 Hey everyone, this is Jack and what you're about to see is my official audio commentary track for my video on Aaron Sorkin. I do one of these after every video, and it's an exclusive to Patreon, but I wanted to make this video to promote it, so if you want to get these after every video, check out the link to Patreon. It's laid back, unrehearsed, unwritten. It's just me talking about the video and some of the process that went into it and kind of what inspired the video, and hopefully you can learn a little bit more about it. Anyway, there are also a lot of other rewards over at my Patreon, so check that out if you're interested, and I hope you enjoy this one week free preview of what some of the perks of Patreon are. Thanks for watching. Hey everyone, this is Jack and this is going to be my official audio commentary for my video on Aaron Sorkin and especially how to develop characters. A few things that I want to touch upon today. First and foremost, I'll be telling the story of the conception of this video, and then moving on to respond to some comments and point out a few different things in the video that I feel like are worth pointing out. But to begin, how I decided to make this video on Aaron Sorkin, and it's one of those videos that's kind of gone through a couple of different stages, and I'll be talking about each of them. Originally it was going to be just a video on Moneyball. I was actually at a buddy's house and he had an Oakland A's game on, and I'm not the biggest A's fan, but whatever I was watching, I was just kept on thinking to myself, I'd much rather be watching Moneyball, the movie about the A's in the early 2000s than the A's in 2018, even though they're having a pretty decent season, which I'm not too happy with. Anyway, getting off of that. Anyway, I got home, watched Moneyball, and just totally fell in love. It's a movie that's really hard to dislike. I think it just has that universal appeal of one person doing so much with so little. So anyway, got home, watched Moneyball, and then kind of just started outlining a script of what I wanted to focus on with just the one movie, and then I kept on thinking how it was so similar to Molly's game. There were a lot of parallels between Moneyball and Molly's game, and I was thinking maybe I could do like a two for one. I could compare some between the two movies. Then it was really disdagned of myself. This is almost all of Sorkin's career is not his entire career, but his modern era of his career. Let's just talk about that whole thing. So anyway, I've kind of had this video on the back burner for months now, and I'm glad that I could finally release it. So since late June, early July, I've kind of known that I wanted to talk about Sorkin, and originally it was going to be a scene comparison type deal, looking at the crux of the story. If you remember my Steve Jobs video, where I kind of argued that the one scene between him and Andy was the crux of the entire movie. I was almost going to not remake that so much. We kind of look at a couple of different scenes and see the similarities and the differences of the character, ultimately revealing that he's wrong or she in Molly's case. Then I thought I've already kind of done that. Let's look at it from a slightly different angle and still look at the character development and still look at the crux of the character, but also kind of go through their entire arc and what Sorkin does to create conflict along the way and to do so much that makes Aaron Sorkin Aaron Sorkin. Anyway, I got to writing and I found that great interview, which I used quite a few clips from in this where it's him being interviewed, I think before either Molly's game or Steve Jobs, one of the two, I think Steve Jobs actually. It was him talking about structure and character and conflict and ultimately his writing process. It's an hour-long interview. It's definitely worth listening to if you really want to hear a great writer talk about his writing process because he really gets into it and gets fascinating to listen to. Anyway, that was a big help in kind of structuring it because there's certainly overlap in how I went through that, but ultimately it's kind of structured to flow like one of his movies, go from the beginning to the end with the different steps talking about what helps to define his characters because I feel like that's definitely the best way to discuss his films because even though they are almost never linear, they always cut back and forth in between depositions or storytelling, however they do it, the character development is linear, which I think is really fascinating how he's able to take one aspect that's completely wonky off the walls, but the fundamentals of what the story is about stays uniform. You're finding out more about the character as the story goes on even though what the character does may not happen in order, how the character does it, and how we're presented with how the character does it is ultimately what stays uniform as Sorkin, and I just think that is awesome the way he's able to break conventions in some ways, but also do things very conventionally in others. That's what I really love with filmmaking. And then as for the element with his daughter, what ultimately, Aaron Sorkin's daughter I should say, what ultimately inspired that to be such a big part of the video was that commencement speech from Syracute, some school, I forgot exactly which school he went to, but anyway, that commencement speech was where he talks about his daughter and his cocaine addiction, and I just felt like he's talking about himself, but this is so many of his movies, and I just think that's, I don't know, I totally see the parallel and hopefully I was able to lay that out. Anyway, one thing that I did want to discuss that I saw a whole lot or a little bit in the comments, and then a whole lot on different people who had posted my video and read it in the comments over there, was this Sorkin backlash, which truth be told, I've made a couple of videos about Sorkin's movies. I did one on the social network, one on Steve Jobs, and honestly, I had never heard this pretty insane backlash to him. His dialogue's not realistic, it's completely fictitious, it takes me out of the movie, no one talks like that, and I don't know, I just don't have any time for that nonsense. First of all, this video isn't about his dialogue. I think I made that pretty darn clear in the beginning when he even says the last thing I do is dialogue. It's kind of what he's known for, but I feel like saying that's what makes him a good writer is barely scratching the surface of what makes him a good writer. I think what I talked about is why I love his movies so much. Anyway, but this idea that he's a bad writer because his dialogue is fake, and he actually talked about this in the hour-long interview I mentioned, where he goes, dialogue isn't how we talk at all, and then the interviewer asks, what about Shakespeare? Is that how we talk? He goes, I'd say that's even further from how we talk because most people don't rhyme when we talk or something like that. It's not necessarily supposed to be realistic. It's fast in your face dialogue. It's telling a story that took years to unfold in two hours, and he's able to do it efficiently and still make it fun. I will not have anyone saying that Aaron Sorkin is a bad writer because his dialogue isn't necessarily what you will hear in an everyday conversation. Also, I feel like trying to get the edge and trying to win a conversation is a big part of what everyone does, like you're not quickly on this black screen. This was a render error, and I'm super upset with myself for not noticing it earlier. I had something in the Final Cut Pro timeline, and I don't know what happened. It didn't render out, and I re-watched it before rendering, but not after I upload it. I've been kicking myself all week for that. I'm glad it was only 15 seconds and not a longer segment, but yeah, I'm really upset about that. I just took the file and put it into a new thing. Gosh, I'm very upset about that. Anyway, this is the commencement speech, which is definitely worth watching as is the interview. You can hear him talk. He doesn't have the same control over language that he does when writing, obviously, but what he says is absolutely remarkable, and you can still totally hear his characters in him. Definitely, familiarize yourself with Aaron Sorkin's interviews. He is a fascinating person. Read his Wikipedia page, because that's a great mini biographer. Obviously, you're not going to learn everything from that, but Aaron Sorkin's a fascinating person, an incredible writer, and I'm glad there are people out there making movies like the movies that he is making because he does a pretty darn good job at his job. Anyway, thanks for listening, and I will see you next week.