Are playwrights prima donnas, or does television somehow require less polish?
Neither. With A Few Good Men the play, with A Few Good Men the movie, with The American President and with Malice the plays and the screenplays I wrote each for a year-and-a-half, maybe two years. I do many drafts. If I get up in the morning, and I don’t really have it, and I go to the movies instead, I don’t write that day. We begin making the movie when I’m ready. On television, the deadline is king. It’s a script every eight business days. It reminds me a little bit of the way that Hawkeye would talk about the kind of surgery they do at the MASH unit. He would reprimand Winchester, “You can’t get too delicate, you can’t get too fine. This is meatball surgery here, patch it up and move ’em on to Seoul.” Well, this isn’t meatball surgery here, and you want to get as delicate and fine as you possibly can, but I often equate this series to summer stock with a lot of money. We’re doing a show every week, the deadline is king, but most of the time the real difference is you can’t afford t
