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How To Write a Screenplay

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Sorkinisms

June 25, 2012 By William Robert Rich Leave a Comment

I had no clue Aaron Sorkin wrote Tom Hanks’ Academy Award speech for Philadelphia. You learn something new everyday! I think it should be noted, with repeated use, cocaine causes long-term changes in the brain. Loss of visual memory is one. Perhaps Mr. Sorkin doesn’t watch his films or shows. Perhaps he doesn’t remember typing those words on the page. Perhaps he developed his technique for dialogue after painting a picture with numbers. Hey, these films and television series were written months, years, and even decades apart. He wrote eighty-eight episodes of The West Wing for Christ’s sake. Let’s cut the man a break…he’s sober now.

Aaron Sorkin’s Sorkinisms

  • They only thing that you had to do to make me happy was come home at the end of the day.
  • Don’t be ridiculous. Everybody likes me.
  • At the moment I could buy Mt. Auburn Street, take the Phoenix Club, and turn it into my ping-pong room.
  • I could buy his house four times and turn it into my ping pong room.
  • Answer them. Don’t answer them. It’s entirely up to you.
  • This will get worse before it gets better.
  • A writer once wrote, “as if it matter how a man falls down. When the fall is all that’s left, it matters very much.”
  • If you haven’t seen Davis Love play Pebble Beach, then you haven’t seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played.
  • I’m really quite something.
  • A famous monk once said, “I don’t always know what the right thing to do is, my Lord, but I think that the fact that I want to please you, pleases you.”
  • Eyes front, mister.
  • That was predictable.
  • Don’t get cute with me.
  • What is the virtue of a proportional response?
  • Fire me, or shut the hell up.
  • I’m not other people.
  • To say nothing of the fact…
  • You think?
  • Not for nothing.
  • You bet.
  • This isn’t happening.
  • Yeah, really.
  • Bring it, boss.
  • Q: Better from who? A: Whom.
  • The streets of Heaven are too crowded with angels.
  • I have legs that go all the way down to the floor.
  • …much like myself.
  • I’m not that guy.
  • I’m talking about really good porn.
  • You are an adolescent, over-sexed, whore-monger!
  • That’s the cost of doing business.
  • Eat ’em up.
  • I go home and you go home.
  • I’m like Tippi Hedren around here.
  • How’s it going so far?
  • This isn’t government camp.
  • …and you know it.
  • I’m [insert religion] and her family is…incredibly not.
  • I’m pretty drunk.
  • Can we have a civilization?
  • Look at my face!
  • I hate your breathing guts.
  • This sideshow is over.
  • …screwed with your pants on.
  • It’s seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less from each other.

You can also include slapping people across the back of the head, as well as chicken and fart sounds.

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