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As creator Aaron Sorkin faces TV critics and issues a mea culpa for his recent drug arrest, four cast members demand higher salaries.
By ERIC DEGGANS
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 24, 2001
PASADENA, Calif. -- Let's say you're one of the most powerful TV producers in Hollywood.
You've created one of the most critically acclaimed series in recent years. You've won a raft of awards, from the Emmy to the Peabody to the Humanitas. Your show's return will be one of the most highly anticipated events of the new fall season.
And you're three months past a bust for carrying controlled substances in an airport.
Do you bother appearing at a reception where you'll face up to 200 TV reporters who know every detail of your recent tribulations?
You do if you're West Wing creator-executive producer Aaron Sorkin.
"I can't even tell you how lucky I feel to be able to come back to (making) this show," Sorkin, 40, said last week at a reception held by NBC at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour.
"I did something really stupid," he said of his arrest April 15 at Burbank Airport, after security officials discovered marijuana, cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms in his luggage (Sorkin pleaded guilty and agreed to a drug treatment program). "It was obviously very public and embarrassing. But it would be a mistake to think the trouble I got into was the result of pressure. It was a result of stupidity . . . nothing else."
Sorkin's rounds at the press tour -- he also attended the critics group's awards ceremony Saturday, along with many in the show's cast -- couldn't help but seem a little like damage control.
That's because the behind-the-scenes wrangling at this White House drama has threatened to overshadow the action in front of the camera.
About two weeks ago, four cast members -- Allison Janney (C.J. Cregg), John Spencer (Leo McGarry), Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman) and Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler) -- missed a read-through rehearsal of the new season's first script. The actors did show up July 16 for the first day of filming.
Though producers said their absence resulted from a "misunderstanding" about the date, news surfaced that all four were negotiating together to triple their salaries from about $30,000 per episode. NBC officials said Warner Bros. had already offered the quartet double their current salaries -- closer to the higher incomes enjoyed by co-stars Rob Lowe and Martin Sheen.
At the critics association awards Saturday, the West Wing Four (as some critics call them) presented a united front, saying their salary demands were in arbitration and would be resolved soon.
(Sheen, who has publicly admitted his own past problems with substance abuse and bemoaned Sorkin's drug problems, was absent Saturday.)
"It's not like we banded together -- us against the world -- we just respect each other a lot," said Janney, adding that the negotiations were largely resolved, though she would not say if their pay demands were met.
"We got what we wanted, in that we want the show to go on and we're all behind it," she added, refusing to say which actor may have initiated their alliance. "We're doing this together . . . only to facilitate, not to aggravate."
Whitford declined to say much on the record about the situation ("I'm pleading the Fifth on the advice of my attorney," he said, only half-joking), but his wife, Malcolm in the Middle star Jane Kaczmarek, defended the four in an interview Wednesday.
"I think it's interesting that somebody commits a felony and the studio comes out saying, "We completely support (him) and stand by (him),' " said Kaczmarek. "But when a group of actors stand up for what has been promised them, (they) are treated like money-grubbing pariahs."
Executive producer John Wells -- whose aggressive push for wage increases for writers as head of the Writers Guild of America this year led industry types to fear a possible strike -- shrugged off Kaczmarek's comments, saying such tense negotiations are common when shows go on summer hiatus.
"The difficulty here, especially for actors who haven't been through it a lot, is that the negotiating process for this is very adversarial between the attorneys," said Wells, adding that he is good friends with Kaczmarek and Whitford, with children in the same Los Angeles area preschool. "It's difficult not to feel as if it should be personalized. But it's not."
He also acknowledged that writers on the show were asked to forgo raises as producers instituted an across-the-board freeze on salaries to contain costs; he hopes NBC will kick in additional money to help solve the problem, once the negotiations with the actors are completed.
"The show itself is very expensive to produce," said Wells, noting that AOL Time Warner (owner of West Wing's production studio, Warner Bros.) has pressed for cost controls throughout the conglomerate. "There's a lot of pressure to contain the costs on the show. And the writers weren't the only ones affected."
Because so many of the show's grand sets have to be made from scratch, production costs for the West Wing outstrip even those of NBC's longtime colossus ER (factoring out the huge salaries for stars Anthony Edwards and Noah Wyle), the producer said.
According to the Washington Post, NBC pays Warner Bros. $1.6-million for each episode, though the show costs $2.7-million per episode. Wells said such deficits add up to a $50-million loss each season.
And with network TV dramas notching some of the lowest ratings in summer reruns ever -- ER recently recorded its lowest rating in history for a repeat -- broadcast executives are pushing producers to cut costs significantly.
Such problems couldn't come at a worse time for Sorkin, who has also spent time defending himself on the Internet against charges that he unfairly takes credit for writing all of the show's episodes.
The party line at The West Wing has long been that Sorkin writes every script himself, using research material, scenes and sometimes whole scripts cobbled together by his writing staff.
But writers on the show insist that they provide more to Sorkin than just background material. (At last year's critics association tour, some West Wing writers groused during a Writers Guild reception with TV critics, after some journalists ribbed them about not having much to do every day.)
The issue went public when former West Wing writer Rick Cleveland was quoted in a Writers Guild magazine complaining about Sorkin hogging the spotlight when the two accepted an Emmy Award for a West Wing episode.
Sorkin eventually logged onto the Web site MightyBigTV.com and claimed that Cleveland was fired from the show; Cleveland, now working on the HBO series Six Feet Under, denied the allegation in another post, and Sorkin apologized.
"I always imagined, when I was on the Internet, that I was in a very small room with about 10 people in it. . . . I just didn't imagine the volume of the microphone I was speaking into," said Sorkin, who sparked a blizzard of news stories with his behavior. "I responded too quickly to a post attacking the producers of the show and paid the price for it."
Certainly, this will be a challenging season for the award-winning drama (recently handed 18 Emmy nominations, the series also won a TCA Award on Saturday as best TV drama). Though last season's finale left some doubt as to whether President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet (Sheen) would run for re-election, Sorkin and other cast members have pretty much admitted he will.
Stockard Channing joins the cast full time as Bartlet's wife, and actors Ron Silver, Connie Britton and Evan Handler come on board as recurring characters. Oliver Platt, Emily Procter, Anna Deveare Smith and Marlee Matlin will also return in recurring roles, Sorkin said.
Ask Matlin how she feels about Sorkin's problems and you'll get a quick answer: "S--- happens," said the actor, who is deaf, using sign language to communicate her words to a speaking interpreter. "As long as he's standing on his own two feet and he knows what he was doing and he knows it was wrong, all you can do is be there for his support."
On screen, the West Wing crew faces a different challenge: organizing Bartlet's re-election campaign while recovering from news that the president hid his multiple sclerosis from his staff and the American people.
"Everyone -- including the press, by the way -- in this fictional world, feels a sense of betrayal," Sorkin said. "The press in Bartlet's world, a press that . . . was very supportive and sympathetic (and) . . . feels like they were responsible for getting him elected, have all of a sudden come down on him like a brick bank."
Sounds an awful lot like the situation Sorkin faces in real life, as critics who have hailed The West Wing as one of network TV's finest shows set about probing the life of its creator for further scandals.
"It's like something Orson Welles said (comparing) jealousy and seasickness," Sorkin said. "For the person it's happening to, they want to kill themselves. For the rest of the world, it's hysterical. That's what this is like."
-- Material from Times wires was used in this report.