Sorkin branches out with directorial debut
Screenwriter finds heroine after his own heart in high-stakes drama ‘Molly’s Game’
I or anyone else would be foolish to try hard to not write like themselves. I’m not trying to write the way people talk,” he adds, “I’m trying to write in a more entertaining manner than the way people talk.”
This has led some to accuse Sorkin of selfrighteousness and being obsessed with supermen (and wonder women) who don’t exist in the wild. As for his own self-image, Sorkin insists that he’s far from perfect, calling everyone — Molly Bloom, his family, his friends — “all way smarter than me.”
Old-world integrity
That hasn’t stopped him from voicing his opinions, as he did in the form of a letter to his teenage daughter and ex-wife that was published by Vanity Fair the day after Donald Trump was elected. “Sorkin Girls,” it began gently, before getting right to the point: “It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time), but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has.”
That screed was originally intended, he says, as a private communication.
“But my daughter’s mother said, ‘Can I send this to a friend?’ I said sure. And it turned out the friend was the editor of Vanityfair.com.”
Sorkin doesn’t regret the exposure. Far from it. He kind of loves seemingly lost causes, he says, and the heroes who champion them. Bloom, he argues, is one of them, not merely because she excelled in a field in which she had no previous expertise, but because she refused to give up some of her clients’ names to prosecutors, or to “dish about” the famous clients in her book. (This is only partly true. Bloom is only too happy to talk trash about Maguire in the book, who she writes once asked her to “bark like a seal who wants a fish” for a $1,000 gratuity.)
The heroes who most appeal to Sorkin all have one thing in common: a kind of old-world “integrity” that his late father possessed. “He always lived his life with one foot in another century, and the other foot in a century that perhaps never existed,” Sorkin says. “Character, and the difference between right and wrong, were always very important to him.”