The Hollywood Reporter – Sorkin’s New Newsroom

Admired and attacked in Season 1, the HBO drama reboots with A-list advisers as its creator opens up about his process (up to 6 showers in one day), how he broke his nose and dealing with hate-watchers:  “You’re playing a dangerous game if you write to try to change people’s minds.”

It’s a mid-April morning at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, and Aaron Sorkin’s nerves are getting the best of him. “I have no ideas right now,” the Oscar-winning writer confesses once his office door has shut. Soon, the cast of The Newsroom, his HBO cable-news drama whose first season was in equal measures praised and pilloried, will need to begin shooting an episode that he has yet to begin writing. He’s aware that the holdup is worrisome — for HBO, which is shelling out several million dollars on each episode; for his actors, who often are kept waiting until the 11th hour for his scripts; and for Sorkin himself, whose reputation as one of Hollywood’s few name-brand writers is wrapped up in the series’ success. Anxiety is a feeling with which Sorkin, 52, is all too familiar. “It’ll be my 165th episode of television,” he says, “and I’ve come to realize that it’s only being scared to death that gets it done.”

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