미드 뉴스룸 The Newsroom (2012)

[Astroboy(용준)]

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난 Aaron Sorkin의 작품을 좋아한다.
끊임없이 쏟아지는 대사에 압도당하면서도 지적인 말싸움에 입이 쩍 벌어지게 감탄을 하게 된다.
영화 A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Moneyball과

미드 The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip을 좋아한 사람이라면

이번에도 분명히 만족할 것이다.

개인적으로는 Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip을 보고 감탄을 했다.
이렇게 지적이면서도 유쾌한 드라마가 있을까?
아마 우리나라는 10년이 지나도 이런 드라마는 만들지 못할거라는 생각을 하게 했던 미드였다.

급박하게 돌아가는 상황과 숨가쁘고 끊임없는 배우들의 하모니를 보게 된다.

분명히 액션이상의 액션을,

감동이상의 감동을,

그리고 드라마 이상의 드라마를 선사한다.

특히 Emily Mortimer 가 매력적으로 나와서 좋았다.

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The Sorkin Way

After writing two of the most interesting movies of the past several years (The Social Network and Moneyball), Aaron Sorkin has returned to television via HBO, which is premiering his dramatic series The Newsroom next month. On the set, as a blue-chip cast—including Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston, Emily Mortimer, and Olivia Munn—revel in (and wrestle with) their dialogue, James Kaplan hears about the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of Sorkin’s fictional world, from his love of screwball to his passion for argument.

By James KaplanPhotograph by Annie Leibovitz

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO SPEAK From left: Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Sam Waterston, Olivia Munn, Dev Patel, Thomas Sadoski, Alison Pill, and John Gallagher Jr., photographed on the set of The Newsroom, in Los Angeles.

Recently, Aaron Sorkin got a note from HBO entertainment president Sue Naegle about a passage he’d written in a script for his new series, The Newsroom, a workplace dramedy set at a fictional cable-news show and premiering on the network in June. The comment, which was not approving, got his attention. It concerned a moment at the end of Episode Four. As Sorkin explained the scene to me, “Everybody is having a petty argument about something, and it’s a Saturday, and—”

And then a certain actual national tragedy (the show is set in the very recent past against real news events) takes place. Suddenly, “they have to scramble to get on the air,” Sorkin said. “And I called for source music.”

He meant an already recorded song, rather than part of the score—something to play over a scene to heighten its emotion. Naegle had objected. “Sue’s note was ‘They do this a lot at the end of Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” Sorkin told me. “I wrote back saying, ‘You know what? I’ve never seen Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m sure they didn’t invent this thing.’ Sue said, ‘It’s just an observation. Just letting you know that HBO has to vigorously distinguish itself from network television.’ ”

Aaron Sorkin has done network television—quite a bit of it. There was his beloved, multiple-award-winning The West Wing, which ran on NBC from 1999 to 2006; he also created Sports Night, a critically acclaimed but ratings-challenged satire of an ESPN-like all-sports network that ran on ABC from 1998 to 2000; and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which explored the backstage dynamics at an L.A.-based Saturday Night Live-type show and sputtered to a close on NBC in 2007, after one season.

But that was network, and, as Sorkin can now testify personally, cable is a different animal. Especially HBO, which pioneered original cable drama in 1997 with Oz, then marched on to greatness with The Sopranos and The Wire, opening the floodgates for Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, and a spate of other good to great shows on Showtime, AMC, TBS, and IFC, among other outlets.

Naturally, HBO has had its share of misfires and mediocrities over the past 15 years—make your own list—but in the moneyball world of premium-cable programming (HBO topped $4 billion in global revenue in 2011), it’s still the gold standard. “It’s why you see so many people now—Michael Mann, Dustin Hoffman, Martin Scorsese—who cut their teeth in the feature world thrilled to come work at HBO,” Sorkin told me.

We were sitting in his office at Sunset Gower Studios, just across the way from the soundstage where The Newsroom was being shot. It’s a quietly elegant man cave: Leather furniture, dark-wood cabinetry, major Apple gear on the mogul-size desk. An expensive-looking cowhide valise plopped significantly on the carpet. Six Emmys on a shelf.

Sorkin, who has a million-mile-an-hour edge behind a camp-counselor-friendly, highly focused exterior, asked if it was O.K. if he smoked, fretted about smoking, lit a cigarette. “They were concerned about you seeing my office,” he finally said, exhaling.

I asked why.

“They felt it was too nice,” he said. “They wanted me to make sure that you understood it’s because I essentially live here. I sleep here.”

Noted. And believed. For while Sorkin’s bad habits have attracted their share of notoriety—in 1995 he spent time in rehab for addiction to crack cocaine; a backslide after recovery led to a widely publicized 2001 bust for drug possession at Burbank airport—no one has ever called him a slacker. Quite the opposite. From all evidence, his capacity for work is herculean: beginning with 1992’s A Few Good Men, the highly successful movie he adapted from his 1989 Broadway drama, there’s scarcely been a moment in his career when he hasn’t had projects afoot simultaneously in theater, film, and television.

Yet The Newsroom appears more than capable of keeping him fully occupied. After seeing a partially completed pilot last summer, HBO ordered 10 episodes; production began in the fall. The schedule calls for each episode, comprising 80 to 90 pages of dialogue-dense script, to be shot in nine days. To put this in perspective, most feature films shoot two to three pages of script a day, most network TV series six to seven.

The money at HBO may not compare to the payday for a commercial-TV series that hits the syndication jackpot, or to profit participation in a hit feature film, but in a movie universe that grows coarser and more constricted by the second, HBO represents an attractive alternative—if not a high-prestige life raft—for big-name talent. “The line has been blurred,” Sue Naegle told me.

And the alliance between the premier cable network and movie giants such as Mann and Hoffman (the recently canceled Luck), Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire), and now Sorkin (The Social Network, Moneyball) makes for interesting balances of power. Was Sorkin’s confidence in himself or, more likely, in HBO shaken by Naegle’s note about the music? Not in the slightest, he said. “I understood what she meant, and it was a perfectly valid comment.” But, he told me, “I can only write the way I write. I’m not altering my writing style at all because it’s on HBO. Yes, I am able to—when I want to—use the language of adulthood when people get a little hot under the collar, which wasn’t something that I was able to do, say, on The West Wing. Frankly, I would have loved to be able to do it there. I just would have liked to have seen [Martin Sheen’s President Josiah] Bartlet say ‘goddammit’ from time to time, which you can’t do. You’ll be able to say ‘motherfucker’ on network television before you’ll be able to take God’s name in vain on television—I promise you.

“So it’s nice to have that here,” he continued. “It’s nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There’s a difference. Trying to guess what the [mass] audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.”

And the recipe at HBO? “Listen—obviously we want people to watch the show,” Sorkin said. “We want as many people as we can get. But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn’t set up their business model to make writers happy. It’s just a nice unintended consequence.”

Still, business is business. The network won’t comment on production budgets (which in the case of big-canvas shows such as Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire have been reported to reach as high as $100 million for a 10-episode season), except to claim, as Rolls-Royce used to say about the horsepower of its car engines, that they are adequate. “With television that’s worth paying for,” Naegle said, “I think you really have to deliver something that looks spectacular.” Yet, she added, while “what we offer the filmmakers isn’t really analogous in terms of what you can spend when you make a movie, I think the reason they’re drawn to work in [cable] television is the ability to tell a certain kind of story.”

A story, in other words, with length as well as depth and breadth: one that can be spun out over season after season, as with Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Wire, rather than a mere 120 minutes. And one that will draw the kind of actors who can do it justice.

“Great material attracts great actors,” said The Newsroom’s casting director, Francine Maisler. “But it’s always tricky to get certain actors to commit to the multiple years a hit series will require. HBO is a slightly easier sell than broadcast networks because they only produce 6 to 13 episodes a year, versus 22 to 24, which gives actors more time for features and theater projects in between production.”