Search Results for: oral history

‘West Wing’ Uncensored

Longreads Pick

An oral history of the beloved political series:

Aaron Sorkin: Kivi knew about the meeting and said, “Hey, you know what would make a good series? That.” He was pointing at the poster for The American President. “But this time you’d focus on the staffers.” I told him I wasn’t going to be doing a series and that I was meeting with John to meet John — I wanted to hear stories about China Beach and ER, and I especially wanted to hear about his years as stage manager for A Chorus Line. The next day I showed up for the lunch, and John was flanked by executives from Warner Bros. and agents from CAA. John got down to business and said, “What do you want to do?” And instead of saying, “I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding. I don’t have anything to pitch,” I said, “I’d like to do a series about staffers at the White House.” And John said, “We’ve got a deal.”

Published: May 13, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,858 words)

If 'The West Wing' Were Run By NBC Executives, It Would Have Become 'Schindler's List'

JOHN WELLS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: I had a deal at NBC because they wanted me to continue to be involved in ER. So we developed West Wing there, but they didn’t want to do it right away. “The American audience isn’t interested in politics” and “there’s plenty of that on Sunday morning television” were some of the things I recall hearing. But I insisted on getting it made if I was going to stay with ER.

AARON SORKIN: Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield were running NBC at the time the pilot script was delivered. Sitting in a meeting in Warren’s office with John, my sense was that the network executives were respectfully underwhelmed. Referring to one of the stories in the pilot that was about Cuban refugees fleeing to America on inner tubes and should we or should we not send the Coast Guard out to help them, one of the execs suggested that it might be better if [Bradley Whitford’s character] Josh Lyman went out and saved them himself. I tried not to make it an awkward pause before I said, “You mean actually swim?” He said, “No, that would be ridiculous. I mean he rents a boat. A motor boat, a skiff, but the boat’s too small to get all the refugees on board and he has a moment like Oskar Schindler where he’s saying, ’I could have rented a bigger boat! I could have saved that guy over there and those kids over there!” It was hard to avoid the awkward pause then because I honestly didn’t know if I was being messed with or not, and I didn’t want to insult the executive or appear to be difficult to work with (even though I badly needed the network to pass because by this point ABC had ordered 13 episodes of Sports Night) so I said, “That’s worth thinking about.”

From The Hollywood Reporter’s oral history of “The West Wing.” Read more oral histories from the Longreads Archive.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Netscape, 20 Years Later

Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to be an amazing thing and the social aspect of everyone can publish on this platform was going to be amazing. But the idea that it would become this powerful and interoperable, I can’t take any credit for thinking that up front.

Rob McCool: I remember when I was driving somewhere in 1994, I was driving from Illinois to here [California] and I saw a URL on a billboard and I was like, “Oh my god! What is that doing there?” Now it’s taken for granted, but back then it was like, “Wow! What is that? Why is that there?”

Jon Mittelhauser: I can’t even begin to think it’s 20 years. But then I look back and I realize I’m significantly older than the guys I thought were the old guys who were managing us. The guys who had come out of SGI. Now I’m in the role, or senior to the role that they were in at that point. Aleks Totic: This is the stuff I’m thinking about these days: For me, I’m not used to being in the winning position. I come from a long tradition of geeks. Where you’re just not a winner. It’s really weird to see that the vision we had has just won over completely. That revolution is still being played out. As Marc said, software eats the world.

An oral history of Netscape on its 20th anniversary, from the perspective of its creators. Read more oral histories.

Stories About Ghosts: A Reading List

This week is all about ghosts: ghosts that haunt houses, girl ghosts in movies, ghostwriters and Ghostbusters.

1. “If You Believe in Ghosts, You’ll See a Ghost.” (Katie Heaney, Pacific Standard, November 2013)

Katie Heaney writes about the supernatural for Pacific Standard — everything from Bigfoot sightings to seances. In this installment, she visits the oldest home in New York in search of its rumored ghostly matriarch.

2. “The Oral History of ‘Ghostbusters.'” (Jason Matloff, Esquire, February 2014)

“You never expect that big a hit. But there was a great sense that we were doing something special right from the beginning.”

3. “Ghosting Julian Assange.” (Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books, March 2014)

A sprawling, spectacular account of O’Hagan’s attempt to help the founder of Wikileaks write his memoir, and the total chaos that ensued.

4. “The Feminist Power of Female Ghosts.” (Andi Zeisler, Bitch Magazine, September 2013)

A shorter piece about the role of malevolent women ghosts in cinema. (Hint: It’s their righteous fury that makes them so angry.)

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Photo: spectrefloat

The Truth About What Goes On at the 'SNL' After-Party

“If you had a good show you’re on cloud nine,” said Jon Lovitz, who had a lot of them in the mid–1980s. On the other hand, Mr. Lovitz recalled the forlorn night when he had appeared in only one sketch, and was sitting at the party with Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers.

“It feels like your career’s over,” Mr. Lovitz said. “Honestly, they call it the after-party. In my mind, I only know one time when it actually felt like a party.” (That was in 1990, he said, when Technotronic played their hit “Pump Up the Jam” there.)

Paul Brownfield, in The New York Times, investigating Saturday Night Live’s legendary after-party—and whether it’s actually fun. Read more on SNL in the Longreads Archive, or check out the Live from New York oral history.

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‘The pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin.’

Longreads Pick

On Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and an oral history of the “outlaw country” movement that coalesced in Austin as a reaction to the polished “countrypolitan gloss” in Nashville, led by RCA executive Chet Atkins:

“Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.”

Author: John Spong
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 13, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,438 words)

The Sad State of America’s Aging Nuns

Longreads Pick

The population of nuns in the United States has dwindled to less than 60,000, and just 12% of them are under the age of 60. With convents closing down, sisters are left to fend for themselves: The Catholic Church covers retirement funds for priests, “the sisters have no such safety net. When their orders run out of money, that’s it.”

“‘Why would you want to be a nun if the archdiocese is going to treat you like they do?’ Ann Frey at the Wartburg said. ‘Their whole lives they’ve been obedient and done what they were asked to do, and now nobody is helping them?'”

“Neil Burke, a 24-year-old who spends a lot of time with the sisters at the nursing home, feels the same indignation. He could be volunteering with priests, but he doesn’t like them much. ‘If they need anything, they ask and just get it,’ he said. Instead, he’s compiling an oral history of the sisters at the Wartburg that will hopefully be completed by 2016. He can list the ways women are mistreated by the church off the top of his head: ‘They can’t give homilies, celebrate mass, consecrate the host, or become priests.'”

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Jul 23, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,741 words)

Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013)

When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find a date to her wedding, she made the best of the situation—she took to Craigslist.

2. “The Amazing Atheist: The Full Interview.” (David Luna, The Annual, May 2013)

Traditional interviewing with a twist: Luna interviews T.J. Kincaid, better known as YouTube’s The Amazing Atheist. (Full disclosure: I am the editor-at-large for The Annual, a monthly humor magazine founded by my childhood friend and comedy connoisseur, Kevin Cole.)

3. “Jokes Taught Me About Sex.” (Andrew Hudgins, The Rumpus, June 2013)

To everyone who didn’t understand the dirty jokes their friends told in middle school: Hudgins understands you. And he may have had it a bit worse.

4. “And … Scene” “An Oral History of Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater Partying and ‘Awkward Sexuality.’” (Brian Raftery, New York magazine and Vulture, 2011 and 2013)

Their former venues include a bloody delicatessen basement and a low-fi burlesque club frequented by Hasidic Jews. Upright Citizens Brigade has produced some of the wildest and funniest folks in comedy today. Here, Raftery compiles the experiences of the early days of Amy Poehler, Ed Helms, Bobby Moynihan, Horatio Sanz, Janeane Garofalo and many more.

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Photo: Marcin Wichary

“The Oral History of NY1.” Hannah Miet, Complex