A Quote by Alex Graves
My experience on 'The West Wing' was, I think, now rare in that I was pretty young, and I walked into this environment where Aaron Sorkin was giving me a script every week, and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells were keeping the studio off my back, at least as best as they could.
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It was terrifying when Aaron Sorkin announced that he was leaving West Wing, he and Tommy Schlamme. We felt like our parents were abandoning us. It was a tremendously sad day and I'm sure I will never understand exactly all the reasons why that happened.
Both of the Quaid brothers, Randy and Dennis, were in my class, and Tommy Schlamme, who produced and directed The West Wing with Aaron Sorkin, among many others. Marianne Williamson, who did A Course In Miracles, she was in my high-school drama class, too. So it was kind of an amazing class.
The universe works in mysterious ways and for me it worked out perfectly. With all respect to everybody else, Aaron Sorkin is and was The West Wing, full stop. There's no West Wing without him.
'West Wing' was huge. Like 'Hamilton,' it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up.
The script was given to me by one of my agents and they didn't tell me anything about it. My first reaction was, "The West Wing? Is it about a squadron of fighter jets?" Then I turned the page and saw, 'by Aaron Sorkin' and I knew it was going to be something good.
Anything that Aaron Sorkin writes, I could watch a million times. One of the few shows that I've watched in repeats was 'The West Wing.'
Actually, if I had to do it over [leaving the show the West Wing], I'd do the same thing, because lost in the shuffle of it is that Aaron [Sorkin] left the same year I did. And I would not have wanted to be on The West Wing with somebody else writing it.
The funny thing about The West Wing is - and I don't know what Aaron Sorkin says about it - but I'm convinced it was a comedy. It's a very intellectual and cerebral comedy, but it was SportsNight in the White House. It had an energy and a vitality and an intelligence and a passion that's rare. And it was extremely difficult to do, because they were so demanding about the dialogue.
I worked on a show called 'West Wing' before. I didn't work with Aaron Sorkin, but he created the show and set the tenor of the show, which was you follow the words of the script perfectly because there's a dramaturgical thing behind it.
Right before I got The West Wing, I was pretty much out of money. When I first came in to Warner Brothers, Aaron Sorkin was there. Of course I was nervous; I'm sitting here in front of the guy who wrote "You can't handle the truth!".
I had no regrets when I did it, I have even less regret now because I can't imagine staying on the West Wing show and then, six weeks later, Aaron Sorkin leaving.
During my many hours on the Acela, I have taken to watching 'The West Wing,' Aaron Sorkin's drama of an idealised White House.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!
Aaron Sorkin whole thing was that he didn't want the pomposity of the presidency in the West Wing. But once we cast Martin Sheen and we realised Martin's incredible accessibility, nothing felt pompous or aloof. If the show is about all the planets, let's end it with the sun.
I remember running into Aaron's Sorkin office and going "The show's West Wing going to work! I know it's going to work!" And it was literally that moment: the energy, the place, the feel. I didn't know the show would be successful but I thought it was going to be good and I don't have that feeling very often. And we were rehearsing all of that not knowing who the President of the United States was!
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