09-24-2008, 11:02 PM
I liked the patriotic eloquence and righteous energy of that speech, it's a great example of what Sorkin excels at. I've seen that movie (and that speech) about five times, and always enjoy it. The pro-environmental lobby lecturing seemed like a paper tiger to me when I first saw it, though it's proved to be more prescient than we knew, when the movie came out. The line about going door to door to collect guns, even now, is downright nutty, theatrically satisfying but empty and silly. The speech as a whole makes me long for a Democrat Presidential figure with that kind of guts and clarity, who's not a fictional character, but a real candidate. Clinton came close. None of the current candidates on either side can carry a speech like that as universally convincingly as Sorkin and Douglas did, in that performance. Themes that would be further explored in "The West Wing" were hatched in performances like that.
Trivia: I read that Sorkin's original script for "The American President" was hundreds of pages, way too long to fit into a shootable movie. Sorkin had more to say, and shopped his idea to the networks. The material leftover from "President" became the framework for the series he pitched, some of the pages of the script went directly into the storylines of "The West Wing."
Trivia: I read that Sorkin's original script for "The American President" was hundreds of pages, way too long to fit into a shootable movie. Sorkin had more to say, and shopped his idea to the networks. The material leftover from "President" became the framework for the series he pitched, some of the pages of the script went directly into the storylines of "The West Wing."