to tell them that he couldn't. And had a beer? Does this make you feel superior? Yes. You are better than my old boyfriend.

30:21I'm just saying, if you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for a beer.

30:26John August:If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights. I miss those two. As we get into this, I'll note that the reason we picked this scene is because one of Meredith's friends has these four pages printed out and up on her wall. Oh. Really? It's true. She does. That's so nice. Tell us about that scene. First, let me tell you about the episode. It's 17 people, right? Yeah, that's the episode. episode. I love that episode because, well, there are a number of reasons, but what would happen from time to time is we'd be over budget for the year. We'd be over budget. So Tommy would come into my office and say, I need you to write a bottle show.

31:07Meaning no new sets, no guest cast, no background. We're just going to take this show down to its bare bones, down to its studs. I always liked when he did that. First of all, it meant, okay, great. I can write a play. That's where I'm most comfortable. The page, it's not a blank page anymore. I already know some things about the episode. No background. It's going to take place at night or on the weekend. It's all going to be in rooms. They say when you bring home a new puppy, that you should get a crate that's just big enough for the dog to be able to turn around him, but no bigger because those closed-in spaces give them a sense of comfort that they need when they're a puppy.

31:52And I am like that cute puppy.

31:58I like the four walls around me, which is what you get when you're writing a bottle show.

32:03John August:Okay, talk about intention, because you're saying you need to know the intention of a scene. So let's talk about the character's intention in there. What are they trying to do? Okay, what Donna is trying to do, Josh has been making fun of this ex-boyfriend for a while. because Josh is kind of hurt that she stopped working for him to go back to the ex-boyfriend. But then when he thinks when the ex-boyfriend broke up with her, that he was a consolation president, that she came back there. She is there to finally set the record straight. And so she comes in with the intention of like, okay, in this conversation, I'm gonna make this clear.

32:42And he does continuously things

32:44John August:to undermine her ability to sort of actually lay out a clear case of what's happening here. And you introduce other ideas, the kitty litter, the other little visual ideas that are sort of pulling us off the main thread so that she has to pull us back onto it. And yet the story she's telling, we can summon a visual for what actually happened, which I think is also crucial because while the scene is happening in the present tense, her conversation, her dialogue is about this past moment and she's doing a good job of creating this past moment for us. And they have a shared experience because Josh is doing a very certain thing, which is echoing back what she just said.

33:21John August:He's actively listening so that we are paying attention. That's right. There's a moment in the scene that Janelle has, Donna, that for the life of me, I can't remember if I wrote it as a stage direction, gave it to her as a note. The director gave it to her as a note or she just did it. But I like it so much. and it's when he says, you told me there was a late thaw. And she just laughs a little bit, remembering because of just how sweetly dumb he was to believe that. And it's moments like that, really that make those scenes come alive. Because the challenge is, the characters are fully present in the moment and yet they're also thinking back to other times And they're both trying to predict where the conversation is going and trying to remember things that happened before.

34:14John August:And that's how we are in real life. We are constantly in this sort of multi-temporal space. And we're trying to be alive and present in this moment. But everything is connected. There's another thing that they're doing. And this is really important in the world of the West Wing. They're working. Yes. All right. They are there. They're at the office, which is the White House. They're at the office late at night. And they're in street clothes. And they're working. And most of the time, for the West Wing to work, we had to believe that these people were working for us always. If they were just goofing around, if it was working for the weekend, if it's I can't wait to get home, we wouldn't be rooting for them the same way we'd be rooting for somebody in another job who was doing the same.

35:06John August:Or if it just totally was a comedy, then it's kind of fine that no one's actually really working. Sure, sure, sure. This is, you can have jokes, but there has to be like a thing getting done as well. Yes. Let's talk about, we have the conflict. Let's talk about the choreography and which that comes down to me, like it's the punctuations, it's the stops, it's the starts. These are all in your script and yet it's also coming out of the actor's mouth. Talk to us about the choreography and figuring out the tempos on the page so that actors have a thing to hold on to. Well, you're using all the right words because for me, dialogue is music.

35:40What a line sounds like is as important to me as what it means. I think that happened because I started to love plays before I knew what they were about. I grew up in a suburb just outside New York and my parents took me to see plays a lot. Including plays that I was too young to understand. You know, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf when I was nine years old. I loved the sound of dialogue, didn't really know what was happening in the play, but the dialogue sounded like music to me, and I wanted to imitate that sound.

36:12John August:I think a lot of people go to see Shakespeare now, and we honestly can't fully understand what they're saying, but it's nice to hear the rhythms there. It's comforting. I would say half of Shakespeare's plays, I do not know. I know what's happening because I have read about what's happening. But if the play was by Oldie, we go to see opera and like whiz. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's very nice music, but I could not tell you why that lady just killed herself. So the actors will know when they've kind of dropped a syllable and they've dropped a beat. In a sense, they'll go to the script supervisor and say, I'm saying something wrong.

36:51I know I'm saying something wrong, which is great.

36:54John August:Well, so I also want to stress, like you're trying to connect the idea so that it follows one continuous mode of thought, But it's also so that the rhythms, that the words can actually, they can get to the next thing. That the next word makes sense for them to have said in that moment that it fits the mouth. Oh, yeah. Sure. It needs to fit the mouth. I want these words to be sayable by the actors. I never want it to be the actor's job to make something work. And so often I'll work with an actor who I can tell it's almost like a beaten animal. that they've spent so much of their career trying to, feeling like it's their job to make something work, that someone has to say to them, no, really, let the words do some of the work.

37:43Yeah, absolutely. The music is important to me. I've learned a new trick, and this is maybe a trick that I should have learned a long time ago. But as an experiment, when you write a scene, just see what happens if you cut the last line of the scene just see what happens half the time I'll say oh that is a cooler ending

38:08John August:to the scene I'm gonna try this this afternoon yeah do you write in the afternoon? I mostly write in the morning so it's an exception today because we're recording in this I like to be at my desk at 9am I have 9 to 11 as like writing time if I get go to hell if I did 9 to 11 I would be just go to hell Well, you, Stephen King, you people drive me crazy. Sorry. The people who can command themselves to write. What do you mean you write from nine to 11? Currently, I'm on a thing where I actually really know what I'm writing. I'm writing two things and I really, really know what they are. And so it is just that joy where it's like, I do have, I don't have a corkboard, but like, I really know what the scenes are.

38:47John August:And I wake up actually excited to write those scenes. And that's a luxury. That's not usual. No, no. Those are great days. Those are great ways to wake up. as knowing what you're going to write. Oh, another recommendation. Please. If it's going well, end your writing session in the middle. Don't get to the end of the scene. And if you can, end before the plunge down to a joke so that when you wake up the next morning, you don't have any thinking because you know exactly what you're going to do. You're excited about it. You know what it's going to be. That's what we've done. I'm very excited to write these next scenes, which is not always the case.

39:18John August:Hardly ever. But I'm so excited to look at the next scene. This is from The Social Network. Okay. And this is a different kind of music, a different kind of conflict. Again, a scene I just love. When we met in January, I expressed my doubts about the site, where it stood with graphics, how much programming was left that I had not anticipated. The lack of hardware we had to deal with, the site use, the lack of promotion that would go on to successfully launch the website. This was the first time you raised any of those concerns, right? I'd raised concerns before. Bullshit. Not to us. Gentlemen, I'm talking about at the meeting in January to which this letter is referring.

39:52Yeah. Let me rephrase this. You sent my client 16 emails. In the first 15, you didn't raise any concerns. Is that a question? In the 16th email, you raised concerns about the site's functionality. Were you leading them on for six weeks? No. Then why didn't you raise any of these concerns before? It's raining. I'm sorry? It just started raining. Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention? No. Do you think I deserve it? What? Do you think I deserve your full attention?

40:26John August:I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition and I don't want to purge it myself So I have a legal obligation to say no Okay, no You don't think I deserve your attention? I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall They have a right to give it a try but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie You have part of my attention you have the minimum amount The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

40:58Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

41:08I have 12.45. Why don't we say that's lunch?

41:13John August:Back at 2.30. Oh, I love that scene so much. It's just terrific. As you watch that scene, what do you see? What do you remember? Oh, I have great memories of shooting it, obviously. I like the scene too. And what I was thinking as I was watching this, I knew at the outset that part of the structure was going to be these dueling depositions. He's being sued by the Winklevoss twins here and Eduardo Saverin. there's going to be these dueling depositions. And the challenge was going to be that it just can't seem like we're constantly cutting to exposition. Yep. That'll be easy enough to just sort of have the lawyers do a recitation of you did this and you did that.

42:02Disguising exposition is a skill that a writer needs to develop. It's very important. Exposition being the only part of drama. If drama is exposition, inciting action, action, reversal, climax, day and month, exposition is the only part that isn't natural. Okay? People don't generally say, you know, as you know, I'm a butler here and I've been working here for 22 years. Disguising exposition was going to be the challenge. And it turned out to just be fun for me.

42:38John August:That doesn't feel like exposition at all. That feels like just a conflict. But like you said, they're not shouting at each other. They're just, you've created a character, Mark Zuckerberg, who is so challenging to pin down that we're there with him. Right. And if you can create a moment where he is being challenged by people he believes are inferior to him, which is most people, then you can usually light something up. I mentioned a little while ago that one of my trying to write things is driving around in my car, listening to music. It's good for getting into arguments with myself. And I would bet anything that this scene, that the end of this scene, the, you know, do I have your full attention part of this scene, was the result of, like, I owned myself there.

43:33I asked myself that question and shot back with the answer. It was one time during the West Wing, a messenger delivered to me from the president of NBC, at the time it was Scott Sassa, a headset meant to be paired with the phone in my car with a note that said, I was next to you at a red light earlier. Please wear this whenever you're driving your car. You look crazy. And I get it.

44:02John August:But I'm sure that's how that scene happened. In those situations, do you have any way to capture that thing? Are you going to remember it or are you going to scribble that down someplace, leave a voice memo? What are you doing? I'm going to remember it unless it happens as it frequently does, just as I'm falling asleep. For some reason, that couple of minutes as you're falling asleep, I don't know what is, because you're relaxed or something, you'll get an idea. I have learned the hard way. I will not remember it that first thing in the morning. so I have to write down a note for myself. Sometimes that note will turn into, okay, well, here's the actual line that I want and then I'll do the line and suddenly I'm writing the scene.

44:45John August:Yeah, which is true. I have a stack of note cards beside the bed which is just for that purpose, just to get it out of my brain so I stop thinking about it, but also so I remember it in the morning. Christopher Nolan, when he was on the show, was talking about how for Oppenheimer, he started to write a note and he's like, oh no, I actually know more. He goes out, walks across the garden, And it goes to his office in the middle of the night to write the scene because it finally came clear. I would have asked, did you ask him by any chance? I want to go back and listen to your Chris Nolan show. How much about nuclear energy did he know before he started writing Oppenheimer?

45:20He knew a lot.

45:22John August:He read the Oppenheimer book twice. He really did know. He does a lot of research. I mean, the man has no email, so he has a lot of time to just read books about it. Still, I've a bunch of times written things that I don't know anything about. With Steve Jobs, I had to tell Sony, listen, it takes me five minutes in the morning to find the power button on my computer. You're going to have to bring in somebody who can teach me how a computer works. So they brought in Steve Wozniak. Great. Except, and Steve Wozniak, who invented the home computer basically, does not know how to talk to somebody as dumb as I am.

46:01he can only talk to Christopher Nolan

46:05John August:true confessions here so when the Steve Jobs books was being shopped around they came to me and I said I'm not even going to read this until Aaron Sorkin passes because it was clear Aaron Sorkin said this is a movie about hyper literate people discussing the futures of things it's an Aaron Sorkin movie I appreciate that I would have liked to have seen your version. But I was delighted to see your version. So, I mean, sometimes I won't get a project and, or a thing will happen and I won't get to do it. And it's like, wow, I don't have to do that thing anymore. Because that thing exists in the world without me having to have done anything with it.

46:45John August:I love that. I saw a movie this last week, which was very much an idea I've been kicking around for 10 years. And I was like, oh, well, now I don't have to do that thing. That's great. I saw it as a liberation. Have you ever regretted passing on something? The Hunger Games. I wasn't officially offered it but they came to me it's like I don't want to see a movie about like children killing each other I maybe could have done The Hunger Games but Billy Ray did a great job yeah yeah yeah yeah what are your regrets? yeah Martin Brest sent me an Italian film called La Profuma Vidana Scent of a Woman oh my god yeah and I didn't see it I couldn't figure out what he wanted and of course Bo Goldman comes along hits him out of the park Oh my God, did he write a beautiful screenplay.

47:33Pacino's fantastic in that. I think people slightly resent the movie simply because Pacino should have won an Oscar, you know, five times already before that. But don't take it out on Sentible Woman. It's a great movie.

47:45John August:Yeah. We've gotten very far off of discussing the incredible clip from the social network. So also I'm never saying that like Jesse Eisenberg, of course, in that clip, he came on the show and it's fantastic in his own right. And Rashida Jones, who's great in that movie as well. And as a tremendous writer, her movie, The Invite, was incredible. Yes. In that scene, again, you're introducing an outside idea, like it's raining and that it's not related to the thing. You're doing timeline sliding where we're cutting back to an earlier moment to get stuff through. It's just such smart filmmaking. It's just, it's telling itself cinematically.

48:20John August:I'm glad to hear that. Just praise. And I really appreciate that every inch of that experience was great. but I loved writing the first couple of scenes of the movie. I loved getting started there. What I had was, if you remember, it begins with Jesse and Rui Mara having a bad date in a college bar. And then Jesse, Mark Zuckerberg, after a long walk across the Harvard campus, goes back to his dorm room, boots up his computer, and he starts live blogging. I'll say he's talking about the date that he just had. What I had research-wise was a transcript of his blog from that night. It was a Tuesday night in October in 2003.

49:09And I used, except for changing the girl's name, I used almost word for word what he had said, which goes from being very mad at this girl to this prankish thing. where he's going to hack into the different Facebooks of the different dorms and create a hot or not website called Facemash. He's drinking there. And it was important that he was drunk. And this goes to – I'm introducing a new topic now. Please, please. Because that seems to be the theme. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

49:45John August:We'll keep juggling. of what, when I'm writing nonfiction, when I'm telling a true story, what am I willing to lie about? And here's an example. He says in the transcript of that live blog that he's drunk, that he's drinking to get drunk. So what I wrote was that we're on his computer screen as he comes into his dorm room. He walks in and out of the frame, booting up the computer, comes back into the frame, puts a glass down, ice in the glass, vodka in the glass, orange juice in the glass, all the while in voiceover, we're doing this thing. A couple of weeks before shooting started, we found out that he was drinking beer that night, Beck's beer to be exact.

50:27And so David said, okay, you got to change it to beer. And I begged David, no, no, no, keep it vodka and orange juice, not just because it's more visually interesting making vodka and orange juice than opening a beer, but because drinking a beer doesn't necessarily read as drinking to get drunk. It can just be a college kid thirsty on a Tuesday night. And the important truth isn't what he was drinking. It was that he was drinking to get drunk. I wouldn't have had him do a line of Coke. I wouldn't have been shooting up. That's an entirely different thing. But I'm interested in the more important truth.

51:04What I tell, again, what I tell young screenwriters is like yourself, is... Thank you. You're welcome. Is that it's not journalism. It's not a photograph. It's a painting. It's a painting.

51:20John August:Let's talk about the new painting. So this is The Social Reckoning. It is the second movie you've made about Facebook. Second one with a character named Mark Zuckerberg in it. A very different Mark Zuckerberg. In Social Network, the Mark Zuckerberg we meet is protagonist. He's certainly a protagonist. The anti-hero. He's an anti-hero. Yeah. We're following the story from his perspective. An anti-hero, which is to say not a villain. Not a villain. His motives are good. What he wants is good, to connect people. Yeah. What's underneath that is bad. No spoilers, but I would say Mark Zuckerberg is not the hero of the new movie.

51:54He's not. Listen, first of all, I know some people are a little confused. Is it a sequel? And why isn't Jesse playing the part? It's not a sequel. What it is, is the guy who wrote The Social Network has written another movie about Facebook in which Mark Zuckerberg is also a character. It's as if Henry Hill showed up as a character in Casino.

52:15John August:Yes, I think that's a fair assessment. And having seen the movie, I will say that if you've not made the social network and say like, oh, Aaron Sorkin is making a movie about the Facebook files, I'm like, yeah, like I want to see that. Good, great. And by the way, I do think that two minutes into the movie, people are going to stop thinking about what came before it. It did go to Jesse first. It seemed logical. Jesse, it turns out, no longer wants to be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn't like Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn't like that he kind of resembles Mark Zuckerberg. And he doesn't like, apparently, in airports at the baggage claim, young boys, teenage boys are coming up to him with wanting him to sign business cards that say, I'm CEO, bitch.

52:58And he just doesn't, he feels that he kind of maybe made a hero out of Mark Zuckerberg, which isn't what he wanted to do. So I got to replace Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle. Yeah. Jeremy Strong is phenomenal in the movie. It is the same person 17 years later.

53:16John August:That's what my question is. Do you perceive this as the same character or is this the character in a different movie? Do you see a continuity between the Mark Zuckerberg you wrote in The Social Network and the Mark Zuckerberg we see in Social Reckoning? I do. I absolutely do. If only because, again, I'm the first person to play the part. So I'm still playing Mark Zuckerberg in this now. He's older. He is more confident. He is a, to say he's a multi-billionaire, is kind of not giving his pile of money enough credit. And we are seeing Mark Zuckerberg in a particular situation, in one particular situation.

53:59The movie, this will be hard to understand if you haven't seen it, But the movie has a kind of complicated structure in that there are two timelines in it. One of them is chronological following Francis Haugen, Mikey Madison, who enlists a Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeremy Allen White. And together they uncover these highly guarded secrets that Facebook has. The other timeline is all taking place in one morning. and we find that out toward the end.

54:34John August:Yeah. So Frances is your, she is the classic protagonist of this. She's a character who comes in with one set of ideas and those ideas have to change over the course of them. I would say classically Jeremy Allen White's character is the one who is an antagonist who's like nudging her towards changing. Does that feel correct to you? That does feel right. Jeremy Allen White's character also serves another important purpose in a story like this. He's someone who knows as little as the audience does. Exactly. It's Aaron Stark with Steve Wozniak. Uh-huh, exactly. So that is one section of the movie and one way we're following this.

55:08John August:And a thing I think you do so smartly in the movie is we have a timeline that slides across the bottom. This is true. It's like here in 2018 and here we're in 2020 just to notice where we're at because otherwise we wouldn't know what other characters know or what has changed. Yeah. This is, I have to tell you, this is the first time, 11 movies in, And this is the first time that test screenings have been helpful. Okay, great. Because the movie didn't used to have that sliding chyron at the bottom of the screen. But it feels true to Facebook. It feels true. It fits the visual language of the movie.

55:43It does feel true. Yeah. And what we found out from test screenings is that the audiences were confused about the timeline. So sort of bit by bit, I began to help them. And then I just said, why am I being coy with this? just tell them when it's taking place.

56:00John August:You started working on the idea that there would be another movie about Facebook. There's news reports of that earlier on. And so when did you know that this was the way into it? When did you know it's about Francis Hogan? When did you know, and you're fond of Francis and Jeff of it all versus the 19 other things that Facebook has done and choosing to end it where at the time period you did versus the other weird things that Facebook has done since then, like the metaverse and all that stuff. It's all pre-metaverse is what we're saying. I would say that since the social network came out in 2010, just about every year, either my agent, Ari Emanuel, or Tom Rothman, CEO, the chairman of Sony, would just call and say, come on, you got to write, you got to go back to Facebook and write a story, whether it's Cambridge Analytica, or, as you said, any of the stuff that's happened.

56:59And first of all, I wasn't dying to go back into the Facebook world. I didn't want to be the writer of Jaws 2. Yes. I really hope I didn't hurt the feelings of the person who wrote Jaws 2. No, I mean, Jaws 2 was not Jaws.

57:15John August:That's what I'm saying. But then I was asked to meet with, several years ago, I was asked to meet with Francis Haugen, who was shopping a book proposal. It was very difficult for me to understand the book proposal because Francis has one of those Steve Wozniak brains. One of the things which people can look forward to seeing when they actually see the movie is there's rehearsal for testimony that Zuckerberg's going to give. And that is its own play, which is delightful. I'm really glad you put it that way. Yes, I mentioned the complicated structure of the movie. And the way I thought of it was there's this movie about Frances Haugen and Jeff Horowitz and her journey to become a whistleblower and inside of that movie there is a one act play going on those two things crash into each other by the end of the movie you asked me when did I say okay this is a movie now and why did I stop where I did I asked Jeff Horowitz a dramatist question which was what for Frances was the inciting action, right?

58:24You know, one day she was a devoted Facebook employee who went to this company specifically because they had the civic integrity team that she wanted to work on. One day she did that. And one day she was a whistleblower. I can't figure out what the inciting action was. And he said, well, she had this friend who was a Bernie bro, basically. this liberal friend who got radicalized to the extreme right very quickly by Facebook. And I imagined the opening scene. And suddenly, for the first time, I was imagining a movie. Why did I stop where I did? Of all the strikes against Facebook, the one that this movie's about is Facebook's role in the rise of divisiveness and extremism, and hyper-partisanship in the country, and there seemed like a logical ending point.

59:19John August:Yeah, it definitely is. It is a fantastic opening scene, and so people look forward to seeing that. And what is so rewarding about a cold open is that we don't have any information, and so we're gathering along the way, and you can create these wonderful false expectations about who are these characters, what is really happening here, why are we supposed to be paying attention, and the payoff is so great. It's a horror film almost. I'm really glad to hear you say that. Again, as I'm talking to you, very, very few people have seen this movie. So it's nice to speak to someone who has. What I need to do, because the conflicts that I write so often are about ideas as opposed to a bank robbery, I have to create a sense of motion.

1:00:05I like to start things in the middle, going 60 miles an hour already. If you can get the audience, the audience shouldn't just be a spectator. They need to be a participant in what's going on. They are the magic ingredient. If you can get them just sitting forward a little bit, having to think, needing to just constantly be running a little bit to catch up with you, that sense of energy is powerful.

1:00:32John August:Let's talk about who are the real people in the movie. So obviously Mark Zuckerberg exists. Francis, Jeff exist. Bill Burr is playing a character named Charlie Garrigan. He was an early investor in Facebook, millions and millions of dollars from Facebook, but saw that Mark was starting to take Facebook in a bad direction. I just saw bad things happening, could not persuade Mark or Schell Samberg. Is he a character who would have existed in the social network? Like could he have been a character who would have shut up in there? He became kind of a consulary to Mark immediately following those social network years.

1:01:09Great. Like right after the 2005 lawsuits. And wrote a book called Zucked, Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. And so obviously he and Mark had a falling out over that. And I made him a character in the movie. Wunmi Masako is...

1:01:30John August:Wunmi Masako is playing a fictional crisis PR. I believed every moment that she was in. Yeah, because she's Wunmi Misaku. Yeah, that's a talented actor there. Yeah, I'll say. That whole room, by the way, that you're talking about the prep session, they're preparing Mark for congressional testimony. Wunmi Misaku is the PR person running the whole thing. Also in there are Joey Brooks and Patrick Fishler, who are just, you know, Mark lieutenants, who are terrific in those scenes. I had a lot of fun shooting those scenes. And, you know, Jeremy Strong. I think Jeremy might be the best American actor under 50 years old.

1:02:09Oh, that's high praise.

1:02:11John August:I can see that. He's incredibly gifted and magnetic and compelling. And you can see the thinking happening behind his eyes. And he believed that that thinking is happening as the character, not as the actor. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And never once during the shoot did I hear Jeremy use his own voice. He only spoke as Mark. Never until I called cut, check the gate on the last setup for Jeremy. He was a fierce defender of Mark. Great. Always. And you want that. He made a beeline to me. As soon as I said, cut, check the gate, it came up to me and said, if I'd been playing Jeff, I would have been defending Jeff in his own voice for the first time.

1:02:58Yes, as we should.

1:03:01John August:let's get to our one cool things. Yeah. So what do you have to recommend to us? Okay, first of all, let me just be clear. I'm not cool. No, no, no. I've tried a couple of times to be. It doesn't work. One thing you like. One thing I love. The new season of The Paper has arrived. Great. Okay, the first season was fantastic. For anybody who doesn't know, this is from Greg Daniels. It's not a spinoff of The Office. It's the same idea. It's a documentary cruise in another office. It's a small newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. It has a potential relationship because of paper being sold. Because of paper being sold and one character, Oscar Nunez, who plays Oscar Martinez, is there too.

1:03:42But the show is very good. It's very charming. The cast is fantastic. The writer's room is fantastic. And the new season, I waited a year for the new season and it has just dropped. So that's my one cool thing. Fantastic. New season of the paper. The paper.

1:03:56John August:My one cool thing is a trope that I was not aware of until this last week. It's a trope slash a meme called Surf Dracula. Do you have any idea what Surf Dracula might be referring to? I do not. Wait, Surf Dracula? No, I can't. All right. So it comes from a tweet from 2021 by a guy named Topher Florence. And he says, back in the day, if you did a TV show called Surf Dracula, you'd see that fool surfing every week in New Adventures. But in the streaming era, the entire first season got to be one long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for five minutes in the finale.

1:04:33John August:And it's just such a wonderfully savage explanation of sort of this moment that we're at with a lot of our shows, which I just loved it. Okay. So this is like, this is bookending my saying at the beginning that some of the best theater in America is being multi-part series. Yeah, there's some bad stuff. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I just love it. That was good. The poor people at Surf Dracula. of, maybe it's great. It's going to be great. I mean, it's so wonderfully specific. He picked the exact right name for the show. His language is specific. I just love that as a tweet. It's a great tweet. Well done.

1:05:08John August:Well done. Great tweet. Aaron Sorkin thinks that that was a great tweet. He approves the writing of that tweet. I do. And that is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Meredith Stedman with help from Lauren Loesberg. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer. You'll find transcripts at johnhaugust.com. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. Script Notes merch is available at Cotton Bureau.

1:05:36John August:If you'd like to see us, not just listen to us, follow us on YouTube and Instagram. If you'd like to read us, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Most of all, thank you to our premium subscribers. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on the projects that never shot, but maybe we'll even talk about Houdini. Aaron Sorkin, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks.

1:06:32Transcription by CastingWords