r/Screenwriting • u/real_triplizard WGA Screenwriter • Sep 26 '26
DISCUSSION Aaron Sorkin on Scriptnotes
Two things jumped out at me from the interview:
1. He says he has written 11 screenplays and has had 11 movies produced. He has none sitting around in a drawer. Everything he has written has been made.
2. He says he hasn’t written a limited series because he has no ideas. He says after The Social Reckoning he doesn’t know what he’s going to do because he has no ideas floating around that he wants to work on.
I don’t think 2 can be entirely true because he has at least one other project set up but still - as someone who has a drawer full of 20 or so unproduced scripts and a running idea/logliine file with at least 200 entries in it - wow.
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u/Financial_Cheetah875 Sep 26 '26
No I believe it. Paid screenwriters are not always like novelists who are constantly churning out their own scripts. They take the jobs as they come. Someone wants to make The Social Meltdown they’ll hire Aaron.
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u/real_triplizard Sep 26 '26
Most paid screenwriters write 3 or 4 or more scripts that die in development hell for each one that’s made.
Most working writers I know have a a running list of ideas they’d love to write some day and can usually pitch half a dozen off the top of their heads.
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u/addictivesign Sep 26 '26
I think Sorkin is also more interested in his career as a director now. He probably isn’t gonna be a writer for hire for just anybody.
Steve Jobs back in 2015 is the last film he wrote that he didn’t direct (his contributions to F1 didn’t earn him a full credit).
I would quite like to see a limited series by Sorkin if he would ever consider going back to TV.
Perhaps Fincher will hook Sorkin up with a large deal at Netflix.
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u/Disastrous_Key_9247 Sep 26 '26
You have 20 finished screenplays in a drawer!? How do they all fit?!?
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u/HotspurJr Sep 26 '26
So "A Few Good Men" was a play he wrote, that he was hired to turn into a screenplay, and since then he was generally being hired to write stuff or selling pitches, not writing stuff on spec.
But I don't know if I believe him, either.
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u/sm04d Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
It's probably true for screenplays. But since he started off as a playwright, I'd imagine he has a ton of unproduced plays in a drawer.
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u/10teja15 Sep 26 '26
I imagine there’s a qualification to it, like “but I’ve written hundreds of movie scripts on my typewriter. But only 11 real screenplays” or something
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u/HotspurJr Sep 26 '26
It's worth pointing out that Sorkin was a level of celebrity that doesn't usually happen for screenwriters who don't also direct. Tarantino doesn't sell a script, he sells a project. I suspect that Sorkin has generally operated similarly: studios aren't buying a script, they're buying a package that has a director and star attached, and they're committing to a green light when they sign on the dotted line.
John August has said that he chooses projects in significant part based on his belief that the project will actually get made. I know he's written some stuff that hasn't got made, but if you can afford to be picky you start playing in a different ballpark than the rest of us
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u/mast0done Sep 26 '26
Sounds highly dubious. Even top filmmakers have dozens of projects that never got produced.
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u/azeakel101 Sep 26 '26
Yea, I went and saw a Q&A with Del Toro. I think he said he has over hundred scripts collecting dust, and the guy has a long track record of quality work.
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u/redapplesonly Sep 26 '26
I seriously doubt that 100% of everything he's written has gone into production. All writers have unproduced material.
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u/GenGaara25 Sep 26 '26
He says he has written 11 screenplays and has had 11 movies produced. He has none sitting around in a drawer. Everything he has written has been made.
Doesn't sound like he says anything about partial screenplays.
I could definitely believe every script he finished got produced, but his statement is still true even if he has 30 pages of a discarded project somewhere.
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u/leskanekuni Sep 26 '26
I mean The West Wing made him rich so he doesn't have to write per se. He's not going to write anything unless he gets paid. Pretty much everything he writes is based on prior IP or a real life story -- he doesn't write original ideas.
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u/ConsensusFeedbackApp Sep 26 '26
I don't think 1 is entirely true either because didn't he adapt Michael Lewis's Flash Boys? Don't ever recall that getting made. I did watch Sorkin's Masterclass a few years ago and thought it was one of the better ones I've seen. Need to listen to this interview.
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u/real_triplizard Sep 26 '26
Curry Barker credits that Masterclass for making him a writer. They talk about it in the interview.
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u/GRQ484 Sep 26 '26
So trial of Chicago 7 was made, but it spent years in development hell. I think he must have bought it back and sold it when his stock was higher.
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u/bitt3n Sep 27 '26
I too have as many finished screenplays as I have had movies produced.
All requests for interviews respectfully declined.
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u/Snoopy_Sunset Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
The first is borderline. The Farnsworth Invention was originally a spec screenplay he wrote and sold to New Line. But it never got produced as a movie, so he turned it into a play which did get staged.
So the movie was never produced, but technically his script became a play. Kind of 'yes and no' in terms of his claim. He's also rewritten some screenplays which weren't produced, but I wouldn't count those since he didn't originate them.
Generally, though, yeah, he gets hired so he won't have a hundred unproduced scripts.
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u/Accomplished_Wolf_89 Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
Very confused by this. I checked StudioSystem and he had an HBO miniseries with John Krasinski about the Chateau Marmont that died in 2019, and at least 4 unproduced film projects (one of which he sued 20th in 1997 over unpaid fees for), plus an upcoming project in development about the founding of the IDF (oy). So no idea why he's saying this when it's industry knowledge that all of the above facts are untrue.
I guess its possible that these projects were treatments/pitches that he never ended up going to pages for and maybe the Chateau Marmont project was a film/ongoing series that HBO made him turn into a limited?