The LA Times recently interviewed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin about his new take on To Kill a Mockingbird and the criticism he received for adapting the work of a female author as a white man. As part of the interview, Sorkin said that if he wrote a sequel to the movie The Social Network, it would focus on Mark Zuckerberg’s inability to deal with “bad actors” on Facebook, and how the company has “helped damage democracy.”
The LA Times recently interviewed Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter known for his work on the political drama The West Wing and newsroom drama The Newsroom, along with The Social Network, a movie centered on Facebook. Sorkin has recently adapted the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird into a stage play starring Jeff Daniels, who previously worked with Sorkin on The Newsroom. But Sorkin has come under a surprising amount of criticism — mainly for the crime of being a white man.
The interviewer noted that Sorkin had to deal with multiple legal issues with Harper Lee’s controlling estate when attempting to adapt the book. The interviewer further noted: “You had to deal with the criticism of a white man adapting a classic by a female author that deals with racially charged material. What was the bigger challenge, grappling with the art of adaptation or gearing up for these battles?”
“It wasn’t so much the art of adaptation. It was playwriting. My first draft wasn’t any good at all,” Sorkin replied. “I was just concerned with how not to ruin “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I took all the scenes you needed to tell the story and stood them up and had people talk to each other. It was like a greatest hits album performed by a cover band. The best thing you could say about it was that it was harmless — which is probably the worst thing you could say about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.'”
Later in the interview, the interviewer notes that many on social media were angered at Sorkin’s announcement that Atticus would be the lead protagonist of Sorkin’s adaptation as the book was written by a woman with the female character of Scout acting as the central consciousness of the book. Sorkin replied: “I’m not on social media, so I didn’t experience that earthquake. What I have experience of is an epidemic of people having a big reaction before they’ve seen something. Never has Scout had such a large role in what’s going on. Never has she had so much to say or been such a part of the entire story, which is organized around something that doesn’t exist in the book. Scout is trying to sort out the loose ends of what happened to Bob Ewell the night he died. She’s coming to grips with the truth.”
Sorkin also commented on the possibility of writing a sequel to The Social Network. The interview asked, “If you were to write a sequel to “The Social Network,” what’s the new Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook story?”
Sorkin reponded, “It would be how Mark and company were unable to anticipate that this thing could become a platform for bad actors. And then having discovered that, not doing anything about it. It would be about how Facebook helped damage democracy.” He has not commented on if he will actually write a sequel to his movie on the Masters of the Universe.
Read Sorkin’s full interview with the LA Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.