Aaron Sorkin responds to joke comparing Twitter to McCarthyism by comparing Twitter to McCarthyism
The Being The Ricardos writer-director also talked about the film's casting controversies, and managed to work some Dave Chappelle thoughts in there, too
It’s like the old proverb says: Never joke about wanting to hear what Aaron Sorkin thinks about a topic, unless you want to spend the next several minutes of your life hearing what Aaron Sorkin thinks about a topic. (Probably while walking down a hallway at improbably high speeds.)
Thus was the fate of The Hollywood Reporter’s Lacey Rose this week, who made the mistake of joking with Sorkin—amidst a profile about his upcoming why-are-you-doing-this TV history project Being The Ricardos—about a possible link between the McCarthyism aimed at Lucille Ball back in the day, and modern-day Twitter.
Sorkin, taking Rose seriously, responded with that sort of high-speed verbal firehose that can come off as moderately charming coming from the faces of a Bradley Whitford or an Alison Janney, but which, from the man himself, mostly just comes off as unfiltered raving. Hence:
The bad guys during the blacklist, it wasn’t just Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn would have been powerless if it wasn’t for this other committee whose job it was, if the network wants to hire me on a television series, it was their job to tell the network whether that was OK, whether a guy who owned a couple of supermarkets on Long Island was going to be OK with the network advertising their product during my show. If the studio heads and network heads had told these groups to take a walk, and had just not listened to them, everything would have been fine. And so, for instance, if we were to talk about Dave Chappelle for a moment, I certainly could make a rebuttal argument against a number of the points that he makes in his special, but I have absolutely no argument with Netflix and Ted Sarandos for putting it on their platform, and what we need are more people to say no to — and that’s what Twitter is, Twitter is that committee that says whether or not you can abuse someone, and they must be ignored.
Sorkin also opened the hose on critics of Kidman’s performance in the film, making it clear he never asked for her to do any kind of impression of Ball, and criticisms of casting the Spanish Javier Bardém as Cuban-born Desi Arnaz:
I want to tell you my opinion on this and I stand by it, which is this: Spanish and Cuban aren’t actable, OK? They’re not actable. By the way, neither are straight and gay. Because I know there’s a small movement underway that only gay actors should play gay characters. Gay and straight aren’t actable. You could act being attracted to someone, but most nouns aren’t actable.
(Aaron Sorkin: Bringing up stuff nobody asked about since, roughly, forever.)
Being The Ricardos is set for a limited release on December 10; you can check out the trailer (and whatever the heck Kidman is trying to achieve with this particular part) over here.