Watching Studio60

Continuing from Thursday’s Part 4 of the DVD audio commentary on the pilot, which shared Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme’s thoughts on the “The Big Three” segment, today’s installment describes the commentary over the fifth segment. Again, since Sorkin and Schlamme are generally speaking as one creative entity, I’m not going to worry over who said what unless it’s apropos. To start from the beginning, go back to Part 1.

No title card here. The segment starts with Matt outside the Studio 60 theater, jumps to Jordan and Danny in a hotel room discussing why he won’t actually be doing a movie and why he and Matt should take over the show, continues with Danny telling Matt about his movie-blocking drug problem, and ends with Matt running inside the building to give Jack Rudolph what-for.

Mention is made again of the fact that the Studio 60 theater is the Palladium in Los Angeles, with lots of CGI to add a second story and outer décor. The music editor and film editor are name-checked with kudos for their great work.

Wendy Phillips plays the head of PR who talks to Matt before he declares he’s going to wait outside for Danny. (Whatever happened to her character, by the way? She was in the show a lot at the beginning, and then sorta disappeared.) Sorkin and Schlamme talk about what an incredible actress Phillips is, with Schlamme mentioning that she played Robert DeNiro’s wife in the movie Midnight Run, and referencing the scene where he comes home with Charles Grodin. Sorkin remembers the scene but didn’t realize it was her. Personally, I particularly remember her from the series A Year in the Life, a one-season wonder from the ‘80s, but that’s neither here nor there.

The hotel room in which Danny and Jordan confer is a converted West Wing hotel room set rebuilt on their stage. “Bartlet has been there.�

Amanda Peet was still doing Barefoot in the Park on Broadway when this scene was being shot, and Bradley Whitford was still doing The West Wing two stages away on the Warner Brothers lot. Both of them had very long days. With this scene, they had to come back and finish later because Peet had to fly back out to New York and Whitford had West Wing work to do.

The scene marked Peet’s first day of work, and she hadn’t done anything like this show before. She “couldn’t have been more pleasant, but very nervous, so nervous� and admitted it, “which is the best thing an actor can do,� and plowed through it.

Once again, the commentators mention how much they love Donna Murphy, who plays Danny’s … agent, I think? I can’t remember, but she’s there in the hotel room. They talk about how she’s not just a phenomenal singer and dancer but also an actress as well. She has a Tony for the Sondheim musical Passion “where, incredibly, she has to play a woman who’s not beautiful.�

Back to Amanda Peet: In “fictionland,� this was the character’s first day on the job – or really, her job hadn’t started yet, it wasn’t supposed to start until Monday. As Schlamme recalls, “I thought, given the idea that I’m not going to have Amanda for rehearsal, I could use that to my benefit, and hers, possibly, by keeping her from being very comfortable with the rest of the cast.� He would have rather her rehearse that feeling of being the outsider rather than actually live it, but it was better this way than with her having lunch with her fellow cast members and becoming all friendly with everyone first.

Sorkin talks about how he and Bradley Whitford discussed the character of Danny, and the ways it differed from Josh Lyman. When you have the same people carrying over from one project to another, it’s easy to slide into the old ways. He wanted to make it very clear that the characters were different, and Whitford was very open to it. He talks about how an actor’s mannerisms seep into the characters he plays, and Whitford was good about catching himself and not doing those same things, and once they were stripped away, he created this all new character

Schlamme says the same issue came up when they were casting Rob Lowe for The West Wing. Here was this very familiar face from ‘80s movies, and there was concern that this would take the audience out of the show. But seeing the work that Lowe did in the auditions, they felt that yes, it would bump audiences in the beginning, but by page 10 he would just be a part of this big ensemble.

He felt the same way about the casting of Whitford and also of Perry — “the guy had just come off 75 years of doing the most successful show on television. You think the first year we’re going to be watching Josh Lyman and Chandler Bing.â€? But these are two great actors who worked hard to overcome that. So although they wrestled with those casting questions, they wanted to put the best actors on the field, and the results proved them correct.

Go on to Part 6.

_{Photo by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, DVD, audio commentary, pilot