In high school I started watching re-runs of The West Wing and dreaming about working in the White House. Specifically, I wanted to be either Press Secretary CJ Cregg or speechwriter Sam Seaborn or, most of all, head speechwriter Toby Ziegler. No one plays a tortured writer quite like Richard Schiff. (For the record, I would have also settled for dating Sam Seaborn. Rob Lowe in his prime, people.)
I'd never before seen speechwriting celebrated as an art apart from any other; this scene in particular is iconic in my mind:
In college I double-majored in journalism and political science, always thinking in the back of my mind of speechwriting but never actually attempting it. I spent a summer interning in the Washington, D.C. office of Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka, working on the Hill during the day and traipsing back to my West End sublet and devouring two or three West Wing episodes a night. Obviously reality didn't have much in common with my favorite TV show, but it was an incredible summer and I came away with a deeper appreciation for the complexities of working in government, particularly in communications.
Yesterday President Obama gave a speech in Tucson at the memorial for the victims of the shooting last Saturday. He's getting praise for it all over the place, and for good reason: It's a really, really phenomenal piece of writing. If you haven't seen it, read the transcript here or watch below:
The speech is emotional but balanced. It is precise and focused and does not take advantage of the situation. Most of all, it's sincere. This is the best speech of Obama's presidency thus far.
I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know more about Obama's speechwriters beyond the fact that a 29-year-old whippersnapper leads the team. Jon Favreau (no, not that one) started as a Kerry intern in 2004 and, six years later, is Obama's Director of Speechwriting. Talk about making me and everyone else under 30 look bad.
Besides an incident last summer wherein Favreau was photographed playing beer pong shirtless (the horror!), he's received mostly positive reviews under the current administration. Favreau was on the Time 100 list and also got some love from GQ and Vanity Fair.
(By the way, Favreau is not the youngest head speechwriter the White House has seen: That would be James Fallows, who wrote for Jimmy Carter in the '80s and has since established himself as a total badass with a pen, writing for the Atlantic Monthly and pumping out top-notch books like nobody's business.)
It's inspiring to see this caliber of writing coming from the very top of the government communication machine. It makes me want to be a part of politics again, a part of bringing eloquence to a national forum which is too often dominated by trying to out-scream the other guy. Of this speech, I think Toby Ziegler would be proud.
My name is Brittany (hi Brittany), and I'm addicted to Aaron Sorkin.
Phew, that felt good. Okay, so if you don't know who I'm talking about, you're about to get a crash course. (Just go with it.) Sorkin is a writer whose most famous work is a little show called The West Wing. The show ran for seven seasons and won more awards -- including 27 Emmys -- than you can fit on even the most impressive mantle. I mean, hot damn. It was basically one of the best shows ever on the air. (omg West Wing clips) His other TV series -- Sports Night* (1998-2000) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006-2007) -- featured a similarly witty, intense, character- and dialog-driven television experience, though neither lasted more than a couple seasons. He's also written screenplays: The American President, A Few Good Men (which was actually a play a few years before Jack Nicholson yelled, "You can't HANDLE the truth!!" at Tom Cruise), Charlie Wilson's War, and this fall's feature on the founding of Facebook, The Social Network, among others. His characters are consistently brilliant, articulate, and self-aware. Sorkin somehow makes even the dullest discussion of political theory engaging, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I learned more about the American political system from the West Wing than in my freshman year American Politics class.
Basically, he's a BAMF.
So you can imagine how psyched I was when my friend Jason asked if I wanted to attend a production of Sorkin's newest play, The Farnsworth Invention, which is about the invention of television. The play ran on Broadway for fewer than six months (starring Hank Azaria as media mogul David Sarnoff; check out the trailer) back in '06-'07, and has since only been shown in small theaters in a few cities around the country. The TimeLine Theater Company in Lakeview is currently staging the Chicago premiere.
Okay, so I may be fundamentally biased because of my undying love for everything Sorkin, but this was quite possibly the best play I've ever seen. The scenes and transitions were crisp, the characters were lovable and flawed, and the acting and staging were phenomenal. Most of the engineering stuff went over my head, but that didn't matter in the slightest. The confrontation between Sarnoff and Philo Farnsworth -- a small-town kid from Idaho that invented television without so much as a college degree -- is played out to perfection. The two narrate each others' stories, bickering in the middle of scenes in the way that brings to mind a regular Monday meeting between Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman. And as with everything Sorkin, you walk out of the theater knowing something new. (Of course, you have to take into account that the play is ficitonalized, but there are enough nuggets of truth to create a fairly complete tapestry, and the program notes belabor the actual facts if you're interested.) TimeLine took a really good script and put on a top-tier production.
Point is, if you're in Chicago, you gotta go. Soon, because it closes this month.
[Side note: In the process of writing this post, I've watched at least 20 minutes worth of WW and SN clips. It's a disease, I'm telling you. And it feels so good.]
* You can watch the entirety of Sports Night on YouTube. Begin your conversion here.
