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Hollywood has never concerned itself with self-plagiarizing. Ergo this video, which calls itself a “tribute to the work of Aaron Sorkin: the recycled dialogue, recurring phrases, and familiar plot lines. This is not intended as a critique but rather a playful excursion through Sorkin’s wonderful world of words…” (And I have swampland in Arizona to sell you.) Let’s see how long it takes before Sorkin’s new HBO series The Newsroom starts relying on Sorkinisms.
Related: HBO’s Aaron Sorkin Drama ‘The Newsroom’ Draws 2.1M Viewers In Premiere
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This is UNreal! And who had the time to do this?
truly. that is a lot of work.
They forgot a good one — “and I am never, ever sick at sea”
-Malice
-Charlie Wilson’s War
They also forgot:
“You know how I know they didn’t invent Facebook? Because if they did, they would have invented Facebook.”
–The Social Network
and
“You know how I know he didn’t write that script? Because if he did, he would have written that script.” –Studio 60
Someone who probably doesn’t have a job, it looks really time consuming.
more likely someone who’s a video editor and does this sort of thing for a living.
Wow – that’s impressive/unreal. Now – let’s have The Deadline Team go through OTHER aspects of movies and find Creative Repetition:
Let’s do music today. The film scores of James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith & Dmitri Tiomkin and see How Many Times They Repeated a specific muscial theme in several of their movies.
Everybody who is prolific will repeat themselves to some extent. This is a given. And it’s no big deal. My god – on TV, this happens all the time – RE tv writers – when one goes to another series, he’ll often pull out a ‘great line’ he came up with two seasons ago. I’ve seen this many times, across many series.
Odd that you listed James Horner instead of Hans Zimmerman.
My hero (du jour).
Exactly. The headline is highly inaccurate and very “internet” of the Deadline team. Over an extended period of time, just about any writer will establish a voice, and this sometimes means recurring turns of phrase. Kind of ridiculous the way the internet has decided to pile on to this. They got hungry, and they set out to find the next Jonah Lehrer, which Aaron Sorkin isn’t by any stretch of the imagination. The internet is like an addle-minded, obsessive-compulsive child who fixates on things and won’t let them go until they’ve sucked so many other irrelevant things into their orbit that the original thing is relegated to a footnote in the article on knowyourmeme.com. Seriously. FFS.
You could do that with any writer’s body of work, if they were fortunate enough to be this prolific.
It makes me feel hopeful that Alan Sorkin gets paid good money for what he does.
Sad. I thought he was better. Still a brilliant writer, but what happened to individual voice. As Sorkin states, “More and more, we expect less and less.” I guess I expected more of him. Great job to the editor.
Worse, the interview going around where Sorkin’s misogynistic nature is brought out gives ammo to those who criticized THE SOCIAL NETWORK. I loved that movie, love that script, didn’t agree, but he is kind of a major league jerk. Granted, everyone is Hollywood is, except Tom Cruise, who raised Chet Haze, an absolute jerk. So there’s that.
Also, the Sorkinisms and recycled dialogue have already been catalogued in the The Newsroom in countless mashups.
My goodness, how long did that take Kevin?
“Bok Bok-bok-bok-bok-bok” is the one I feel like I should’ve noticed.
Interestingly quite a few of those episodes of West Wing are from the post-Sorkin era
Hey Garfield!
Thanks for watching! I actually made a concerted effort not to “cheat” as far as that goes, and the only West Wing clips are from Season 1 through 4, (when Sorkin had a writing credit on all but 3 episodes)
Seriously, that’s all I could think about the whole time – how on earth did he find all this? Did he have transcripts from every episode and film and then just feed them into a computer script that looked for matching pairs?
Also, it does take away from Sorkin’s mystique a teensy weensy bit.
Sorkin is a mid-level brand, like Panera Bread–consistent, but not awful like, say, Burger King. But at the end of the day you’re just eating out when you go there, not really dining out.
Still, people love it. Who cares if it’s less insightful or original than all the hype would have you believe? I’m just glad the guy seems to be clean and happier than he was a decade ago.
I’m pretty sure this guy works for Panera.
Write what ya know.
Sorkin would make for a great copywriter… should he ever want to make a few extra bucks.
Nice indictment. The writing is tired and unreal. Always straining to be clever,hip and fast. Everyone sounds the same so what you get is no one. Just breathless,trite dialogue all contrived to capture the very short attention span of today’s t.v. remote jockey.
Sorkin’s constant messaging that people in Washington and in power are universally quick,sharp and clever could not be further from the truth and displays an abiding contempt for the imagination of his audience.
I’d have less contempt for the imagination of online critics if they didn’t use the word “contrived” every time to describe something they didn’t like. Bet if we could take clips from all your posts that term would come up over and over and over again.
Admit it, you put Sorkin to shame when it comes to reusing material.
#1 – Someone seriously needs to get a job, a life, some place to volunteer his time…
#2 – This only serves as a reminder how AWESOME Aaron Sorkin shows are!! God, I miss The West Wing. By the way, its pilot was a little lackluster. By the fifth or sixth episode, wooooh! look out.
“By the fifth or sixth episode, wooooh! look out.”
Isn’t that like saying: “The first few years of your marriage will be difficult and tedious but after you’re married 5 or 6 years, it will be wonderful?” Why can’t it be great from the start?
All this time, all that talent, and meh.
The way I look at it, the pilot executes on the idea that this is, for example, Lost meets The Beverly Hillbillies, in order to sell to the execs who are charged with making sure that things work, based on their understanding of what has come before.
Once on the air, a series sells itself on what is different from what has come before, and it takes a few episodes to find that.
But based on what we just saw…. it’s not different from what has come before.
No it’s not, because the next four or five episodes were seen in a month or two, not five to six years down the road.
Just terrific; but, yes, someone has too much time on their hands!
Honestly the Newsroom was the worst piece of crap I’ve seen in a while. Opening scene started out cool, and I really had my hopes up for it, but this is what happens when you let a writer run away with their ego and their power. It’s totally overwritten– every scene has WRITER stamped all over it. I once heard Sorkin say he hates it when actors or directors go off book– does he not know that that’s exactly what made most good movies great? The guy is an egomaniac and it shows. HIs work has terrible dramatic structure and relies completely on clever dialogue — this show will help bring him back down to earth eventually.
you’re angry and bitter and he’s rich and talented.
I have to agree. Preachy, overly written, overly earnest, unreal sounding and on the nose dialogue in too many places. It didn’t live and breathe to me. It hyperventilated. And the camera movement, like much of the dialogue – overly self-conscious.
Exhausting posturing and speeches!Has Sorkin ever been in a newsroom? Who has time for all that talking?
Oh, I get it. Will is a bastard but the love of his life dumped him.
Sorkin pontificating was insulting. Does he really think he will change people’s ideas? Does he see himself as a Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine?
Does HBO really want an audience who remembers Edward R. Murrow?
HBO wants whoever will pay for their service. That 18-49 network demo bullshit doesn’t apply.
And you heathens would do well to remember the great Edward R. Murrow. This generation couldn’t wipe his ass.
Unfortunately, Will McAvoy is no Edward R. Murrow. The problem with THE NEWSROOM is that Sorkin is using his characters as sock puppets to insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that McAvoy is the second coming of Murrow.
overstatement of the century. going off book has made most good movies great? do tell. which ones? Godfather? Shawshank Redemption? Casablanca? Vertigo? Sunset Blvd? Network? Star Wars? The Lion in Winter? Caddy Shack?
disappointed with newsroom but i’ll give it another shot. dude writes great dialogue so why not reuse it? plus, if you’re a writer and not plagiarizing yourself? then you’re not writing enough.
Yeah Line Prod! That’s what matters here!
This is HYSTERICAL! (And stated with enormous respect and affection for all the great dialogue he’s written over the years.)
I concur, WrteStuf! Hysterical! And, it makes me love his writing all the more. His voice is clear. His dialogue impactful. Haters, hate on. I would be willing to bet a million dollars on the next thing Sorkin does.
Awesome. We are going to build our very own Sorkinbot so we can use all his dialogue and never pay him a dime. Once it’s on YouTube it’s in the public domain and we can use whatever we want to use. We will program our own computers to give our network’s writers all the Sorkinesque witticisms they could ever want.
Your comment about “once it is on YouTube it’s in the public domain” could not be further from the truth.
The Internet is not immune from copyright laws.
You know if it were possible someone would actually do it.
Thank you, Kevin Porter! This is mostly unfair (and you know it, and you know it, and you know it), because I hardly think Sorkin is the only writer to repeatedly use a phrase like “You bet your ass.” Still, an amazing piece of editing. But how the hell did you have the time to do it?
Um…apparently Kevin Porter does.
Questions of going back to the same well too often aside, it’s fascinating to watch the same dialogue in different contexts with different line readings.
Kudos to Kevin Porter!
Pick any great writer supposedly in the same league as Sorkin (Billy Wilder, Chayefsky, etc) and find all the times they repeat the same lines over and over and over again. You can’t! They treated every story differently, they created very original characters who never spoke the same way twice) Sorkin has a style. But that style (as the exhaustively researched clips hows) undermines him. He needs an editor or a staff brave enough to tell him when he leans on trite phrases.
Take it even further, compare Faulkner’s body of work to Sorkin, who was more prolific? Who reused more dialogue….. There are a FEW examples of a great like Faulkner doing it but with Sorkin (Panera bread of writers) it’s a little ridiculous considering what he is paid
The point isn’t so much that he recycles themes and lines constantly but that a “great writer” would churn out interchangeable dialogue for such a range of characters. The same mannered lines coming from Presidents, assistants, soldiers and PA’s alike! A universe where every person talks like the man in the mirror who Aaron Sorkin is in love with!
Perfectly said. You can recognize each character created by a “great writer” by how he or she speaks, and, as you said, it’s annoying when everyone on screen, stage or page sounds identical to one another.
This is awesome. I am so glad someone had no family, no girlfriend, no job and no social life and hence had the time to put it together.
I do think it explains why I like Sorkin’s writing so much. I like what he has to say and how he says it, so if he is just doing a lot of repetition of what I like, there is not much I am going to dislike.
Incidentally, aren’t a bunch of the West Wing Clips taken from after Sorkin left the show? Doesn’t negate the point, but does show that some writers can emulate his style.
This is so funny–I actually thought of the same thing watching THE NEWSROOM. The show starts with a “You can’t handle the truth!” moment to rattle Jeff Daniels character into spewing what he thinks…
Think about it. A writer actually caused all of you to post. A fucking writer. A writer that spanner in the works, that thing that can’t get laid, that is too blame for all the failures. A writer made you take time out of your day to bitch. Sorkin is so good he steals from himself. I do too but I steal the lines that producers and net executives cut … this cat actually gets his stuff on air. He writes lines that actors will crawl through glass to say…He’s a writer and he makes all of us scribblers want to get up in the morning and try to matter. I’m too cynical for his brand of idealism but I’m not stupid; I know when someone is better than me and if his greatest crime is to know that too — well good on him. Bow down. His only fault is knowing that he is as good as he thinks he is — Bravo.