How does Sorkin use this payrolled brain trust? ''Well, for instance, a lot of it will be, 'I need a scene where Leo interrupts an intelligence meeting to tell the President that the chairman of the Federal Reserve has had a heart attack and died,''' says Sorkin. "Now, I don't know what an intelligence briefing looks like, so I say, 'Could someone find [that] out and write it out on a piece of paper for me?' Sometimes it'll be written down as cold facts. Dee Dee Myers will always take a crack at writing it out in dialogue form, and what I enjoy doing with Dee Dee is making fun of her dialogue in actual scripts.
"There's a scene in a [recent] episode in which an African-American woman, the secretary of housing and urban development [played by CCH Pounder], has lost her cool in a committee meeting and accused the committee chairman of being a racist. And the way [Dee Dee] did it was by using the phrase 'If the shoe fits...' In my script I keep having people say, 'If she was going to lose her cool, couldn't she find some better way of phrasing it than ''If the shoe fits?''' That kind of thing drives Dee Dee crazy because I spend the entire episode mocking her dialogue.'' Myers, for her part, laughs good-naturedly and admits, ''I'm learning a lot about writing dialogue from Aaron.'' O'Donnell, whose story ideas are similarly recast by the show's creator, says, ''Do I mind being rewritten by Aaron Sorkin? It's an honor and an education. When I want my own prose to survive somewhere, I write a book.''
On a popsicle-cold, windy day near Washington, D.C., Martin Sheen, John Spencer, Allison Janney, and Dule Hill, who plays the President's aide Charlie, are living out one of Sorkin's political scenarios. The actors and a crew that includes Wingexecutive producer and director Thomas Schlamme are standing on a tarmac at Dulles Airport, shooting a scene that aired Feb. 9, in which the President and his entourage emerge from Air Force One and scuttle into a limousine to be given an update from Spencer's Leo about a pending prison execution. Except the plane they're currently emerging from isn't Air Force One — it's a Virgin Atlantic 747 complete with a painting on its side called "Scarlet Lady" — a curvy pinup girl in a red dress that ultimately gets digitally removed in the editing room and replaced by a staid presidential seal. If they couldn't get Air Force One, why drag the cast from its usual studio in California to shoot in D.C.? "The actors' teeth wouldn't chatter as convincingly," says Schlamme, only half kidding. "And we usually do get Air Force One, by the way," he says.
The show films location shots in D.C. four times a year. In fact, Wing has inspired a mini-showbiz boom in the capital city. Walk over to an extra in a Virginia state trooper's uniform waiting to be filmed as part of the President's cavalcade and he'll tell you yes, he's a real trooper, named Matt Hanley. "I do this in my off-duty time," he says. And when he's on duty? "I escort President Clinton places." Like where? "Meetings. The golf course." Next, chat up a fellow in a black suit fiddling with a wire in his ear and muttering into his lapel and he'll tell you no, he's not a real Secret Service man — he's an actor named Scott Goodhue. He and other Washington-based actors are hired by the day to be extras; today, Goodhue is the agent who opens the limo door for Sheen and then slaps the roof of the car to signal the procession to move beyond camera range.
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