31 Aug 2026
Aaron Sorkin’s Closet Picks
The writer and director talks about how Broadcast News awakened his desire to become a screenwriter, recalls a story that Mike Nichols told him about working with Simon & Garfunkel on The Graduate, and fondly shares how William Goldman and Rob Reiner championed his early career.
Aaron Sorkin: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
Watch on Vimeo This one is not on Criterion's YouTube channel, and their Vimeo copy will not play outside criterion.com · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Tanner ’88 | Robert Altman | 1988 | |
| 2 |  Broadcast News | James L. Brooks | 1987 | |
| 3 |  The Graduate | Mike Nichols | 1967 | |
| 4 |  Network | Sidney Lumet | 1976 | |
| 5 |  The Princess Bride | Rob Reiner | 1987 |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
4 of its 5 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 7.7 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. The median visit runs 18.9 hours, over the 379 whose every runtime is on record.
What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.
How unusual this haul was
Its 5 choices had been taken by 5.4 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Tanner ’88, taken by 3 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of James L. Brooks, through Broadcast News, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.