According to the 'Social Network' scribe, the complaining writer actually liked the final draft although she initially opposed the story.
- Dec 10, 2014
AceShowbiz - Aaron Sorkin broke his silence on "The Newsroom" controversial rape storyline. The screenwriter/producer told his side of story in response to the show's writer Alena Smith who revealed on Twitter that she was kicked out of the room for expressing her objection.
In a statement to Mediaite, Sorkin admitted Smith was indeed "excused" from the room after "some passionate debate in our writers room" regarding the matter. He, however, added that Smith eventually loved the final draft of the story although she opposed the initial script.
"Alena Smith, a staff writer who joined the show for the third season, had strong objections to the Princeton story and made those objections known to me and to the room," he said. "I heard Alena's objections and there was some healthy back and forth. After a while I needed to move on (there's a clock ticking) but Alena wasn't ready to do that yet. I gave her more time but then I really needed to move on. Alena still wouldn���t let me do that so I excused her from the room."
"The next day I wrote a new draft of the Princeton scenes - the draft you saw performed last night. Alena gave the new pages her enthusiastic support. So I was surprised to be told this morning that Alena had tweeted out her unhappiness with the story."
"But I was even more surprised that she had so casually violated the most important rule of working in a writers room which is confidentiality. It was a room in which people felt safe enough to discuss private and intimate details of their lives in the hope of bringing dimension to stories that were being pitched."
He concluded, "That's what happens in writers rooms and while ours was the first one Alena ever worked in, the importance of privacy was made clear to everyone on our first day of work and was reinforced constantly. I'm saddened that she's broken that trust."
Smith previously tweeted, "As @emilynussbaum points out in her review of tonight's ep, you can't criticize Sorkin without turning into one of his characters. So when I tried to argue, in the writers' room, that we maybe skip the storyline where a rape victim gets interrogated by a random man..."
"I ended up getting kicked out of the room and screamed at just like Hallie would have for a 'bad tweet.'," she added. "I found the experience quite boring. I wanted to fight with Aaron about the NSA, not gender. I didn't like getting cast in his outdated role."
