​Richert. Versus. WGA

RE:  RE-DO OF WGA ARBITRATION THAT NEVER HAPPENED ON 'THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT'

 

UPON NEW DISCOVERY OF WEST WING PILOT SOURCE WILLIAM RICHERT DEMANDS  WGA ARBITRATION THAT NEVER HAPPENED AND RE-DO OF AARON SORKIN'S PHONY CREDIT FOR 'THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT' – WRITER ASKS UNPAID VOLUNTEER SCREENWRITER-PRODUCERS ON BOARD OF DIRECTORS TO READ THE ACTUAL SCRIPTS IN RARE UNUSUAL REQUEST – WRITER-DIRECTOR WILLIAM RICHERT ACCUSES ADMITTED 'CRACK WRITER LIAR' AARON SORKIN OF LYING IN 1995 LETTER FROM DRUG REHAB CENTER - BOARD MEMBER KATHERINE FUGATE ONLY WGAW MEMBER WITH COURAGE TO ASK REASON FOR FIRST SCREENWRITERS LONG-TIME ANGER AT CREDIT AWARD TO SORKIN – VOLUNTEER BOARD PROTECTION BY TONY SEGALL AND DAVID YOUNG GONE ASUNDER

 

MEMO TO:

 

KYLE MORRIS, 

CO-WRITER ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY  'THE PRESIDENT ELOPES AKA THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT; 

 

CC WGAw ALL-VOLUNTEER BOARD MEMBERS AND CREDIT EXECUTIVES:   

 

Katherine Fugate, Stephen Schiff, Carl Gottlieb, Patric Verrone, Chris Keyser,  Scott Alexander Howard A. Rodman, Alfredo Barrios, Jr. Marjorie David, Carleton Eastlake, Jonathan Fernandez, Karen Harris, Chip Johannessen, Peter Lefcourt, Aaron Mendelsohn, Michael Oates Palmer, Billy Ray, Ari B. Rubin, Shawn Ryan, Thania St. John et.al.

 

FROM:  WILLIAM RICHERT

 

July 4, 2015

 

Dear Kyle,

 

  In Hollywood I discovered that I was one of the chosen people.  Not of tribe, but of talent, which has a tribe of its own.  If the 400 know each other, so do the talented.  No secret handshake or password required.  The talented people know each other and recognize each other from afar.

 

Now, Aaron Sorkin is certainly among the talented people we know in the instant.  So am I and so are you.  We each contain talents of different atmospheres, like the planets circling the sun,  of patrons, fame and “success” (the title of one of my favorite movies of mine) , but nonetheless we are spinning in the same space, chasing or subject to the same rules.

 

That is why when one of the talent tribe swings way out of orbit, almost to defy gravity and throw off the solar system of the  light prisms of talent into shit, we have to restore order to the system of gravity, however elliptical our orbits.

 

Continual striving for greatness is not for the feint hearted.  The use of the screenplay form is equal to the use of the novel form or the poetry form or the forms you fill out to get into college, though I didn’t go to college, that institutionalized leveler of boundless youth, another system like the Writers Guild of America that may have gone awry.

 

The Writers’ Guild ought really to be seen for what it is:  an exclusionary group of “writers and video game creators” (talent not required to join, just a pay stub) who control how a “writer” gets paid in Hollywood by the studios with secret contracts; WGAw "protection" from "enemy" studios is like the payouts to mobsters; and anyhow "studio" has itself become  an inclusionary term for the interlocking systems formerly centered geographically in Southern California.  (What constitutes a "studio" any more?  One of 7 major corporations?  Something in your garage? Who is that artist formerly known as “Prince.”  Anybody remember?)

 

The writers guild was begun by Lillian Hellman, among other "scribes" who eventually created that original "black list"  in the 50's which has been converted by the WGA into a new "black list" but this time a praise and accolade for scripts, the same kind up upside-down gymnastic linguistics that allowed them to award Aaron Sorkin sole credit.

 

WGA founder Lillian was both a convincing playwright and plagiarist about whom Mary McCarthy famously said:  "Every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘but,’” and the whole of the WGA has come to be like that.

 

Not long ago John Wells, maybe to cover up his treatment of our own script, awarded Dalton Trumbo his writing credit on “Roman Holiday” — after 59 years, and after Wells had run the union for ten years in various capacities.  This is rather longer than the fast track for sainthood given that South American dude by Pope Francis.

 

[Click following link to Eric Hughes' websie to see how far back the WGAw has been collaborating with the studios against the true rights of authors who choose screenwriting as an art form and ignore WGA dictates; back then they called them commies:    http://www.screenrights.net/creditsescapeclause.html]

 

20 years ago, on November 16, 1995, the WGA gave Aaron Sorkin sole “written by” credit on his draft being the last in a series of drafts starting in 1982 with the sale of my original story to Walt Disney Company.

 

By this time I'd already spent an earlier 20 years doing re-writes for Redford's producers and other executives, thinking my director contract would be honored.  It was originally set for me to direct:  as a writer-director, that was my whole reason for the long trek.  

 

During this time, the project was very well known, often in the press, and VARIETY announced in 1993 that Sorkin was doing a revision of our script to make it more political, or something.

 

It was always in rewrites, it seemed.  In a letter he wrote to me that Alan Horn copied to the WGA Directors and Robert Redford the Disney CEO referred to our original as "Your much re-written screenplay."  

 

Alan Horn should know.  He knows how much he paid for re-writes, and all scripts attached to each other in a time line back to ‘82, like the chain letters you've recently written the WGAw Board Members. The fact that Alan Horn paid 5 million dollars for the right to take our script off the market (?!) makes it the largest script sale in modern times, but we didn’t get credit for that either.  Nor did we get any of the money, even after all the free-writes I did for Bob, a very conservative reader.  Finally I refused to give him any scripts until I read them to him first, after he called me to say he was in the office.  Maybe he gave Sorkin the credit because he didn’t like to listen to me, “another actor,” he called me once.

 

At the time of the Writer's Guild “arbitration” in 1995 -- an arbitration which we know today never occurred --  Wildwood executive Sarah Black told the LA TIMES: “THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT” belongs to Bill Richert the way France belonged to DeGaulle.”

 

Of course this is hyperbolic; France never belonged to DeGaulle.  But neither was he written out of his own history as I have been written out of mine by Sorkin and the WGA.

 

I thought it was kind of hysterical, in the old female psychology sense, that Sorkin called me a “Hack” in 2010 in THE DAILY BEAST or somewhere.  I'm nothing like a script factory, just the opposite.  I'm a beat poet making movies as a sideline for the fun of it, and my output is very slim.  Actually, I’ve written only a dozen or so scripts in the past 50 years, a few of which I’m still working on, while Mr. Sorkin wrote over 86 "teleplays" for our uncredited series THE WEST WING even though he never really got the original point of it, and damaged the reputations of some pot smokers.

 

Michael Douglas would have been miscast in our original THE PRESIDENT ELOPES along with THE EXECUTIVE WING/WEST WING;  Douglas tends to Borcsh Belt when being satirically philosophical, while I was after a President more in line with a Roussaeu-enlightened Ronald Regan, if we can dare imagine such a persona.

 

You might have thought Michael Sheean would fill those shoes, if his President weren’t a secret drug user, like Sorkin, with perpetually sweating feet.

 

Sorkin did a fair job of mimicking my long “walk and talk” dialogue passages he claims he invented (forgetting Shakespeare)  — which I started in my own venues way back in WINTER KILLS, a movie I found out he used as part of his “research” — and Sorkin also sparked to and copied my President-Speechifying Moment of ripping into a long monologue to the astonishment of his staff, like Pavarotti bursting into THE HILLS ARE ALIVE.

 

AS an aside, to show how scripts can influence society if made into movies, I quote myself in a recent letter to Jeff Bridges, who is presently reading WHAT GENRALS DO AT NIGHT, a film I’m producing.  I include it here because it relates to the vast reach of movies, and the results of deceit:l 

 

[Dear Jeff, Many years ago I sent you the first draft of THE PRESIDENT ELOPES which you said "Sorry Billy it doesn't float my boat", a line that still makes me smile a little, but that led to Robert Redford optioning the screenplay and 20 years of re-writes for various studios until production when Redford so hated Rob Reiner and Sorkin's revisions that he quit the picture, while this picture became the basis for THE WEST WING which led to the revulsion of the "evangelists" towards Democrats because the President in the series used drugs, and that led to the election of George W. Bush, which led to Iraq and the present conflagrations of humanity everywhere.  Not to say because you declined a role we now have the crummy state of the planet earth, but I gotta say if you'd been in that movie, we would quite possibly be living in a very different kind of nation with a different recent history on a way more peaceful planet…however, we can make up for lost time…etc…]

 

If the “iconography” of actors is part of the design, you see why I would not have chosen Michael Douglas for the movie, and neither would Redford; it was Sorkin’s choice.

 

AS FOR MY DIALOGUE FOR PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON, THE CHARACTER BEFORE SORKIN’S 1994 NAME CHANGE/TRANSFORMATION INTO  'PRESIDENT ANDREW SHEPARD' (NOTE:  HOW THE NAMES ARE ALMOST SCRABBLE VERSIONS OF EACH OTHER; TRICKY AND NEAT BUT NOT NICE - nor original to him.)

 

TV critics made much of these long monologues. If you think of Jeff Bridges in the role of Andrew Shepard/Sam Anderson, you get the idea of what it might have been had I directed the movie, from my script, as intended.  For better or worser, Here is the original of those long Aaron Sorkin speeches, as written by the author; pls think of Jeff Bridges doing the lines, and then how Sorkin might re-write into his own image:

 

EXCERPT FROM 1991 'THE EXECUTIVE WING/WEST WING' DRAFT SCREENPLAY by WILLIAM RICHERT:

 

SOLVANG (CONT) 

-- If you were to reach her, propose to her, and be rejected ••• 

 

HOVERMANN 

It would be a knife in the heart of your Presidency. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Is that why you're asking? Not occurring to you the effect her saying no might have on my ••. 

Sam trails off. 

 

CYRUS 

-- All benefits which might accrue from your bold, romantic and adventuresome move would reverse themselves to liabilities. 

 

SOLVANG 

The polls would kill you. 

 

HOVERMANN 

Think of the headline: President turned down, caught out of the White House with his pants down, so to speak, and -- • 

 

Sam turns to his son Peter. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Peter, this concludes White House Politics 101. I want you to go to your room like we said __ 

(looks over at the Men) while I tell these three gentlemen just where to sit when they ride on these upcoming poles. 

 

PETER 

Okay. 

He crosses to the door. Sam is about to speak once more when Peter turns back. 

 

PETER 

Will I have to call her Mom? 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Well, her given name is Catherine. I'm sure the two of you can work that out together. If we get the chance. 

 

Giving him a "thumbs up," Peter leaves. 

Sam looks at the others. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Amazing. The four of us have faced some tough situations since my inauguration, but I've never seen any of you this scared. Do I appear to be a dangerous person to you? Some kind of threat, or obstacle? 

 

THE THREE: Stare at him. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Then why do you look at me as if I'm Abul Nabul? Am I merely a political being? If so, I'm a walking historical artifact __ nothing more -- certainly not an evolving, evolutionary, biological being -- No wait, I'm not going off the deep end here __ • 

He crosses to a pile of books at the base of the couch, where he's been doing "research." The three observe the President of the United States rummaging through pages like a graduate student. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

(opens book, reads) 

"Our happiness is not an ordinary matter of young lovers; it is, for me, a matter of efficiency. 

I am absolutely dependent on intimate love for the right and free and most effective use of 

my powers. Love, personal love, is the one thing a man's heart cannot do without." 

 

CYRUS 

President Woodrow Wilson's love letters. Great. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

-- At the height of the bloodiest war in all history. We men do need our women from time to time, do we not? 

 

SOLVANG 

Forgive me, but I gave up a very lucrative position in the private sector thinking you intended to both be and stay the President, sir. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

What? 

 

SOLVANG 

I do not think this is a win-win situation. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

Good God, if I am denied because of questionable theories or possibilities or press reaction the ability to be all that I am, or who I am, as a human, feeling being, then how can I possibly represent the human feelings of tens of millions of beings? Don't you see, the best I can do for my country is equal to the best I can do for myself? If the goal is greatness, for me and you and this administration -- which is only a blink in the long list of forward-moving administrations - then I've got to strive for the heights -- I've got to at least prepare myself for the possibility that I -- like you, Cyrus, or you Ben, or you, Reggie -- that I could be the hundredth monkey! 

 

Now he's done it. He can tell by the looks on their faces they're not au courant on the hundredth monkey theories. He can tell explaining it would be to lengthy and probably counter-productive. He can tell that they probably think he's lost it. But what really frightens him: he doesn't care. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

(a little patiently) 

The hundredth monkey is not a-creature. It's just the theory that we can learn from each other in simultaneously evolutionary ways, as opposed to legislating laws alone or -- or -- • 

 

He turns to the desk, starts collecting a pile of small volumes into his briefcase, as if preparing to end the meeting. 

 

HOVERMANN 

We'll not abandon you, Mister President. 

 

PRESIDENT SAM ANDERSON 

I expect you won't. 

 

I might add that Sorkin mentions Harding’s love poems in one of his scripts too, but doesn’t bother to quote them; I wonder how he found out about them.  I first heard them when they were read to me by Alice Longworth Roosevelt as we drank copious scotch together in the tea room at the house of Katherine Graham while i was interviewing Nixon’s daughters in the White House.  Sorkin can mention Harding, but he don’t know Harding like I do.

 

Even in the original plot of our first version of the 1982 THE PRESIDENT ELOPES/AKA/AMERICAN PRESIDENT, there is still the central element of a widowed father with an only child living in the white house, courting a woman who is unsuitable.

 

Scientists win Nobel prizes with one sentence formulas.  Ours would be Widowed President + Only Child + politically unsuitable woman + courtship from within whitehouse to impress + a scene where they dance + a scene where they romance in the White House + a break up + a get togetherwiththe unsuitable Woman with the American President.

 

That’s the formula followed by Aaron Sorkin which originated with us, scientifically and factually.  There is no other formula fitting any other scripts in history, besides our versions and Sorkin’s version. Our DNA is all over the movie and the Series Sorkin stole from my last draft, and DNA will out.

 

(Few know there is an original King Lear with long bits directly sounding like Shakespeare, so that the original writer Raphael Holinshed would have surely gotten a credit from the WGA just like us, and if alive he’d be angry still, just like us.  We are on the side of the original Lear.)

 

INSIDE JOB AT WGAW

 

In the early 90's John Wells is volunteer Secretary Treasurer.

 

Carl Gottlieb was WGAw Vice President, and he brags that during that time he was setting up the illegal foreign levy scheme with Brian Walton along with Universal Picture’s Robert Hadl.  Universal owned rights in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and in the copyright.

 

John Wells and Carl Gottlieb are still at the WGA as a volunteers with Gottlieb back for a second time as secretary treasurer.  Not long ago Carl wrote a check to me for foreign royalties, then took it back.  I consider that an act of retaliation for my efforts for the Sorkin arbitration overturn, and for demanding the court enforcement of RICHERT VS. WGAW INC. settlement, a related issue of Board oversight failure. 

 

BOARD MEMBERS MUST ACT LAWFULLY AND  REVEAL THE FACTS ACCORDING TO CIVIL CODE

 

"Activities which are unlawful must be made known to the Board of Directors if the Executives are acting in a criminal manner, AND THE BOARD MUST RESPOND.” FYI

 

It is ironic that the screenplay the producers didn’t want anybody to see — Sorkin being a Producer who cannot say he didn't see Sorkin-the-writer's material— is the screenplay that will bring them all down, the rats and cats in he same dumpster, the script entitled THE EXECUTIVE WING/WEST WING which was written in 1991 for Redford and director Fred Schepsi.  Both of whom told me the script could be the basis of a TV series after being a movie.  They were correct.  A series was even in my Universal contract.

 

The key thing is that there never could have been any kind of legit arbitration at the WGA because the prime scripts and contracts were not given in evidence; were, in fact, willfully withheld.

 

But not skillfully withheld, or we wouldn’t have been able to figure this out, albeit 20 years later (the title of a Musketeer book; my film THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK INDIE VERSION has been gathering foreign royalties for 15 years, collected by the WGAw but not given to me; another story, but involving the same characters like Tony Segall, etc.)

 

In his deceitful letter written to Sally Burmester at the WGAw 1995 purportedly written from NYC but actually mailed from Hazelden where Sorkin was incarcerated for his addiction (Burmester still works there, but is an employee and therefore exempt for personal lawsuits, unlike the volunteer WGA board members Wells and Gottleib and the ones we must put on notice.) 

 

Aaron Sorkin claimed he’d been hired separately Rob Reiner -- the co-producer with Redford! -- to write a script entitled “untitled Washington project” but we know from Eric Hughes that his was a "blind script" deal and he began no writing until working for Redford's production company and Universal -- on his re-write of our script.

 

In 1995 Sorkin copyrighted THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT Draft 3, dated 11/11/94.  We don't know what was in the first drafts.  The one I read was 350 pages + and had large chunks of dialogue from earlier versions of mine and other writers of THE PRESIDENT ELOPES so that reading it I wondered why he bothered to re-write for the worse and more pedestrian dialogue.

 

Other drafts existed before Sorkin started writing for Reiner and Redford and it is those he used as the basis for his characters and dialogue and story.  He omitted the charms of my "Sleeping Beauty" aspects in the 1986 version for Universal, and his President Shepard didn't sneak out of the White House as my President Anderson did -- who started out as President McCormick in our 1981 original,  with my grandfather's surname.  So the names change as these drafts are rewritten by the likes of Ron Bass an Alice Arlen among others.  But they are the same men, the difference between Shepard and Anderson being a re-write by Sorkin.  That's how it is in "development."  Aaron Sorkin simply aborted the credit system with a lie the system wanted to accept for reasons of money and status.

 

But the crux of it all, and the reason a new arbitration and script comparison is required, is that THE EXECUTIVE WING/WEST WING draft I wrote in NYC was totally omitted from the WGAw decision process and arbitration, as was my contract with Universal/Wildwood to write the screenplay.

 

Your letters to Stephen Schiff and the credits committee and Board of Directors over the past few years are now part of a chain of information that shall bind them, since they cannot say they didn’t know you thought they were covering up criminal behavior — and as lifetime WGA credits expert Eric Hughes wrote, there was no way we could have known until now how they did what they did — it was a coverup!

 

What is germane and the source of this gravitas for courts is that the this key bit of evidence shows overwhelmingly that we were not liars when we said that Sorkin took his script from the source of ours.

 

We had to sit for years in front of the teleplay Taj Mahal that Aaron built, knowing we were the true architects.  No more waiting. In a literary spin, It’s not hard to see the ghost of the meal in the cannibal Sorkin’s brain; it shows up in print and on the screen, and that is where we must direct the attention of the West Wing fan hoard:

 

When it becomes known that the Writers guild never compared the William Richert/Kyle Morris original and early drafts  with Sorkin's rewrite -- as Disney executive and then Castle Rock CEO Alan Horn wrote in a long lying letter to me at the time -- and Tony Segall declared to the Judge — when the basis of all this is examined and finally includes “my last draft for Redford” - namely the eponymous THE EXECUTIVE WING script — it will become a clamorous clarion call for credit redux, in our favor, at last.

 

In your chain letter you have thus far provided a running demand for justice from Stephen Schiff and Katherine Fugate and the board of directors, without any real response.

 

A man, a writer, a member Emeritus of a guild – like you -- is due proper respect.  Neither you nor I signed on to the WGA as collective bargainers leaving our individual rights behind, especially the right to due process.

 

We should adhere to the “principles” Aaron Sorkin put down in his August 1995 letter to Sally Burmester, addressed from NYC but written by Sorkin from Hazelden rehab for crack addiction:

 

QUOTING AARON SORKIN’S LETTER: “In closing, I note that the ‘Guiding Principle’ of the WGA’s system of credit determination is that the ‘writing credit should be a true and accurate statement of authorship’.  Let the credit arbitrators, therefor, make their determination solely based on reading the scripts in front of them. Their judgments should not be restricted or predetermined by an artificial minimum ‘irreducible story credit’ to any writer other than me.  This would be a gross and fundamental misapplication of the Guild’s own guiding principles.”

 

But they did not have all the scripts, and didn't compare ANY of the scripts by reading them -- so how could they possibly decide who gets the credit?

 

Sorkin seems to say the Guild’s guiding principles apply only to him, or otherwise be grossly misapplied. As the WGAw’s prime public mouthpiece, he might consider other phrases, or put his principles where his mouth was.

 

In other words, the WGA should have been given THE EXECUTIVE WING/WEST WING screenplay, but they never saw it.

 

The WGA and its Board of Directors has thus far denied us the right of due process, as they must do to be given credence in a court of law, and their willful negligence in excluding the last draft in the PRESIDENT series of rewrites is our prime exhibit in a new case against volunteers with duty that can be filed both in the courts and in the social media, where the interested people or West Wing scholars can read for themselves what we are talking about.

 

While we re-examine the blatant con that went on with the phony “Pre Arbitration Special Committee” held in secret etc., we will also look at the reality show playing out in ’95 at the Bev Hills Peninsula Hotel, where Rob Reiner and Julia Bingham and Alan Horn are desperately looking for a place to put Aaron Sorkin as he was, he says, under a 2K a day crack habit, his per diems up in smoke, while trying to finish his rewrite  of THE PRESIDENT ELOPES AKA THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, which he admits he doesn’t completely remember writing, grasping at dialogue from the stack of drafts from other writers.

 

IN the world of celebrities, where Aaron resides, it is nearly impossible to miss wedding photos and announcements etc. — to the varmint gossip collectors it will be a true Holmesian insight that the person who benefited the most from this fraud, after John Wells, is the former Castle Rock attorney, VP of Business Affairs, and personal advisor to Aaron Sorkin:  Julia Bingham, that rare lawyer who marries a crack head.  

 

We can be allowed cracks about how the one who benefitted the most was Aaron’s lawyer at Castle Rock, where he was a long-term employee.  The Rangers always get their man, and lawyers always get his/her fee.

 

Sorkin was a screenwriter literally in bed with the studio.  After they started their romance, Julia stopped memos on Castle Rock stationery that began:  THE PRESIDENT ELOPES AKA THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT. 

 

We should not cease our the “original creator” demands and the “irreducible story by” credit promised in the WGA MBA, that is the minimum.

 

This is a great, rousing campaign for rightful credit to all, and we have assembled the Braveherts among us, ready for auld ang sine.  We can do the Sorkin/Zukenberg thing to Sorkin/Bingham/Horn/Reiner to the tune of "Guys and Dolls."

 

That’s another copyright worth owning.

 

ONWARD

 

BILL