Matthew Weiner

March 23, 2009 World Screen

Creator & Executive Producer
Mad Men

As the creator and executive producer of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner takes viewers back in time to the ruthlessly competitive world of Madison Avenue advertising in the ’60s. Mad Men won the Golden Globe Award for best TV drama two years in a row and made tele-vision history by being the first basic-cable series to win a Primetime Emmy Award for best drama. Weiner shares his passion for history and for his craft.

WS: How did the idea for Mad Men come about?
WEINER: I can’t really answer that; I’ve tried to answer it before. It was something that was on my mind probably since high school. I am interested in that period. I worked in television for a while and the more I knew about the period and the more I knew about how important advertising was during that time, the more I saw the similarities with [what I did]. There is something about the ’50s and [the beginning of] the ’60s that interested me. I’m interested in history. But the truth is, it’s a very personal thing for me. I was interested in a stage in my life and also in a stage in the country’s life.
 
WS: Drinking, smoking and the treatment of women in the workplace are all depicted in the series. Did you focus on those because you had a particular desire to show how different things were back then?
WEINER: I wanted to show how different things were back then but also my nature is to show how similar things are [today]. And even though the attitudes are less institutionalized and thank God there is legal protection at work, for the most part I find that a lot of these things haven’t really changed. I really wanted to show that when we look at history and when we look at people’s lives before us, we act very wisely and judgmental because we know what happened and how things have turned out. But it’s kind of foolish, because to some degree people don’t change and you should recognize these people and recognize a lot of their desires and hopes and obstacles from your own life.
 
WS: What kind of research did you do to depict that decade as carefully as you have?
WEINER: That’s just another thing that is slightly mysterious. I read a lot about advertising in that period, as much as I could find. I wrote the first script nine years ago, so I was doing the research as much as 13 or 14 years ago. There wasn’t much on the Internet. Almost all of the books that are now in print, and I don’t know if it has to do with the show or just the culture, but they were not in print at the time. So part of the research came from reading fiction and watching movies from the period and deciding that I would do a show about the people who read those books and watched those movies and not actually imitate those things.
I’ve also always been interested in people who are older than me and the stories they tell. Even though they are warped sometimes in their memories and inaccurate in many ways, I just loved hearing them and that was really a big part of the research—hearing someone tell a story about seeing a movie and how that influenced them. And I especially loved hearing women tell about going to New York to get a job and then hearing about those offices. Some of it is filled with outrage and some of it is filled with the wonder of being in New York at that time. And then I’d hear about a 21-year-old at his first job.
I was interested in men and what the definition of masculinity was and is. And about our fathers and that generation going from the Depression into really having influence in the world and the power that came with that. But I was also interested in the women. I read Sex and the Single Girl [by Helen Gurley Brown], which came out in 1962 and The Feminine Mystique [by Betty Friedan], which came out in 1963, in the same week. That really told me that I had a TV show.
 
WS: How do you decide which events in American history and which pop culture references to include in the show?
WEINER: I work from a thematic standpoint, so I like to see what I can use to tell the story of my characters’ lives. There are also certain things that I want to take a revisionist swipe at and say, this is the way that history has been metabolized, this is what we’ve been told about the time, but no one experiences history that way.
People talk a lot about Marilyn Monroe dying and they remember it happening, but the impact of it is very similar to our interest in celebrities now. So if it’s a personal thing, or a shared experience, I just pick things that I can use to illustrate what is going on. There are some big events that I ignored and there are small events that I made a big deal about that people have forgotten about.
There is one history book I used quite a bit called The Glory and The Dream by William Manchester. It’s a social history and when I was in high school it was used in one of my history classes. For example, Manchester mentions that in 1960 a bomb went off in Grand Central [set by someone] trying to free Puerto Rico from American influence. People were killed, and when I looked at that, I thought, How can it be that this has completely disappeared, that no one even knows this happened. Sometimes people remember, and sometimes they don’t.
History gets formulated into a narrative for different purposes, so I try to find things that are related to the lives of the people in the story. They don’t know what is going to happen. They don’t know what is going to end up being part of the historical narrative. They only know what they are experiencing, so I try to have the history be like it is in our lives right now, some events are devastating and catastrophic and important to everyone and some events are passed by like nothing.
 
WS: Tell us about the attention to detail you and your team give every aspect of the show.
WEINER: I want to do something that has a sense of actual time travel and reality from the period, and not use the period as a stylistic device. I really feel that a well-appointed interior and its objects are all part of our experience of our life. So I try to get a level of accuracy about everything. And I try to fill it with objects. I want it to be filled with clutter and garbage. We had a philosophy right from the beginning—I told the production designers and everyone at every point—number one was that all the ashtrays always had to be full. Because that’s what I remember, ashes everywhere and garbage being on people’s desks and personal artifacts and the furniture was not all from 1960, it was from 1940 and the 1800s. The ultimate ’50s house is not a bunch of modern stuff, the ultimate bourgeois ’50s house is filled with chintz and colonial antiques and Early American furniture.
All of this detail serves to create a reality and it helps the actors, and the audience, realize they are going to be immersed in this experience. It requires a lot of care and research but I have amazing people working in every department who are interested in this accuracy. They know it’s related to the lives of real people.
One example was when we were decorating the office and had placed furniture. We had a picture [of an office from] a magazine ad from designer Herman Miller and it was very similar to what we had, only something didn’t look right. I asked what the difference was, and they said, The difference is that in a movie, or a TV show, or an ad, they cut all of the wires off of the telephones, the answering machines, the typewriters, the lamps. Wires are ugly and messy and not part of this modern office silhouette. But we leave all that stuff in, and that is part of the texture of the show. And besides, I think materialism on some level is such a big part of America and such a big part of the [philosophies] of the office and the home at that time.
And also, in a more general sense, as a creative person, when you are making a film or a TV show, all of these things, whether it be sound, music, hair, makeup, clothing, production design, props, set decoration, all of these things are tools that you can use to tell your story. And the more of them that you have, the more you can tell the story—they become parts of the characters, they become parts of the story, and so I don’t like to waste those things and throw them away.
 
WS: What do you enjoy most about your work?
WEINER: I work with incredibly talented artists. I love the fact that I have this intimate relationship with my audience when they watch the show. And I love the fact that I go to work each day and we get to talk in the most pretentious way possible about the deeper things in life and try to turn them into entertaining drama.