Sorkin takes the blame for `60'

WHEN Aaron Sorkin was a young nobody in New York in the 1980s, working as a bartender while writing his Broadway hit, "A Few Good Men," on cocktail napkins, he found himself observing the media darlings of the moment. The threesome, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, were all as well known for their off-stage antics as they were for their literary work.

"I remember saying to myself, 'These guys aren't doing themselves any favors becoming known for all those other things instead of for what they wrote,' " Sorkin recalls with a wag of his head. "And then look what happened. To me!"

Sorkin's much-touted NBC series, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," whose last episode aired just a few weeks ago, was canceled before the end of its first season, a victim of bad ratings and mediocre reviews. But it was also ambushed by nonstop sniping between Sorkin and the media, much of it even before the first episode aired.

The storm seems to have passed. Though not exactly eager to unburden himself, Sorkin sat down for the first time since "Studio 60's" cancellation to discuss the perils of failing in public and navigating a media universe where it's increasingly hard to tell if you are being judged by your work or simply by your celebrity persona.

Let me put my cards on the table: I'm an unabashed admirer of Sorkin's work. He is a rare breed of writer today who uses both humor and a bracing moral seriousness to wrestle with the complexity of the real world. But "Studio 60," as good as some individual episodes were, never seemed to find a consistent voice, a must for must-see TV. It was, in hindsight, a bad idea, if for no other reason than it tried to graft Sorkin's fascination with social issues onto a story about career crises in the rarified world of TV comedy writers. But that made the show only more irresistible -- we got to see a brilliant writer try to breathe life into a doomed premise.

Sorkin insists that he's not sore about the way things turned out. He's moved on, with a new play premiering on Broadway this fall and an adaptation of "Charlie Wilson's War," a Tom Hanks-starring Oscar contender due at Christmas. He also has a new deal with DreamWorks to write three films, starting with "The Trial of the Chicago 7," a project that could end up being directed by Steven Spielberg.

Still, there are standard ways of dealing with failure in Hollywood. No. 1: Taking responsibility.