The New York Times Magazine - June 22, 2008 : 'Mad Men' by Olaf Blecker

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Source | The New York Times

'Mad Men' Has Its Moment
by Alex Witchel

Matthew Weiner stood on the set of his hit show, “Mad Men,” ready for his close-up in extreme anxiety. He was watching the rehearsal of a scene that seemed fine to me, better than fine, but his staccato commentary was a scene in itself.

“He should be standing,” he said of an actor who was seated.
“That should be on the table,” he said of an accordion folder that an actress had placed on the floor.

“They’re overreacting, paying too much attention to each other.” He heard himself and looked slightly sheepish. “You’ll see it turn from theater to movie in the next take,” he told me. “I want them not to pay too much attention to each other, so it feels real, more perfunctory. Not that TV thing.” His smile was wry. “I’m very impatient.”

He should give himself a break. Everyone else has. “Mad Men,” about the world of advertising on Madison Avenue set in New York in the early 1960s, languished for years after being rejected by HBO and Showtime before the unlikely AMC (formerly known as American Movie Classics) took its maiden voyage into original-series programming and picked it up. The show had its premiere last summer and won instant critical acclaim, a Peabody Award and the Golden Globe Award for best drama. Its second season begins July 27; the DVD set of the first season goes on sale July 1.

Weiner (pronounced WHY-ner) is the creator and show-runner of “Mad Men,” which means the original idea was his: he wrote the pilot; he writes every episode of every show (along with four other people); he’s the executive producer who haggles for money (he says that his budget is $2.3 million per episode and that the average budget for a one-hour drama is $2.8 million); and he approves every actor, costume, hairstyle and prop. Though he has directed episodes, most of the time he holds a “tone meeting” with the director at which he essentially performs the entire show himself so it’s perfectly clear how he wants it done. He is both ultimate authority and divine messenger, some peculiar hybrid of God and Edith Head. “I do not feel any guilt about saying that the show comes from my mind and that I’m a control freak,” he told me. “I love to be surrounded by perfectionists, and part of the problem with perfectionism is that by nature, you’re always failing.”

I recently spent three days on the “Mad Men” set, watching the people who work there, along with auditioning actors, most of whom are desperate to please Weiner, catch his eye, engage him. Rarely have I seen so many people beam so insistently at a human who’s not a newborn. They’re all expert practitioners of the current flavor of show-biz persona: the down-to-earth, up-with-people next-door neighbor who soft-sells his or her obsession with stardust and self-interest with chitchat about, say, the kids, the brilliantine smile buttressed by the unspoken prayer, “Don’t write me out!”

So, after working for 18 years, most recently as a writer and executive producer for “The Sopranos” (the episode in which Tony murders his nephew Christopher was his), Weiner, who is 42, has become an overnight success in a very particular, Hollywood way. He is suddenly a “genius,” a meal ticket and the 800-pound gorilla in every room he’s in. It is already show-business legend that he wrote the pilot of “Mad Men” in 1999 while working on the TedDanson sitcom “Becker.” In 2002, Weiner sent the pilot as a writing sample to David Chase, who created “The Sopranos,” which is how he was hired. That HBO, under its previous leadership, passed on “Mad Men” while Weiner worked on its biggest hit, leaving the field open for the upstart AMC to reap the glory, is one of those stories that give underdogs of all breeds in this town a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Weiner’s achievements with “Mad Men,” which is produced by Lionsgate, are plentiful, starting with the storytelling. Setting it in the early 1960s, on the cusp between the repression and conformity of the cold war and McCarthy-era 1950s and the yet-to-unfold social and cultural upheavals of the 60s, allows Weiner an arc of character growth that is staggering in its possibilities. It also gives him the opportunity to mine the Rat Pack romance of that period, when the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the fog of too many martinis — whether exhilarating or nauseating — and the silhouettes specific to bullet bras only heightened the headiness of the dream that all men might one day become James Bond or, at the very least, key holders to the local Playboy Club.

Deepening the tension between that fantasy and reality, Weiner has put Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency that employs the show’s characters, on the old-school, WASP side of the equation, letting them revel in their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. It was during that period that the creative revolution in advertising was taking off at agencies like Grey and Doyle Dane Bernbach, where Jews and some women held leadership positions. That Sterling Cooper’s creative director, Don Draper, is played by Jon Hamm, a leading man in the Gregory Peck mold who manages to make his sometimes oblique and often heartless character into a sympathetic figure (and won a Golden Globe for best actor), eases the pain.

When contemplating a new account, Draper asks his boss, Roger Sterling, played with perfect cynical pitch by John Slattery, “What do women want?”

“Who cares?” is his answer.

When a Jewish department-store heiress comes to the agency in search of a fresh approach for her business, Sterling tries to find someone Jewish in the company to include in the meeting. “Have we ever hired any Jews?” he asks Draper. “Not on my watch,” Draper says, before adding, “You want me to run down to the deli and grab somebody?”

Weiner chose advertising as a subject, he said, because “it’s a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are. And admen were the rock stars of that era, creative, cocky, anti-authority. They made a lot of money, and they lived hard.”

Some of those rock stars are less than enthralled by Weiner’s interpretation of their careers. George Lois, the legendary art director who co-founded Papert Koenig Lois in 1960 and recently had an exhibition of the iconic covers he designed for Esquire magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says: “When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches.”

Wasn’t it?

“Of course not, are you serious?” he retorts. “We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night. We had three women copywriters. We didn’t bed secretaries. I introduced Xerox. It was hard, hard work and no nonsense.

‘Mad Men’ is typical of ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,’ those phony S.O.B.’s. I was a Greek bigmouth, a Korean War veteran. I used my ethnicity to promote my talent. Before you knew it, most of the great creative talent was Italian, Greek and Jewish. We broke through the terrible WASP-ness of the business.”

As did William Bernbach, a Jew, who co-founded Doyle Dane Bernbach and created the legendary Volkswagen print ads, “Lemon” and “Think Small,” that the executives at Sterling Cooper grudgingly admire. His son, John L. Bernbach, the founder and president of the ad agency NTM, says: “What do I think of ‘Mad Men’? As a soap opera or as an advertising show from the 1960s? I was a teenager then, and our family was very close. My father never took clients out, he didn’t travel, didn’t entertain. In the show, there’s not a scene without somebody smoking and drinking. And it’s an overly simplistic view of the process of coming up with ads. You were handling millions of dollars of people’s money, and no one took it lightly. Here they’re smoking, joking, ogling girls, then they think of a line.”

But the way Jerry Della Femina remembers it, that’s not far off. He now owns his sixth agency, Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners, and wrote a best-selling account of his early advertising career in 1970. Its title was his proposed slogan for the Japanese-owned Panasonic account when he was creative director at Ted Bates: “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.”

“ ‘Mad Men’ accurately reflects what went on,” Della Femina says. “The smoking, the prejudice and the bigotry. I interviewed at J. Walter Thompson for the Ford account and was told, ‘We don’t want your kind.’ It took me two years to figure out that he meant I wasn’t a WASP. Before the war, the joke was that a family would give one son to the military, one to the priesthood, and the dolt went into advertising. After the war, Grey Advertising was the Jewish agency, and Doyle Dane Bernbach broke off from Grey. Suddenly there was a whole infusion of Jewish copywriters and Italian art directors or George Lois, who was Greek. I was part of that group.”

Della Femina, who is now 69, says drinking abounded. “People had bottles in their drawers,” he recalls. “For lunch, we used to go to the Italian Pavilion, which is now where Michael’s is” (he’s referring to the media power spot on West 55th Street). “The bar was still in the same place, and the bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. They would literally serve us the first martini as we were sitting down, the second, the third, then we would figure out what to eat. It was such a wild time, and the best period for advertising, so much looser. We had Blue Nun, which was a terrible wine to sell to people. If there were a Nuremberg trial for selling bad wine, we should have been hanged.”

I tell him about George Lois’s reaction to the show. Della Femina laughs. “I love George,” he says. “Maybe he was working that hard, but he had some of the all-time great drinkers working for him. I guess it’s Rashomon. I always said advertising was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. At this stage in life, it’s the most fun you could have with your clothes off too.”

Weiner employs two advertising consultants on the show: Josh Weltman, an L.A.-based creative director in his 40s, and Bob Levinson, recently retired as head of the television department at I.C.M., who spent 20 years in the media and television departments of BBDO in New York, starting in 1960.

“When I read the script, I called Matt cold and said, ‘Who do you know?’ ”

Levinson told me. “What he captured was so real. The drinking was commonplace, the smoking was constant, the relationships between the executives and the secretaries was exactly right. Two or three women moved ahead only because the men they worked for wanted them to.”

When I relayed the admen’s observations to Weiner, he said: “I love the passion of these people. But the show is not a history lesson. George Lois is a legend, and the process he is talking about is exactly what the show is about, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can’t look at 1960 and say, ‘Why aren’t you doing a show about 1965?’ Also, Sterling Cooper is not cutting-edge; it’s mired in the past. The story to me is about the onset of a subversive ethnic point of view that has not yet poked through to Sterling Cooper. They’re dinosaurs.”

Knowing that these unsuspecting sexists and bigots sit on the brink of their doom is all part of the fun. It is also perverse entertainment of a sort (Weiner calls it p*rn*gr*phy) to watch them smoke like chimneys (including pregnant women), drink like extras from “The Lost Weekend” and eat steak, cheesecake and creamed corn without consequences. Or mostly. When Sterling is felled by a heart attack, he laments: “All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream. Ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.”

The show’s design, the almost fetishistically accurate sets and costumes, has been lauded from the start. But Weiner is wary of deifying the visual.

“The design is not the star of the show,” he said as he led me through the offices of Sterling Cooper. “I don’t want to be distracted by it.” He never forgets that his characters are not movie stars; they are the people who go to the movies and try to emulate movie stars. “I’m against clean and glamorous,” he said. “I like to respect the popular culture, mass production and also people’s eccentricities. The temptation is to become Mannerist.

People have old things and new things, and as someone who loves the period, it’s very hard to resist the idea of getting the perfect 1960 everything, but I want it to feel like a slice of life. People’s hair is messed up, there are sweat stains, their collars are not perfectly flat. The actors tie their own ties a lot of the time, and it makes a big difference.”

At Sterling Cooper, a copy of “Beastly Poetry,” by Ogden Nash, lies on one secretary’s desk next to a pile of letters typed on Sterling Cooper letterhead. Weiner is as proud of the authentic Xerox 914 copier as he is of the exposed wires from the phones. The ashtrays are filled with the butts of different brands of cigarettes, some stained with varying shades of lipstick. But the actors smoke Ecstacy herbal cigarettes, tobacco- and nicotine-free. “You don’t want actors smoking real cigarettes,” Weiner said. “They get agitated and nervous. I’ve been on sets where people throw up, they’ve smoked so much."

 

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Another major pleasure of “Mad Men” is its writing, which is consistently adult and witty. When Roger Sterling takes Joan Holloway, the voluptuous redheaded secretary (played by Christina Hendricks in a turn that pays an affectionate homage to Helen Gurley Brown’s “Sex and the Single Girl”) to a hotel room for a midday tryst, he says of the room-service lunch: “Look, we’ve got oysters Rockefeller, beef Wellington, napoleons. If we leave this lunch alone it’ll take over Europe.” When he offers to leave his wife for Joan because he’s tired of “sneaking around,” she dismisses him. “I know as much about men as you know about advertising,” she says, “and I know that the sneaking around is your favorite part.”

It’s the universality more than the period that’s the hook, of course. Absent the surgeon general’s warnings, statins and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, religion or sex), the people on this show struggle with the same backbiting co-workers, unhappy marriages and ongoing search for the meaning of life that we do now. We’d like to think that things were simpler then, but what’s hard now has always been hard. In “Mad Men,” scenes are set at P. J. Clarke’s and Toots Shor’s; people meet at the Roosevelt Hotel. They dance the cha-cha and the twist. That’s fun.

But as Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The Times, who was the paper’s chief cultural correspondent in the early ’60s, points out: “New York then was still to some extent a segregated city. It was glamorous, but it was glamorous for white people. You rarely, if ever, saw blacks in Times Square.

People came there because it still had the first-run movie palaces. The Stork Club was for the empty-headed rich. At 21, you could walk in off the street, and if you looked presentable and had a beautiful woman on your arm, you could go to the bar and have a drink. The theater was huge; you’d go into Sardi’s and see Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.

“But the Village was the place,” he continues. “The talent was overflowing.

Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen commenting on the city and the way of life. You felt free in the Village in language and action. The middle class were in straitjackets. People were afraid to buck the social system.”

Last season, Don Draper had a mistress in the Village; the affair ended during a pot-smoking party when he photographed her with a Polaroid camera and realized she was in love with a beatnik wannabe — only by seeing it in the picture. This season, African-Americans are moving beyond operating the elevators at Sterling Cooper, though to what extent remains unclear. Weiner is incredibly paranoid about plot details finding their way to the media. “How do you know that?” he snapped about even the most innocuous things I mentioned about the second season. He is used to the secrecy of “The Sopranos,” and every leak, large or small, is a wound. He’s not wrong, of course. Why ruin the suspense? The first season ended on Thanksgiving 1960, and the fact that I knew that the second season picks up on Valentine’s Day 1962 horrified him.

“It’s too much of a soap opera to pick up with the next month,” he said, explaining his decision. “There’s more storytelling in moving ahead and taking a season to find out what happened.” (That idea seems also to have occurred to Marc Cherry at “Desperate Housewives”; his next season picks up five years from now.)

The two leading women in “Mad Men” will be featured prominently this season. “Betty Draper is getting angry,” Weiner said of Don’s Stepford wife and the mother of his two children, played by January Jones. “She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. Her mother has just died, and she’s realized that when her beauty disappears she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband, and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over. She is somewhat puritanical.”

Betty started seeing a psychiatrist last season, who reported on her “condition” regularly to her husband, in flagrant violation of her privacy.

“Basically we’re dealing with the emotions of a child here,” the shrink told Don. At home, when Betty expressed grief about her mother’s death, Don told her, “Mourning is just extended self-pity.”

As a Bryn Mawr graduate and former model turned infantilized, marginalized housewife, she certainly has reason to be angry. Jones, who looks as perfect as her character even at the end of a long day, told me: “Betty doesn’t say what she feels to Don. She can only speak to Glen.” (Glen is the 9-year-old son of the most terrifying woman in the neighborhood — Helen Bishop, a divorcee. He is played by Marten Weiner, Matthew’s son.) Glen and Betty have a simpatico relationship that borders on both the bizarre and the inappropriate. “He’s an adultlike child and she’s a childlike adult, so they have something very much in common,” Jones said. “She’s so lost. She’s supposed to be this perfect Grace Kelly wife of a businessman, and it’s just not going the way she imagined.”

Jon Hamm’s assignment as Don is to locate the emotions in a man who spends his life denying them. “Don’s trying to be a better guy,” Hamm said.

“He’s trying to get back to what it means to be a person in a family. He has a marriage he’s not that involved in, kids he’s not that involved in, a brother he wasn’t involved with at all. He realizes these things have consequences. He tries to make amends a day late and a dollar short. That’s his great tragedy.

He wanted the image of the perfect family, so he married the beautiful model. He takes his cues from advertising, the Coke commercial with the two kids and the dog. And there’s no there there, and why is that? It’s a curious thing.”

Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson, Don’s fresh-faced, smart-as-a-whip secretary, whose knack for copywriting prompts Don to promote her at the end of Season 1. She also gains more and more weight, as surprised herself as the viewers to discover she was pregnant from a night with Pete Campbell, the ambitious, resolutely untalented scion of an old New York family and resident irritant at Sterling Cooper (played skillfully by Vincent Kartheiser). “In the midst of all the sexism,” Weiner said, “Peggy succeeds because the men will take a good idea from anywhere. The pregnancy was just a twist, but I wanted to do a story about a woman getting fat because she couldn’t deal with being sexualized all the time, and that more important, she was never going to be taken seriously professionally until that happened. She becomes a guy, and they give her a big punch in her shoulder. She makes it.”

Lois Geraci Ernst, the C.E.O. and founder of Advertising to Women, says, “I worked for some of the Top 10 agencies, and these high-paid guys were turning to the secretary to find out how women feel.” Ernst created a famous 1970s campaign for Enjoli perfume around an old Peggy Lee hit: “I can bring home the bacon/Fry it up in a pan/And never let you forget you’re a man/’Cause I’m a woman.”

“Right now, they’re just using Peggy Olson quietly,” she continues. “But there will probably come a time when a client finds the source of marketing genius is coming from her. Then she’ll start her own agency.”

Wouldn’t it be great, I asked Weiner, knowing how times are about to change, to watch Peggy be the beneficiary?

His expression was dark. “Possibly,” he said.

 

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After my first day on the set, I met Weiner for dinner at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills, AMC’s base for out-of-towners. He was outside finishing a cigarette. Earlier in the day he commanded, “Don’t say I smoke!”

Why not? His face changed, and he seemed about 12 years old. “My parents don’t know.” I found that appealing, though I could see him wince once he said it. Weiner is slight now — he has written about being at least 30 pounds heavier in his less successful days — and he makes jokes about being bald. If he wore a mood ring it would shatter; he can vacillate in seconds from whopping anxiety and insecurity to fierce determination, thorny to sunny and back again. His energy varies, from motionless intensity to almost antic animation. When he writes “Mad Men,” he doesn’t sit down and start typing.

After a lifetime spent struggling as a student, he has learned to rely on his ear. He creates the show by speaking it out loud, every part. His focus on the characters is laser sharp, and when he discussed them, he was concise and clear. When he discussed school, however, I could barely follow him. In my notes I saw plenty of references to Rousseau and Coleridge, but what was he saying about them? I asked, he answered and I still have no clue.

Perhaps I was disoriented by his recurring admonitions throughout the day: “Don’t write that!” “Don’t say that!” For 41 of his 42 years he has not been a star, and he is not used to presenting himself as a brand — and hallelujah for that. If I said something critical about the show, he took it as personally as if I had insulted his wife. If I praised something, he melted. When he melts, he is delightful — warm, funny and open — before forcing himself shut again. He may have become a star when he wasn’t looking, but he’s still a work in progress.

We sat in the hotel’s private dining room, where the overhead lights were tied to the restaurant’s dimmer, dark as a cave, and could not be brightened. The waiter put extra candles on the table, which illuminated Weiner’s burning brown eyes without relaxing him one bit.

“I have a very good memory for dialogue and for conversation,” he said, “and if you tell me a personal detail about yourself I will never forget it and probably steal it. So a lot of me working out the story is me telling the story.

My favorite people to tell the story to are my wife and Scott Hornbacher.” He is Weiner’s co-executive producer and creative partner. “If I can see their reaction, I can see what works and what doesn’t,” Weiner said. “That was not something I did on ‘The Sopranos,’ because it was so secretive, and I couldn’t bring in a stranger and dictate to them. But when I wrote the ‘Mad Men’ pilot seven years ago, I dictated it to Robin Veith, who is now a writer here. I wanted someone to be there so I would have to show up. I can write a huge amount that way if I have a good outline. Then I rewrite. That’s when I sit at the computer.”

Weiner and his staff try to be scrupulous about keeping the language in period and the facts straight. They dropped the expression “I hear you” from a scene, and an argument broke out about the phrase “I am so over you.”
That stayed.

“The only really big blunder I made that I was embarrassed about —” he started. “Well, there are two big blunders if you want to dwell on the negative, which is part of my personality.” He smiled. “The big blunder was that Joan quoted Marshall McLuhan. He had a bunch of books out in 1960, but not the one where he said, ‘The medium is the message.’ Unless she was in his class in Canada, she wouldn’t have known. He was probably using it already, but it was not in print.

“The second one was that Betty went to Bryn Mawr, and she talks about being in a sorority, and there are no sororities there. Bryn Mawr was very militant. I feel Betty was part of the shallow end of it because she grew up out there, that was a local school for her. She’s Main Line, King of Prussia or one of those towns. But Maggie Siff, who played Rachel Menken” — the Jewish department-store heiress — “went to Bryn Mawr, and she said that’s wrong.” He sighed. “You do what you can.”

Weiner’s nostalgia for the bygone glamour days of New York City stems mostly from his family. He never lived in New York until he worked on “The Sopranos.”

“My parents are from New York,” he said. “My father went to Stuyvesant, and my mother went to Bronx Science. One grandfather was in the fur business, the other was in the shoe business. Once my parents left New York they had nothing nice to say about it. But I loved visiting my grandparents, going past the Empire State Building and trying to crane your head out the window. We went to museums, we saw ‘Hair.’ ”

Weiner was born in Baltimore, the third of four children, and he lived there until his family moved to Los Angeles in 1975, when he was 9. His father, Leslie P. Weiner, is an acclaimed neuroscientist; the neurological care and research center at the University of Southern California is named for him. His mother, Judith, graduated from law school in the 1970s but never practiced.

Weiner attended the Harvard School in Los Angeles, now Harvard-Westlake. Despite his difficulties there — A.P. History was his one success — he got into Wesleyan, from which he graduated in 1987. “My major was a program that combined philosophy, literature and history,” he recalled. “It had no grades, and I remember getting my first comments back and my father looking at my comments and saying: ‘Isn’t this interesting? I can read this comment and I can see that you got a C.’ ”

What do his parents think of the show?

“I think they love the show,” he said.

He thinks? They haven’t told him?

“Ah, not really. I think they like to tell other people more than they like to tell me.”

After Wesleyan, Weiner got into U.S.C. film school with some direct lobbying of the dean by his father. “He was instrumental in making sure I got in, with my academic major that had no grades,” Weiner said. “My family has never shied away from supporting me in being a writer. Our house is filled with books; my parents are both incredible readers.”

Weiner thrived at U.S.C., making a documentary about the paparazzi called “It’s All True.” “It was filled with old movie stars which I already had my fascination with,” Weiner said. “And by the way, my father is a movie freak.

My parents made us see good movies — you had to be able to identify movie stars. They also made us go to the opera. You were expected to know all their references. Getting caught not knowing something in my family was like being an idiot. Half of the reason I was interested in the ’50s was just to communicate with them. I mean, in that 11th-grade history class we had to pick some historical character, and I was Joseph McCarthy. I dressed up like him, and I wore my grandfather’s suit, and I guarantee you that the teacher I had still remembers me doing it.” He laughed.

Weiner married Linda Brettler, an architect, after he graduated from U.S.C. They have four sons. She supported him when he was broke, and she is now his most-important sounding board. “Every single script goes through my wife,” he said. “She inevitably says, ‘What is it about?’ We talk about it and I’m always angry when she’s talking.” He didn’t look angry, he looked glad, as he always does when he talks about his wife. “She’s chewing gum and taking her time,” he continued. “She went to Harvard, she’s really smart and I just stand there literally with my hands out like — ‘What?’ I argue with her, and I always swear I’m not going to show it to her again because I’m so defensive. I mean, my writers come up with lots of good ideas, but she is really something.

“I’m very oblique and embarrassed about writing on the nose,” he went on. “I’m embarrassed about sticking it in people’s faces. After she’s finished, I find a way to stick it in a place where other human beings can at least understand it.” He sighed. “I’m not big on clarity.”

I noticed that. Perhaps it’s the lack of direct communication with his parents.
He bristled. “I have very direct communications with them. Just because compliments aren’t thrown around doesn’t mean we don’t communicate. My family is made out of argument. There is argument, there is discourse, you better stick up for yourself. My sister is a journalist, my other sister is a physician, my little brother is a physician, my mother is an attorney. There is direct conversation of the deepest, most profound, intellectual sort. It’s important to be funny, it’s important to grab attention.”

Maybe that’s why he gravitates toward the oblique.

He shrugged. “You know, honestly, it’s the way my brain works. I loved working with David Chase because he was the first person I ever came in contact with who was like: ‘Let’s not talk about that, let’s just do it. I don’t want to have to explain this because I cannot put it into words.’ ”

After graduating from film school, Weiner wrote scripts for three years, and the only money he earned was from appearing on “Jeopardy!” His wife encouraged him to make an independent film, which he shot in 12 days and edited while working in production at A&E Biography. The movie ultimately disappeared, but right before he screened it, a friend called to ask him for some jokes, which got him hired on the sitcom “Party Girl.” The series was picked up and quickly canceled, and he wrote for two more short-lived sitcoms before landing on “Becker.” “I worked there for three years,” Weiner recalled, “but about a year into it I said, ‘You know what, this is not what I want to do when I grow up.’ ” Which is when he wrote the “Mad Men” pilot.

In true Hollywood fashion, it took seven more years for him to become an overnight sensation. But he feels like the outsider he’s always been. “The beauty of my story,” he said, “is that I never sold a pitch. I’m not clear enough in my ideas, even though I’m a good talker. I think at this point people trust me because I have a track record, but all of my stuff was like: ‘You don’t think I can make a movie? Here, I made a movie.’ ‘You don’t think I can write this pilot?’ I pitched the story of ‘Mad Men’ to a couple of people, and they said, ‘There is too much smoking,’ or ‘Don is too unlikable.’ And I’m like, ‘I write on “The Sopranos,” and I’m watching the most on-paper unlikable person in the world.’ Well, guess what? Jim Gandolfini played that person, and it made a huge difference. So I wrote it.”

Which made the cut even deeper when HBO said no. (Or more to the point, Weiner says, never even got back to him.) Weiner has remained politely reticent about his treatment there. “All I can tell you is that it was very disappointing to me, as I pushed the rock up the hill, that they did not notice me,” he said. “Because I was part of the family.”

No one at HBO was willing to speak on the record about why the network passed on “Mad Men.” Off the record, I heard plenty about the insularity of the previous regime, flush as it was with the success of “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under.” One employee summed up Weiner’s situation this way: “David Chase says the guy’s incredible, he’s writing shows for your iconic hit and you don’t shoot the pilot? Line up 10 people in show business and ask if that makes sense.”

Richard Plepler, co-president of HBO, who took over programming along with Michael Lombardo in June 2007, told me, “ ‘Mad Men’ is a magnificent show, and the only problem with it is it’s not on HBO.”

In an e-mail message, Ed Carroll, president of AMC Networks, said: “The network was looking for distinction in launching its first original series, and we took a bet that quality would win out over formulaic mass appeal. In our view, there’s no doubt it paid off.”

The payoff for Weiner is getting to combine his love of history and literature with his love for the tradition of live television from the 1950s: Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling, “Kraft Television Theater” and “Playhouse 90.” “It all goes back to being socially conscious and the blacklist and who those heroes are,” he said. “Those were my parents’ heroes, and I think that part of the show is me trying to be one of those heroes and part of the show is trying to figure out — this sounds really ineloquent — trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are.”

What form does that take in the show?

“I don’t believe in bad guys, for one thing,” he said. “Everybody has a reason for doing what they’re doing. Writers’ rooms are filled with people who have problems with their parents, but that is universal.” Speaking of his wish to hide, Weiner told me: “When I wrote poetry in college, I wanted to be one of those people who could disappear. I had the exact opposite happen. I’m like a stripper. David Chase used to talk like this: ‘It’s all my life, my stupid family,’ and I was like: ‘You know what, we’re dramatists. So there’s nothing wrong with that.’ But that’s probably part of the reason why I haven’t discussed the details of the show with my parents.”

He stopped eating his filet mignon. “I invited them to see Episode 13,” he said. That was the final episode of Season 1, in which Don makes an elegiac pitch about family memories to Kodak. He dubs its circular slide projector “the carousel” and stocks it with heartwarming photographs of his own family.

“My parents came over and watched it,” Weiner went on, his voice rising, “and there was a picture in there of Betty and Don sharing a hot dog.” He started to shout. “Doesn’t that seem peculiar to you how specific that is?

Was it from an ad? What is it?”

I just looked at him.

“My parents have a picture from their first date of them sharing this hot
dog,” he said.

Oh. Did they mention it?

“No.” He started to laugh. “The truth is it’s such a trope to sit around and bash your parents. I don’t want it to be like that. They are my inspiration, let’s not pretend. Not a lot of Jewish scientists are happy to put their kid into film school. But they were happy about it.”

 

[MissMagAddict]

continued...

They were less happy about an essay Weiner wrote last December for The Times about gift-giving, in which he retraced the journey he and his brother took to discern the provenance of a bright orange Ralph Lauren sweater that his mother gave his brother. Although it was in a Nordstrom box, it was not from Nordstrom. Nor was it from Bloomingdale’s, Marshalls, or T. J. Maxx. It was from Ross, and it cost $1. Since its publication, that piece of prose has been the family gift that’s kept on giving.

“You know what?” Weiner said. “I’m different, I’m different than my family. They kind of let me know that. It was good and it was bad, and that dissonance, that’s where my sense of humor comes from, my sense of irony.” He sighed. “When you reach a certain point, you shouldn’t tell anything. We use our childhood and our pasts to excuse almost everything that we do. I certainly was encouraged to write, to be autobiographical. I think they hoped it would have been more pleasant.”

“MAD MEN” is shot at Los Angeles Center Studios, a charmless cement compound downtown. The actors’ utilitarian trailers are off to one side; when the actresses walk around the set, they wear plush white terry-cloth slippers instead of their punishing high heels. They cut amusing silhouettes when the full skirts of their costumes sway as they pummel their BlackBerrys.

On the second day of my visit, everyone seemed to have a cold or flu, and bottles of Purell were on every table. Weiner let me sit in on a casting session, though he prefaced it with a recitation of everything I wasn’t allowed to say. He has reason to be paranoid about auditions; he is convinced they provide the biggest leaks about the show. If actors don’t get cast, they go on the Internet and spill plot details for spite. If they do get cast, their agents exultantly tell everyone in town what’s happening next.

But that day, Weiner was prepared. A few roles needed to be filled, including a comic à la Don Rickles who is used in a Sterling Cooper ad campaign, and his Jewish wife, who doubles as his manager. Weiner had already seen a woman who interested him for the latter role; none of the actresses today knew that.

For the women auditioning, their “sides” (a scene without context) said their dialogue was with a character named Trent Cresswell. Though his name sounded like a p*rn star’s and seemed to have become a fast office joke, it was code, in this case, for one of the male leads. Carrie Audino and Laura Schiff, the casting directors, devised another safeguard. After each actor finished, they pointed to a carton next to a platter of gummy bears. “We’ll trade you your sides for some gummy bears,” they said, leaving no doubt that the sides stayed. Almost everyone took the gummy bears. For their kids, of course.

Weiner sat on a black leather couch, Audino and Schiff at a table, videotaping each reading. Weiner was so engrossed during the auditions that he seemed to be listening with his spine. His eyes were unnervingly piercing.
After the first actress left, he said, “I love her, but this woman is not in show business.”

“Yes, but it’s an interesting color,” Audino began.

“Listen, she’s really good,” Weiner said. “But she’s got a class thing. It makes me nervous.”

The next woman came in. Long legs, long arms, lots of hair. The scene was a telephone conversation with Trent Cresswell that included the line “I like being bad and then going home and being good.” Weiner said he heard it from a woman he sat next to once on a plane. After her first reading, the actress leaned toward Weiner. “What are you looking for?” she asked intently. He didn’t take the bait. “Everything that’s in there,” he said evenly. “It shouldn’t sound sexy; the words are sexy. It’s declarative. This is who I am.”

She did it again — exactly the way she did it the first time.

Next up was a man auditioning for an office role. He played his scene funny.

“That was my comedic take,” he informed Weiner.

“You don’t have to do that,” Weiner answered. The actor did it again, straight. When he left his sides, he declined the gummy bears, his face a flushing pool of dejection.

“I love naturally funny people,” Weiner said happily, once he’d gone. “He’s the kind of guy we couldn’t have on ‘The Sopranos’ because he’s Irish.” Weiner later hired him.

“Actors seem to feel the need to add more,” Audino said, “to make the show sound like it looks. They seem to want to make it period, but they don’t need to.”

Weiner liked the next woman, who happened to be a peroxide blonde, which he didn’t like. She can dye her hair, he said. But Audino and Schiff said no, she couldn’t, she had another job. Weiner got instantaneously angry. “I would hate to get attached to someone and find I can’t use them,” he said, his voice escalating. Audino made some peace, offering the option of a rinse instead of a dye. “We’ll make it work for you,” she said in a tone that simultaneously soothed him and goofed on him. “I’m warning you of a potential issue, maybe. Let’s not freak out about it.”

He heard both sides of her tone and calmed down as readily as he’d angered.
Then came gold. Patrick Fischler (because he was hired I can use his name) read for the comic and was breathtakingly good. As Weiner watched him, his ramrod posture softened, and the happier he got, the farther to his right he slumped, until he was half lying down with relief.

Fischler didn’t notice that, of course. “I know you hear this all the time,” he said formally, before turning to go. “I love your show.” Weiner looked him straight in the eye. “I can’t hear it enough,” he said.

Another actress came in to read the Trent Cresswell scenes. When she left, Weiner looked transported. “That’s exactly how it sounded in my head,” he said, as Audino and Schiff chimed in support. Just as suddenly, Weiner changed tacks. “She’s been altered,” he said with a tone of doom. “She looks very contemporary to me.” She certainly had the phoniest looking breasts on the block, though given the costumes, that wouldn’t matter. Was it her nose? They queued up her audition on the laptop and Weiner zeroed in. “It’s her lips,” he said. He was right. In 1961, no one got collagen shots.
The last actress read, this one naturally gorgeous and thoroughly great.

After she left, Weiner reviewed the auditions on the laptop. The peroxide blonde came up. “I’m looking for Jewish,” he said, holding his hands up to the screen to block her hair. “She looks to me like the Queen of Sweden.”
By now, it was 7:30 in the evening. “If you want them to be at the table read, we have to tell them tonight,” Audino said.

“What I really want to do is take these home and show my wife,” Weiner answered, looking miserable. Clearly, there wasn’t time. He went down the hall and rounded up half a dozen people to watch the tapes. They roared with laughter at Fischler and voted for the naturally gorgeous, thoroughly great actress. Weiner seemed dispirited. “O.K., I’ll hire the beautiful woman,” he said. Problem solved. For about 30 seconds. He shook his head. “I just don’t want it to look like a TV show.”

At 7:45 it was official. He chose the woman he saw before that day’s auditions. Granted, there is an awful lot of pressure on him and on Scott Hornbacher, who also produced “The Sopranos.” “We’ve established a standard and have an intense fear of doing something poorly,” Hornbacher told me. “Matt probably walks a line between being elated and terrified he’s going to spoil it somehow. But storytelling is foremost of what he is doing.

We all can’t wait to read the next script. It gives everybody a personal stake and a pride in the outcome, to live up to the level of that work. It’s a great synergistic thing here.” Implicit in the storytelling, Hornbacher said, is Weiner’s obsession with period details. A prop like a wedding present of a ceramic chip-and-dip set being exchanged at the store for a rifle, he said, provides a visual joke, a Proustian memory and a theme of emasculation for the unfulfilled groom.

The importance of those details became apparent in a production meeting I attended about the third episode. Because of Weiner’s obsession with secrecy, I was not offered a script, so the experience had a slight U.N. quality of listening to a summit meeting in an unknown language. About 30 people sat in the room, department heads at a center table with Weiner and Hornbacher.

Page 1, Scene 1. Betty has taken up horseback riding. “Ask about wetting down the track so it’s not dusty,” Weiner said, and staff members all around the room wrote down that note. Five minutes followed on whether she and another character should take off their gloves to shake hands. Weiner was going about 80 miles an hour while everyone else seemed to only hit 50. After he repeated a point sharply, Hornbacher said gently, “O.K., we got it the first time.” Though he added a joke to diffuse any tension, the pace visibly quickened after that. You could almost see Weiner’s writing process then; it seemed as if he were taking dictation from someone in his head and that person had an ironclad sense of what needed to happen. Right that second.

Eventually, though, came a moment of hesitation. A female character tucks a Kleenex in her sleeve. “It’s not too Livia Soprano?” Weiner wondered out loud.

“My mother does it,” one woman ventured.

“Mine does, too,” said another. It stayed.

The next scene was set in a car, and Weiner wanted the two characters to play it with the radio on. “Will it come on as soon as the key goes in the ignition?” Weiner asked. The man in charge of cars answered reassuringly, “We can rig it.”

“No, that’s not the point,” Weiner said, aggrieved, addressing the room. “In 1961 when you turn on the car, does the radio come on? Can we find that out?”

Heads nodded, pages flipped and pens flew. It would seem they could.

source | nytimes

 

[Meg]

I'm so glad this show is getting the recognition it deserves but the cover could have been about a million times better. I wish it was b&w, the girl in the back whose name I never remember (not peggy) has some of the most amazing dresses and sexy attitude on the show and yet she's pulling a funny face and the guy who plays Don is also doing something funny. I don't know. It seems weird.

 

[bluedolphin]

i love this ,want to see HQ pixs

 

[Dkammern]

we get this cool newspaper at college called Brandlife that is basically about marketing strategies and advertisment (it is a business school i go to) and a few weeks ago there was this very shocking interview with a misogynist, full of himself publicist that explained that his agency was coming to Spain to "teach us" what real advertisment is, and how spaniards were gonna be very surprised with their work.
During the interview he talked about the rumours that said that in this company of his, everybody had sex with everybody, how they treated women as objects, etc. A real shock hearing someone say those things publicly!
Strangely enough, the first ad campaign in spain was gonna be with a tv channel called Canal +
I talked about this interview with my friends at lunch time and we were all really surprised and truly shocked by the way this nasty man talked... but we forgot about it the rest of the day.
Still curious about it, I googled this man's name and guess what I found? He was the main character of a tv show called Mad Men!! It was all a made up story to create controversy and advertise this "new show" (we always get them a lot later than in the US) that Canal + was releasing in may.
Just bravo!! i immediatly called my friend and we both laughed about how easily we were tricked by the mad men and this great magazine!
I have been looking forward to watch it ever since i read the interview! i wish i had more free time, and less study to do

 

[lalawu]

It's a great show,and this is great to read!

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Ziegfeld Girl]

That was a long article but definitely worth the read. Thank you for posting it and the accompanying pictures, MMA. It's great Mad Men is getting the recognition it deserves. I don't mind the cover but I wish Peggy didn't have such awful hairstyles.

I'm really looking forward to season 2.

 

[Meg]

borjacapella - that's a very cool story! I love interesting advertising like that

 

[Miss Dalloway]

I started watching this show because of Jon Hamm, what can i say i like my men to look like men, no metrosexual bs for me.

And i was a bit digusted how sexist.etc it was but then as i got into more episodes i think its brilliant and very well done.

Meg you mean Joan, i LOVE her hahah, she is so hot and i love how good all those sexy dresses and little suits look on that curvy body.And i agree they all look weird on the cover.

Thanks for posting this.

 

[ShoeGal4Eva]

great read,thanks very much.that show is brilliant

 

[bluedolphin]

anyone can post Jon Hamm 's pixs!!!