More Stuff From "Pilot"

...cause I'm finding out this is kinda hard! Keeping up with all the notes and info and comments I want to do with this rewatch of The West Wing. Hopefully, in the future, I can get everything I want in my first post.

So I was going through Pilot again, just to try to catch any tidbits I might have missed, and there was a bunch of stuff I'd love to tell you about. So consider this an addendum to my first post on Pilot. Trust me, there's good stuff here. With added pictures!

For those of you who may be watching on Netflix, you probably scoffed at my comment about the sound at the very opening of the episode. "I heard the drums over the flag graphics," you probably said. "This guy is a low-energy loser!" Well, it's true, those drums are there in the Netflix version. I'm rewatching the series on DVD, from the complete series box set (which I'm pretty sure are more reflective of the original broadcast), and believe me, there are no drums there. Simply underlying piano bar music that leads into the scene with Sam and Billy the reporter. I was going to try to post the clip, but I can't figure out how. Low energy loser, you know.

Also, Sam makes a comment in that scene that's kind of an Easter egg for history buffs. His line "Alger Hiss just walked in with my secret pumpkin" refers to a spy case from the late 1940s when Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of giving government secrets to the Soviet Union. One of the elements of the case involved film being stashed in a hollowed-out pumpkin. So that's what that line is a reference to, if you didn't know (that spy case is also where Richard Nixon first gained prominence, as one of the prosecutors, so there's that).

Let's mention the order in which the cast is listed in the opening credits. The credits for Pilot are different from ongoing episodes - here the credits are simply shown over the scene with Leo coming to work, stopping by Josh's office, then cruising through the Oval Office on his way to his desk. The cast is listed in this order:

1. Rob Lowe
2. Moira Kelly
3. Allison Janney
4. Richard Schiff
5. Bradley Whitford
6. "and Martin Sheen"

Given that the original concept of the series was to focus on the West Wing staffers, and that Lowe was supposed to be the focus/"star" of the show, his name being first makes sense. We'll keep track of this as we go, but I believe Lowe stays in the first position of cast credits throughout his run on the show. Kelly was probably the next best-known name at the time (other than Sheen, of course) given her roles in The Cutting Edge, Chaplin, and The Lion King (yes, she was the voice of the adult Nala). Looking back from almost 20 years in the future, though, and knowing how the character of Mandy ended up developing, it's kind of amusing to see her listed second in the credits.

I want to also mention the direction by Thomas Schlamme. He worked closely with Aaron Sorkin in the early seasons of The West Wing, and his work was uniformly excellent. His visual style - the "walking and talking," the movement of the camera (sometimes circling the characters) - added a lot of energy and tension and flow, and really establishes the look of the series as a whole. Leo's entrance in the White House (mentioned above) is a nice introduction to the "walking and talking" vibe. It's not one long continuous take, although there are some long takes within the scene (Leo walking away from Josh down the hall, into Mrs. Landingham's office, through the Oval is one long take). And for long takes, stand by for the opening of Five Votes Down.

I'm particularly enamored of the final scene. As the President and Mrs. Landingham go over the day's schedule, the camera pulls back, then moves up to look down directly at the President's desk and the Oval Office. It's a neat shot.

A little quibble, just about timelines here. Obviously, in the world of Presidential staff and the leader of the free world and all that, any strikingly newsworthy/important/medical event would be out almost instantly to those in the West Wing, from the Chief of Staff to the Press Secretary. I mean, that's how it would have to work - those within the President's inner circle need to know these things before they get out to the public, right?

Bear with me here. The opening scenes show Leo, CJ, Josh, Toby, and Sam being informed of the President's bicycle accident. In the real world, they'd be getting told this news almost the instant it actually occurred. We find out later this accident happened during the President's vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Now ... these staffers are being paged about this accident in the early morning, DC time (CJ is saying how "this hour, 5 to 6 am," is her time; Laurie tells Sam it's 5:30 in the morning when he gets his page). Well, Wyoming is two time zones earlier than DC. Was the President out riding his bike in the wee hours of the morning? No wonder he rode into a tree - it was probably too dark out to see (although CJ does tell the press there's photographs of the President "resisting the help of a Secret Service agent and then falling down again").

Speaking of CJ and the press - the briefing room is really small.

Later in the series we'll see a more spacious briefing room with windows and a raised area at the back. I don't know which is more true to the actual White House briefing room. I do know the first season of The West Wing essentially used the set built for the movie The American President, then the set was rebuilt/redesigned for following seasons. (Edit: This may not be true. The DVD commentary track reveals the producers spent a lot of money building the sets, way more than was typically spent for a pilot episode. And they ran out of money before building the press briefing room, which they did get to after being picked up.)

Also, while the closed captioning and most articles I've seen about the show-within-a-show where Josh makes his snarky comment to Mary Marsh calls it "Capital Beat," the clip of the show that Josh is watching makes it quite clear it's called "Capitol Beat" with an "o."

(Love the typewriter-style font on that, by the way.) That program will make a return, most obviously for In This White House and Bartlet's Third State of the Union in Season 2, so we'll see if that spelling remains or if the closed caption folks were just ahead of the game.

And a final quibble of sorts. Rev. Caldwell, Mary Marsh and John Van Dyke are represented as conservative Christian activists of national renown. They need to know their religious basics, in other words. So when Van Dyke spouts off about how the First Commandment needs to be promoted as much as the First Amendment, then calls "Honor your father" the first commandment - wow. That's a pretty big mistake, if you're making that a hallmark of your argument. I may not know off the top of my head the order of the commandments, and even a religious activist might mix it up in the midst of a conversation ... but he's making a point of comparing the first commandment with the First Amendment, so he's thought this through ahead of time and really doesn't have any excuse.

Then Toby, of course, comes back at Van Dyke to tell him he's wrong, then gets it wrong himself (it's not the third commandment, either - depending on your source "Honor your father and mother" is either the fourth or fifth commandment). It's a bit more understandable to think the White House Director of Communications might not have the order of the commandments right in his mind, but he seems really sure about what he says.

Naturally this is all to set up President Bartlet's great entrance ("I am the Lord your God, thou shalt worship no other god before me. Boy, those were the days, huh?"). So it's worth it.

Quotes    

• Laurie to Sam (who, as a White House employee, is wise to turn down her offer to share a joint): "I'm not a drug person. I just love pot."

• Leo: "He was swerving to avoid a tree."
Donna: "And what happened?"
Leo: "He was unsuccessful."

• Van Dyke: "Show the average American teenage male a condom and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust."
Toby: "Show the average American teenage male a lug wrench and his mind will turn -"
CJ: "Toby..."

• Van Dyke: "If our children can buy pornography on any street corner for five dollars, isn't that too high a price to pay for free speech?"
President: "No."
Van Dyke: "Really?"
President: "On the other hand, I do think that five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography."

Bread crumbs and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)

• I don't know if I mentioned in my original post that when Josh and Mandy meet, we first find out they were an item while working together on the President's campaign, and now we find out that Mandy is dating Senator Lloyd Russell (while also working for him). At the tail end of this episode, we hear (in kind of an aside) Sam saying to Josh "Mandy and Lloyd Russell?" to which Josh replies, "I'll be putting an end to that." Well ... stand by.

• Leo, when talking to the economists in the Roosevelt Room, says "The President's going to look at the WBO revenue analysis and say that economists were put on this earth to make astrologists look good." Later in the series we discover that not only is President Bartlet an economist himself, but he won the Nobel Prize for economics (which doesn't actually exist, by the way). In a few episodes we will also learn that President Bartlet apparently took a law class typically taken only by those actually in law school, not those studying economics. In other words - Sorkin hasn't quite figured out exactly what Bartlet's history is at this point.

• The Sam/Alger Hiss mention proves to be somewhat of a foreshadowing of Sam's efforts to help a friend of Donna's clear her father's name of spy charges in Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail  in Season 2.