Aaron Sorkin wrote ‘A Few Good Men’ on cocktail napkins
Aaron Sorkin has penned the scripts and screenplays for some of the best plays and movies of the last 40 years. Amongst them are A Few Good Men and a stage-come-screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Sorkin has also written for television on shows such as The West Wing and The Newsroom and is widely regarded as one of the best writers in the industry.
However, Sorkin never thought he would end up becoming a writer at all. Earlier this year, he discussed his career and early beginnings on This Cultural Life. He said: “Sitting at the dinner table, I never imagined that I was going to be a professional writer; I actually thought I was going to be an actor.”
“I was acting in all the school plays, and writing for me was a chore to be gotten through before a school assignment,” he added. “I did not write for pleasure until literally the day after I graduated from college. But without knowing it, I was thinking as a playwright.”
Sorkin’s most-celebrated work is arguably A Few Good Men, which was a 1989 Broadway production telling the story of a number of military lawyers who uncover a conspiracy surrounding the United States Marines and the clients they defend from accusations of murder. The play would later famously be adapted for the screen in 1992, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.
It was Sorkin’s breakthrough effort, and he had amazingly written it during downtime from his job as a bartender. “After college, I came to New York, where I would begin my life as a struggling writer,” Sorkin explained. “I had any number of survival jobs or what most people would call ‘jobs’. I did everything, I bussed tables, I dressed up as a moose in Times Square and handed out leaflets, and I was mostly a bartender at Broadway theatres.”
“Now, when you’re a bartender at Broadway theatres, you serve people during what’s called the walk-in, the half-hour before curtain, and you serve people during the intermission, giving you an hour or so where you’ve got nothing,” he added. “And during that hour at the Palace Theatre, I was writing A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins on the bar. It was dialogue; I was writing the play.”
However, of course, you cannot turn a play written on napkins into a Broadway production, so Sorkin would go home with his “pockets stuffed with cocktail napkins”. He would then type up the contents of the napkins onto the first Macintosh computer that he had chipped to with his two roommates. “It was the first generation computer, with less computational power than you’d find in a greeting card that can sing you ‘Happy Birthday’,” Sorkin admitted. However, it had enough power that he could write his play and change the course of his life forever.
