by Brett Martin
He also held forth on details of the period, wheeling in a television for group screenings of Sweet Smell of Success and Bachelor Party. He assigned reading lists—Sex and the Single Girl and The Feminine Mystique, John Cheever and David Halberstam, David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. On either end of the room were huge calendars crammed with month-by-month details from 1960.
“He had fully internalized the movies, the literature, the topical news, the restaurants, the New Yorker articles. It was a world inside his head he knew inside and out, like uncorking a vintage wine that had been sitting on the shelf, waiting,” Provenzano said. When the writer began working on his first assigned episode, the WGA-nominated “Hobo Code,” Weiner plied him ceaselessly with notes, once even forcing Provenzano to pull over his car to get them all down. He was especially concerned with the “Sketches of Spain” scene, in which Don gets high with his mistress and other beatniks, while listening to that seminal Miles Davis album. “He’d say, ‘This scene is about America and corporations and Norman Mailer and “The White Negro.”’ I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way I can cram all these ideas into a single scene. This guy wants The Great Gatsby distilled into three and a half minutes.’”
Early on, the writers’ room had been collegial. The staff, Weiner included, often decamped from Los Angeles Center Studios in downtown L.A. to cocktail bars in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood nearby. (If there’s any justice in the world, they were heavily comped for the boost they were about to give the vintage cocktail revolution.) It was only when the first new episode—the second of the series—was submitted to AMC and Lionsgate that the tension began to rise. In it, Pete Campbell, a major figure in the pilot, was totally absent, off on his honeymoon. Conversely, the episode lingered primarily in Ossining, with Betty Draper, a character who had barely appeared in episode one. In came the notes from Lionsgate: Where were the cigarettes? The old-fashioneds? The sexy single broads? Had they been baited and switched?
Sorcher, too, remembered having to swallow hard. “I think it was the first time the enormity of what we were getting into hit home,” he said. “‘We’re really going to do this? And this slowly?’ We were in, but at the same time we wanted something to happen, instead of nothing to happen.”
Staffers could hear Weiner’s heated arguments with the network through the walls of his office. Meanwhile, the next episode, “Marriage of Figaro,” was Mad Men’s “College.” In it, Don, clearly chafing in his domestic life, gets drunk while building a playhouse for his daughter’s birthday and ends up missing the party altogether by never returning from a trip to get the cake. When he does return, long after the guests have departed, it’s with a new dog, to smooth things over. In a show that would go on to be filled with bad mothers and fathers, this was the first example of flagrantly awful parenting, on the part of a character we were growing to like. “They’re never going to let me do this to this character,” Weiner predicted, girding for battle.
HBO may have shunned Weiner, but he seemed intent on pretending his show was on the network. He could recite by rote exactly the quota of curse words he was allowed per episode. As for act breaks, he ignored them altogether, refusing to hit any of the “buttons” that Shawn Ryan so celebrated. Instead, commercials appeared haphazardly, almost always awkwardly, as though being punished for their presence. “Let the network figure that out,” Weiner said.
And if any question was left about how he would view network interference, Sorcher and Elice were equally shocked and amused to show up at the first table read at Los Angeles Center Studios only to be handed nondisclosure contracts to sign. “It was a very strange thing for a writer to be handing his executives,” Elice said. “Why would we leak something about our own show?”
Once production began, tension in the writers’ room ramped up dramatically. Weiner tended to respond to work that fell short of his expectations with withering disappointment, as though it were a personal affront. “He would get so annoyed, like, ‘Why would she say that?’ ‘Why would she do that?’” said Bedard. “He took it really personally. And then it would all get worked out and he’d be thrilled beyond belief. He’s elated when things are what he wants.” It became routine for writers, leaving note meetings on their scripts, to hit the bathroom in order to let the tears subside.
Equal pressure was placed on writers covering set, who would find themselves in a state of terror over missing something important that Weiner wanted, or didn’t want, in a scene. Infractions could be as tiny as a gesture: Hamm repeatedly brushing ashes from his suit sleeve once drove Weiner to castigate the writer on duty for not catching and stopping it.
“It was like a parent. Like you had taken a shit on the rug and he was like, ‘What did you do? Bad! Bad!’” Provenzano said.
Weiner demanded a strict protocol in the room. “There is deference based on age and experience, and it better be there,” he said. Frank Pierson, the legendary screenwriter of Cool Hand Luke, Cat Ballou, and Dog Day Afternoon, as well as TV going back to Have Gun—Will Travel and Naked City, started making weekly appearances in the room during the show’s later seasons. One day, he was telling a story about his dog, and a young writer made the error of interrupting with a story of his own pet.
“This was somebody who was very low on the totem pole,” Weiner said. “I literally pulled them aside afterward and said, ‘No one gives a shit about your dog.’” When Pierson was talking, he said, “only I interrupt him.”
For all that, Weiner insisted that the room was vital to his process—as a source of stories and bits of dialogue and as an audience, a kind of creative conductive jelly in which to immerse himself, not dissimilar to David Milch’s hushed vestal virgins. Michael Patrick King, the longtime showrunner of Sex and the City, had given him a piece of advice on building a writers’ room: “Find people that make you sparkle.”
“And it’s true,” he said. “You want people who haven’t heard your story, and who make you behave better, or think better, that you want to try and impress on some level. And then it becomes what Pierson once said to me. He said, ‘I honestly feel like there’s a kind of psychoanalysis that goes on in that room, and that everybody on some level is helping you discover what the story is.’”
• • •
AMC, deciding to build on its identity as a classic movie network, made an early decision regarding how it would promote Mad Men. The PR campaign, the network’s PR team decided, would focus not on Hamm or any of the beautiful women in the cast, but on Weiner himself. In effect, AMC was claiming auteurship as its brand. “Honestly, it was all we had,” said one person instrumental in building the strategy. “Our tagline was ‘Created by the Executive Producer of The Sopranos.’”
It was a measure of just how far television had come from the days of the anonymous, presumably replaceable, showrunner. And Weiner was the perfect person for the job. He could be a dazzling speaker—eloquent, confident, persuasive, a natural storyteller with a world of anecdotes and references at his fingertips. At an early press event—the presentation of clips to specially selected “tastemakers” at Michael’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan—he wowed the room, outshining such other speakers as Arianna Huffington and Jerry Della Femina.
Though he treated upcoming plot developments with the overwrought secrecy of nuclear codes, once they had aired, Weiner was willing to expound at astonishing length upon themes, references, callbacks to previous episodes, inside jokes, important costume decisions, and other aspects of his grand design. “Wasn’t that amazing?” he would say. Or, “That was hilarious.” And it would take an interviewer—used to the usual rules of human discourse—a moment to remember that Weiner was speaking unabashedly about his own work.
Indeed, for somebody who had not grown up, say, in the wilds of Africa, and who was not obviously autistic, Weiner could be shockingly oblivious or indifferent to how the things he said and did appeared to others. Either that or he
genuinely could not control his most self-aggrandizing and competitive impulses. In one characteristic, oft-repeated piece of industry gossip, he was introduced to the showrunner of a hugely successful and popular network hit. On the way out, Weiner stopped to say, “See you at the Emmys.” “Actually, we’re not nominated,” the man said. “That’s right,” Weiner said, turning on his heel. “You’re not.”
At the same time, he could inspire fierce loyalty among colleagues. The negative stories, Christina Wayne insisted, were the product of jealousy and grudge holding. “I’m sorry, people got fired from that writers’ room”—Weiner seemed determined to eclipse even Chase in writer turnover—“because they weren’t any good,” she said. “Him being ‘difficult’ . . . I think of it as his passion, and I respect it. I’ve been on the other side, when people took my work and tried to change it. So, whenever Matt got upset, or pissed off, or screamed, I felt like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Protect your work.’ That’s your goal, to work with somebody like that. When I work with somebody who doesn’t care, or phones it in, that’s what pisses me off. That’s when I feel like, ‘You’re a fucking douche bag.’ I’d work with somebody like Matt, who gives it all up, hands down any day.”
Weiner, of course, had been raised to not shy away from accomplishment. His biggest fear, at The Sopranos, had been that nobody would ever know how much he had written. (A first-time visitor to the set once made the mistake of chatting with the director about the episode being filmed; Weiner, who had written it, pulled him aside. “In TV,” he said after introducing himself, “the director means nothing.”)
Having his own show was vindication. Because of the writers’ strike that stretched between 2007 and 2008, neither cast nor crew could attend that season’s Golden Globe Awards, gathering instead on the top floor of the Chateau Marmont to watch on TV. When the show won for Best Television Series, the party erupted. Weiner climbed up on a chair to make a speech. “This is what you wait for,” he said in this, his moment of triumph, “so you can tell all those people who ever said anything bad to you to go fuck themselves!”
And he had zero qualms about making sure that the world knew exactly how much of the show belonged to him. A writer’s draft, he maintained, was almost always just a shadow of a blueprint for the eventual episode, the frame of a house with barely any walls, let alone wallpaper. “The problem for many writers,” he said, “is that once they’ve executed the outline, they feel like it’s finished. And you know that it’s nowhere near finished. And you know that that’s a stab at it. Actually, I don’t think they could even work if they knew how unfinished you know it is.”
Rewriting, even drastic rewriting, had always been part of the showrunner portfolio. According to custom, except in extreme cases, the first-draft’s writer’s name would remain alone atop a script, no matter how much work the showrunner had done. His or her involvement, it was understood, was implied by the job title. Chase, as time had gone by, had grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that this often meant his work was going unrecognized. As The Sopranos proceeded, he had added his name to the authorship of scripts with growing frequency. Weiner, though, brought the practice to an entirely new level. He adopted a rule that if more than 20 percent of a writer’s script remained, he or she would retain sole credit. If not, Weiner added his name. A measure of how difficult that benchmark was to reach: Of sixty-five episodes through season five, fifty were at least partially “written by” Weiner. It became enough of an industry inside joke that it was the subject of a sight gag on 30 Rock.
Talking about the policy, Weiner was defensive but steadfast. “For me, it’s just a matter of the well-being of my daily interaction with the people I work with,” he said. “For me to watch somebody go up and get an award for something I had written every word of . . . I couldn’t live with it. I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac.”
Despite Weiner’s assertion that “there’s no residuals in basic cable. I’m not fighting for money,” the arrangement included a financial component. Half credit on a script indeed meant half the residuals on reruns, foreign broadcasts, and so on for the other credited writer. (Giving Weiner the benefit of the doubt, he may have been suggesting that the residuals for Mad Men were so negligible as to be nonexistent; still, one imagines a writer preferring to make that judgment on his or her own.)
The debate was charged enough to itself end up in an episode of Mad Men—which, after all, is in part about creative people working together in a collaborative atmosphere where, nevertheless, some members are more equal than others. In “The Suitcase,” Peggy complains to Don about his not giving her sufficient credit for her ideas. The fight gets heated.
Don: That’s the way it works. I give you money, you give me ideas.
Peggy: You never say “thank you!”
Don: That’s what the money is for!
“I don’t know how it ever got to be the other way,” Weiner said of the tradition of a sole writer getting credit, no matter what the circumstances. “It’s like, ‘You know what you wrote and I know what I wrote. You really want everyone to think you wrote all of it? You can really sit there and not have a problem with that?’ I mean, it’s one thing for me to pretend I didn’t write something. But for someone to pretend that they did? That’s hard to stomach.”
Other showrunners, if they didn’t adopt Weiner’s policy, certainly sympathized with him, even admired his abandoning of traditional niceties. All had at least one stomach-wrenching experience of watching someone take credit for their work.
“I’m impressed,” Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan said. “I recall times when I would rewrite other people’s scripts and my name wouldn’t go on the rewrite and, more than missing out on some money, I would have the feeling of ‘The world’s not going to know the work I did here.’ It would gall me. Maybe tradition is something to fight against.”
Gilligan was speaking in a roundtable that also included Weiner and David Milch. “Ego suppression,” Milch agreed, “can be an act of unhealthy ostentation.”
“Well,” said Weiner, “I’m very healthy.”
• • •
Certainly it was not a unique question in the history of the arts: how someone capable of seeming insensitive and out of emotional touch in the real world could also produce work of exquisite emotional intelligence and empathy. And Mad Men, in its best moments, was just that.
It was the first major show of the Third Golden Age to forgo any instantly recognizable genre; it didn’t arrive in the guise of a cop show, a Mob show, a western, or even a soapy family drama. It was, however, as much of a Trojan horse as any of its predecessors, with the costumes, the smoking, the drinking, and the nostalgia standing in for The Sopranos’ blood, guns, goombah jokes, and strippers. Article after article described Weiner’s fetish for period detail; a pocket Internet industry popped up to catalog and explicate each episode’s references, no matter how oblique or even imaginary. With no apparent irony, Banana Republic launched a Mad Men marketing campaign and line of clothes; Bloomingdale’s devoted its entire Third Avenue window display to the show.
Beneath that, though, it is in many ways a story as brutal and ruthless in its view of human nature as its predecessor. Don may be a searcher, but he is a blinkered, often selfish, sometimes ridiculous one. Weiner never lets us forget how frequently Don is on the wrong side of history: he sides with Nixon over entitled, glib Kennedy; he doesn’t get the Beatles. Emotionally, like Tony Soprano, he makes, at best, halting progress—forcing the audience to reexamine its affection for and loyalty to him at every turn. That people act nearly always on their worst impulses, whether they’re aware of it or not, was an item of bedrock faith for Weiner; anyone who felt differently was fooling himself.
“He has absolutely a conviction not only that his characters think the way they do, but that all people think the way that his characters think,” said Bedard.
Male-female relations—in both the personal
and the historical contexts—are the most obvious subject of Mad Men. In many ways, the series is as much about the journey of Peggy Olson as it is about Don’s. Weiner copped to having a special affection for Peggy, perversely most evident in his granting her foibles (ego, irritability, bad judgment, coldness about her abandoned baby) that mirrored those of her boss and mentor. (Weiner was guilty, it seemed, of loving the show’s other great female character, Joan, too much: alternating between sanctifying her as office Madonna and punishing her with grotesque plot twists.)
But the show was as much about male combat—its infinite variations and the constant, exhausting toll it takes. This, more than alcoholism, the effects of smoking, or any other bad results of ancient mores, was the dark side of unequivocally running the world. It was also vital to Weiner’s worldview, a fact that explained, as much as anything, the rougher edges of his personality.
“I’m constantly putting on my armor,” he said. “It’s all about what you think you’re entitled to, what your ambition is, what’s in your way. I’m not somebody who tries to destroy people, but I am very conscious of these things. It is combat: Do you ever want to give up feeling sexually viable? I don’t. Do you ever want to give up feeling powerful? Do you want to look at a twenty-year-old kid and say, ‘He can beat the shit out of me’? It’s all combat.”
Above all, Mad Men may have been the purest use of the new form of serialized TV. Weiner understood innately the rhythms of thirteen one-hour episodes, the ways in which they could be made to serve an overarching narrative while simultaneously acting as discrete hour-long weekly “movies.” An episode was closer to a feature film than it might at first appear, he pointed out, since a two-hour movie often required as much as an hour of setup, exposition, and characterization. At the start of any given hour of Mad Men, that work was already done, by the two, or three, or sixty-five hours before it.
