Sorkin helped me to figure out how he did it during a Zoom interview for the Writers Guild Foundation.

Because Sorkin kept pulling the script out of the drawer to develop as the Spielberg-produced project went through a succession of directors (including Paul Greengrass, Gary Ross, Peter Berg, and Ben Stiller), the refined screenplay kept getting better, shorter, more condensed. “I’m sure that I wrote more than 20 drafts of script,” Sorkin said. “A screenplay isn’t finished until its confiscated. It’s pencils down.” At one point Sorkin took 18 months to try and turn the script into a play, but it didn’t work for him. Niko Tavernise/NETFLIX © 2020 3. Expand your horizons. Given his druthers, Sorkin prefers writing “scenes in a room with two people talking — not walking even — just standing there,” he said. But “Chicago 7” has “battle scenes with tear gas and blood, all this stuff I obviously had never directed before and had never written before. It was new to me.” Because of the budget-busting riot scenes, the movie couldn’t get made — until Spielberg finally pushed through a $35 million movie at Paramount with Sorkin as director. Having collaborated with directors Reiner, Mike Nichols, Danny Boyle, Bennett Miller, and David Fincher, “I’d have to be really not paying attention,” Sorkin said. “I never underestimated how hard directing is. And I still enjoy working with great directors as a writer, too. I was able to learn on ‘Molly’s Game’ and ‘Chicago 7.’ I’m sorry I had to learn in front of everyone.” 4. Fictionalize to reach the truth. Ever since “The Social Network,” Sorkin has been defending his right to dramatize history as he sees fit. Just as real people don’t speak in film language, “people’s lives don’t line up in scenes that form a narrative,” Sorkin said. “So writers have to do that.” That also holds for dramatizing a 5 1/2 month trial in two hours: “You’re not getting journalism from me, it’s a painting. It’s not a photograph.” 5. Set it up, pay it off.  Sorkin knows the rules of drama. Figure out your protagonists and the obstacles they must overcome. The Chicago Seven are not only going up against the U.S. Department of Justice’s lead prosecutor (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and corrupt Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) but each other. Early on, Sorkin sets up the payoff at the trial’s end (Spoiler alert: Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) reads the names of the dead into the record.) “When I’m speaking to students who are new screenwriters,” Sorkin said, “I say, ‘when writing the first draft, you try to get through to the end before you go back to the beginning. You might find the problem isn’t in the third act, it’s in the first act. Once you do, it pays off in the third.’” Niko Tavernise/Netflix© 2020

During the film shoot in 2019, Trump was holding big rallies. “You’d see a protestor get the crap beat out of him,” Sorkin said, “and you know [Trump is] nostalgic for the good old days as they carry him out on a stretcher. When they talk about the good old days, they’re talking about 1968. You see the same demonization of protest. I thought it was plenty relevant when we were filming last winter, and it didn’t need to get more relevant, but it did. I never changed the script to mirror events going on in the world. Events in the world kept changing to mirror the script.” After the pandemic hit followed by the George Floyd protests, Paramount Chairman Jim Gianopulos during the summer held a marketing meeting where he explained the unknowable future. “We don’t know what movie exhibition is going to look like in the fall,” he told Sorkin, who wanted the movie to come out before the election. “Let’s dip our toe with the streamers.” Netflix made a deal Paramount couldn’t refuse, and pushed the movie out in October, both in theaters and online. Whatever the alternate no-pandemic timeline would have been, the movie is a long-haul contender for multiple Oscars. Actors will rally around the ensemble cast led by Yippies Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong, and in a year lacking films with scope, writers, directors, cinematographers, and editors will appreciate the craft on display. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.