THE SNITCHING POST: Verisimilitude.
The Snitching Post – Where we go BTS.
I’ll never forget where I was. My then-boyfriend, now husband and I were driving from Napa down to Carmel while in California for a family member’s wedding.
I got a ping on my phone. It was an email, and it was from an “A. Sorkin.”
Now, I knew one of these. Andrew Ross Sorkin was an old college friend and colleague at CNBC.
But his emails didn’t usually come from an “A. Sorkin.”
There was, of course, the other one: Aaron.
I didn’t know Aaron Sorkin personally, but I obviously knew who he was. I grew up on The West Wing, but was also obsessed with A Few Good Men, his first play-turned-feature film. Then there was The American President and Sports Night. I loved it all.
Surely this couldn’t be him.
I opened the email and much to my surprise, it definitely was. And he was asking me if I’d be a consultant on a new show he was writing called The Newsroom.
At the time, I was co-hosting a daily show on MSNBC called The Cycle, a panel show where I was paired with three left-wing co-hosts and was usually the target of their ire. It was actually a blast – I came to really enjoy the banter, the debates, and the friendships. Aaron had seen me here and thought I could help with some of the TV lingo and behind-the-scenes of cable news.
I jumped at the opportunity. Of course I would do it.
Over the next year or so, I met with Aaron several times for work talk over boozy dinners in midtown, and we’d share industry stories over late-night emails. He’d text in the middle of a show to ask about something he’d seen us do or say, what happened in the breaks, or what we meant by something.
He was incredible – smart, hilarious, curious, totally earnest, and he talked like he wrote. (He was also a total gentleman and lovely person.) It was thrilling.
Aaron’s known to simultaneously care a great deal about verisimilitude in his work, and care not at all. It’s a delicious paradox that nevertheless balances out perfectly in his films and television shows.
A famous example is in The American President – Sydney arrives late to the White House for a Christmas Party and laments she got stuck on Dupont Circle on her way from The Hill. Of course, as anyone in Washington knows, you wouldn’t go through Dupont Circle from The Hill to the White House. Aaron didn’t care – he liked the way it sounded. And he was right…no one but DC insiders knew or cared, and to the rest of us it sounded believable. And more importantly, it really rolled off the tongue.
When I first started working with Aaron, I noticed in some of his dialogue from what was meant to be the fictional ACN set that he’d have producers shouting at his anchors, “Sound on tape!”
“Sound on tape” is what we call a video that we’re going to play – with sound – during a live broadcast. In our teleprompters it will just say “SOT” when we’re meant to toss to the video. When I was coming up, I remember seeing “SOT” for the first time and asking what it stood for. My very favorite producer memorably responded, “It stands for ‘Shut the fuck up!’” Meaning, when you see it, STOP TALKING.
I said, “Aaron, you know, we don’t call it ‘sound on tape.’ We just call it a SOT – pronounced like ‘sot.’” I was proud – I had contributed something insidery, like I was hired to.
He said, “I know. But I don’t like the way that sounds.”
So “sound on tape” it was for The Newsroom. And once again, he was right. While it drove all of us in the business nuts, no one else cared. Plus, he didn’t have to force a character to explain “SOT” to the audience if they just called it what it was.
There’s a reason Aaron’s one of the all-time greats. He hears words in his head the way musicians hear music notes. We’re friends still, and I just adore him. (Even if it really is a SOT.)
I’ll share more TV BTS, backstories, and gossip here. Just look for THE SNITCHING POST moniker on top.
Loved Newsroom. That pilot was one of my favorite episodes of any show.