Pandora's Box, page 15
In the last, melancholy shot of the series finale that aired on May 30, 2018, Philip and Elizabeth have made it back to the USSR, a country and a way of life to which they’ve dedicated their lives and sacrificed those of many others. As they emerge from their car on a deserted strip of mountain road, they look down at the twinkling lights of Moscow in the distance, a sight that is at once familiar and alien. They face a homecoming that promises to be as unsettling as their pretend lives in America.
6
AMC Chases Chase
AMC got its Sopranos in Mad Men, followed by Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Meanwhile, Netflix traded its red envelopes for streaming, with dramatic results.
Matthew Weiner was at his wit’s end. With no response to his Mad Men script from HBO, a pass from Showtime, and a “Turn it into a half-hour show”1 from FX’s Kevin Reilly, he had no choice but to fall back on AMC, aka American Movie Classics, which had not yet responded: no “yes,” no “no”—nothing.
AMC was a division of AMC Networks, which would eventually include BBC America and SundanceTV. If not at the bottom of the barrel, it was close. Rob Sorcher, who was executive VP of original programming, described it as a “lesser TCM,” recycling “a collection of shit-ass movies.”2 Still, shit-ass movies cost shit-ass licensing fees, and in 70 million homes, AMC was making money, but not a lot. It didn’t have to, because it was owned by Charles Dolan’s Rainbow Media, part of his Cablevision company out of Bethpage, Long Island, aka “Deathpage” to cynical AMC employees. This was the same Charles Dolan who had started Sterling Manhattan Cable years before and stood by watching as it molted into HBO. His son, James, ran AMC, the same James who is infamous for his failure to get the family-owned New York Knicks into contention.
Cablevision, like other MSOs (multi-system operators), was treated by the government like a utility. “It was like making TV for Con Edison,” says Vlad Wolynetz, who joined the company in 1995 and subsequently became VP of production, series, and movies. He adds, “We were showing movies to stick more wires into people’s homes.” It was a place, he is fond of saying, where “hope came to die and mediocrity came to thrive.”
Senior management was headed by Rainbow’s president, Josh Sapan, a tall, slender man with a long, narrow face. The senior executives under Sapan all came out of marketing or the affiliates. Says Wolynetz, “Asking sales people to do creative is a little like asking a basketball player to go into a boxing ring.” Sapan’s number two was COO Ed Carroll, who came from public relations at Bravo. He was said to be the humorless drone who never got the joke. Charlie Collier was general manager, by several accounts a glad-handing backslapper with a broad smile. His previous experience was selling ads for Court TV. He rubbed the creative executives the wrong way, especially since, as Laura Michalchyshin, who ran SundanceTV, says, “Charlie was an opportunist and if he saw an opportunity to take over, he pushed out [those above him]. He was a climber.”3
Not everyone shares their low opinion of the AMC executives. Says Mark Johnson, who produced Breaking Bad, Halt and Catch Fire, and Better Call Saul, all for AMC, “Charlie and Ed and Josh were this triumvirate that I still have great respect for and truly consider them friends.”4
Sapan was no dope, and he could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Cablevision didn’t have the clout to force the cable carriers to offer AMC, and those that did were dropping it. The service was looking at a loss of 30 million homes.
One day, Sapan came to his creative executives and said, “Bring me The Sopranos.”5 Sorcher, who had been wondering what he was doing at AMC, thought, How is that going to work? He’s saying compete with HBO, which does the most expensive programming in the business.
This was Sapan’s Hail Mary, and Sorcher took the leap into original programming, adding screenwriter Christina Wayne to the creative mix. “I thought AMC was a movie theater chain,” she recalls. “A bunch of basic cable channels were starting to do original programming because of HBO. They knew that if they didn’t have must-see TV to bring to the table, they were going to be just one of a long list of other cable channels offering the same crappy movies that everybody had seen five hundred times.”6 Although she was skeptical, when Sorcher told her she would be senior VP of scripted series, she signed on.
Wayne stumbled across Mad Men at the bottom of a slush pile of submissions. As she turned the pages, she thought, This is one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. Wayne contacted Weiner’s agents, who were less than tickled about getting a call from AMC, which was regarded as the luckless Knicks of cable services. The universal response was, “Who the fuck is AMC?” Weiner’s friends discouraged him from accepting an offer. “Don’t go,” he recalls. “It’s really low status, no money, and even if they’d do it, they’ve never made a show before, and you don’t want to be their first one.”7 But he was realistic. It was AMC or the shredder. Neither Weiner nor AMC could afford the luxury of being picky. They made the deal. According to Wolynetz, “Albrecht laughed at us for doing Mad Men.”8
Set in New York City, Weiner’s script was about a Madison Avenue advertising company on the cusp of the 1960s, those transitional years hammocked between the end of the sleepy Eisenhower era and the drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll revolution heralded by JFK. But an ad agency?
With the rest of the world in ruins while the US was untouched, the American religion of the postwar era was consumerism, and its high priests were ad executives. “Admen were the rock stars of that era, creative, cocky, anti-authority,” Weiner says, explaining that they provided “. . . a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are.” He applied the lessons he learned at Chase’s knee to Mad Men. He set out to tell a story about one thing that is really about something else. It looks like a workplace drama. “But what it really is,” he explains, “is ‘I look in the mirror and I don’t like what I see. And that’s because I’ve created this false self.’ That’s the kind of thing that would have never occurred to me before I was on The Sopranos.”9
His Don Draper was yet another good-bad-guy anti-hero, a man whose foremost product is himself, a lockbox of unsavory secrets fashionably gift-wrapped in cover-boy paper. He is the not-so-hidden persuader whose subliminal messages penetrate every nook and cranny of American life, and earn him the title of creative director of Sterling Cooper, the agency with which we would spend almost a decade.
Weiner cast Jon Hamm as his lead. Hamm is handsome in a dark, square-jawed kind of way, the James Bond of Madison Avenue. It was indeed perfect casting, explained Alan Taylor, a Sopranos director who helmed the Mad Men pilot, because “what we were doing was basically deconstructing that.”10
The pilot was shot in two weeks at Silvercup Studios with The Sopranos’ crew during that show’s downtime. It cost $3.3 million, which was a lot of money for AMC at that point. With the pilot in hand, AMC lined up Lionsgate to produce it. Remembers Lionsgate’s Kevin Beggs, “Rob Sorcher called, and said, ‘Nobody will take our phone calls, no one thinks we’re serious.’ To put a show on a network known for reruns that had never done an original, with not a single name actor that was promotable was a huge risk.” Still he says, Lionsgate “loved the conscious choice of casting nonstars and really letting the audience believe in the verisimilitude of those people really existing in the 1960s as opposed to the traditional broadcast marketing where you put a star in the nineteenth version of a comedy with the same star.”11
AMC covered all but $750,000, which was kicked in by Lionsgate, which ended up owning the show as well. Says Wayne, “It was probably one of the stupidest deals AMC ever made, but they didn’t want to take on the liability for production or distribution, because none of the people who worked there had ever launched a show before. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”12
Sorcher, Wolynetz, and Wayne protected Weiner as best they could from the AMC executives they all hated. “They were morons, absolute morons,” says Wayne.13 As for Weiner, Wolynetz compares him to “the little kid who got bullied. He always had his dukes up. And sometimes he was absolutely right.”14 Having graduated from Chase Academy, Weiner was unembarrassed to proclaim, “I do not feel any guilt about saying that the show comes from my mind and that I’m a control freak . . .” And as Mad Men seemed like it was improbably catching on, he exercised that control with an iron fist. When an enterprising ad salesman made a product placement deal with Jack Daniel’s without consulting him, he went ballistic, screaming, “Nobody in my show drinks Jack Daniel’s. It’s rotgut. If you want me to work this thing into the show, I’m going to have it sterilizing equipment in the back alley of an abortionist clinic.”15
Nor was Weiner popular with those who worked on the show. Marti Noxon, a consulting producer and writer on Mad Men, had a long history of doing the same for a blur of hits, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, and, later, HBO’s Sharp Objects, which she created. “Maybe in retrospect Matt would express satisfaction with you, but when I handed in my pages, he said, ‘I’m not angry at you; I’m just terrified,’ the implication being that I had handed him hair balls. I certainly had no confidence in my own voice on that show because his initial reaction to every script was what a disaster it was.”16
Weiner told The New York Times, “No one cried in my room,” but Noxon remembers, “You don’t play to win with guys like him, you just play to survive. You’d walk into that room and be like, Is someone going to be in tears by the end of the day? And will it be me?”17 She continues, “Then there was a weird ritual of bringing people in that he admired, particularly men, like [screenwriter] Frank Pierson, and then telling them that their scripts were bad.” Noxon goes on: “I think that he really enjoyed getting some of his heroes in there and then saying that he could write the show better than they could. Every day just felt like a pageant to his low self-esteem.”18
Although Weiner complained about Chase rewriting his scripts, when he was in Chase’s seat, he did the same. It was as if he was daring writer wannabes to write something that he didn’t have to do over. When he wasn’t satisfied, which was often, he behaved as if he had been personally affronted. According to writer Chris Provenzano, “It was like a parent. Like you had taken a shit on the rug, and he was like, ‘What did you do? Bad! Bad!’”19 Adds Noxon, “Rewriting some or a lot of the show is not uncommon, but he did it on almost every episode.”20 Weiner claimed writing credit on 73 of Mad Men’s 92 episodes. Compare this to other shows with approximately the same number of episodes: David Chase took writing credit on 24 out of 86 episodes of The Sopranos, Shawn Ryan took credit on only 17 out of 80 episodes of The Shield, and Graham Yost took writing credit on 9 out of 78 episodes of Justified.
Writing credit is not just about ego; it’s also about careers and money. The protocol is that if it’s a given writer’s turn in the rotation to do a script, that person gets credit for it, even if some scenes are farmed out to other writers. Explains Todd Kessler, “There are showrunners who put their names on everything and there are others who say, ‘Look, I hired this person to write a script. My job is to rewrite it and get it to be what I want it to be. Do I have to put my name on it and take half of the money away from them for their writing?’”21 Adds Noxon, “I think he thought it was big of him to give other people credit at all.”22
Mad Men premiered on July 19, 2007, approximately two months after Albrecht resigned, five weeks after The Sopranos ended and John from Cincinnati made its debut—in other words, when HBO entered the twilight zone.
Sapan had asked for his Sopranos, and in Mad Men he got it and then some. Weiner’s show turned out to be an instant success, and more, a phenomenon, a cultural touchstone. He recalled, “When I found out that a guy I know named his dog ‘Don Draper,’ I said to myself, ‘I think we’ve arrived.’”23 After its first season, it won a Peabody Award, and it would become the first basic cable show to win an Emmy for best drama. The show rippled through every aspect of American life, not only water coolers but dolls, nail polish, and men’s suits. Even Sesame Street found a way to accessorize Mad Men for its toddler audience.
Despite its success, or maybe because of it, AMC was a snake pit of writhing egos. Eventually, the entire original programming staff either resigned or were forced out. Sorcher left in 2008, to be replaced by Joel Stillerman. David Madden, who spent two decades at Fox and would become president of entertainment overseeing all of the studio’s shows, says he admired Stillerman, with whom he later developed The Killing for AMC. Wayne, however, says she was promised Sorcher’s job, but it never happened. She recalls, “Women in my generation who were EVPs or SVPs rose to a certain point and then [crashed against] this glass ceiling. I was like, ‘Fuck this shit, ’cause now the whole world knows that I just put all this programming on, and I have made them $400 million in profit in the four years that I was there.’ I went back to my office, and there’s an HR guy and Joel fucking Stillerman telling me I’m fired and offering me a producer deal. It was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me. It was disgusting. And may they rot in hell, is all I can say.”24 She left in 2009.
Wolynetz adds, “Christina was the most brilliant development executive I’d ever seen. I would sit in a meeting with her, and she would say something really smart, and everyone would ignore it, and I would repeat it twenty minutes later, and they all told me how brilliant I was. ’Cause I was a guy. That’s how much of a male culture it was.”25 Says Michalchyshin, “It was a boys’ club. It still is. Look at where they came from. Long Island. The Dolans.”26 Madden adds, “Christina was the smart one of that group. Mad Men was her child.”27
Weiner, too, hated the AMC executives so much that he wrote versions of them into the show. Back-slapping Collier became Duck Phillips, who takes over Sterling Cooper. Recalls Wolynetz, “There are whole phrases that come out of Duck Phillips’s mouth that I had just heard Charlie say, because the tape was always on with Matt.” Says Noxon, “It definitely felt like Matt was getting back at all the people who hadn’t believed in him or hadn’t respected or lauded him.”28
At the premiere of the final season, they held a black-tie event, where Weiner, according to Wayne, announced to everybody in hearing distance, “You people are fucking assholes for doing what you did to Christina, you’re all male chauvinist pigs. You just didn’t want her there because your penises are too small.”29
It was difficult for the craziness at Sterling Cooper to keep up with the craziness at AMC, but Weiner did his best, and Mad Men deserved its collection of Emmys. There is no question that when the show was good, it was hard to find one that was better. Through a fog of cigarette smoke, Weiner’s agency slowly comes into focus, revealing a withering picture of cultural manipulation executed by entitled white males—WASPs on the wing, as it were—indulging in casual racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia that had infected so many of the characters for so long they never even noticed. Asked if the agency has ever hired a Jew when one is thought to be needed to service a Jewish client, Don answers, “Not on my watch. You want me to run down to the deli and grab somebody?” If your gender was male and your color was white, you could sell lies and be handsomely rewarded for it.
The problem was that Mad Men wasn’t always good. Indeed, it was wildly uneven, with beautifully realized episodes cheek by jowl with clunky ones. Moreover, Draper is burdened by an overwrought backstory so lurid that it’s almost comical, and it drags down the office drama. It turned out that our glib, slick Don was the illegitimate son of a hooker and grew up in a brothel. His father got kicked in the head by a horse and died, leaving him at the mercy of his holy roller stepmother, who also became a hooker. One or another hooker—it’s hard to keep track—raped him. Enough? Not quite. He has stolen someone else’s identity, a fellow GI killed in the Korean War, and “Don Draper” isn’t even his real name.
Still, however badly Don behaves, he’s more sinned against than sinning. “I don’t think [Don is] a bad guy. I don’t want you to ever think that,” said Weiner. “This is a story about how hard it is for him.”30 But Weiner succeeded so well in creating a vivid picture of men behaving badly that what begins as critique turns into a male wet dream, full of nostalgia for a time before women, Blacks, gays, and Jews were invited into the corner office. He demystifies Don’s world, in other words, only to remystify it. Using the example of Joan Holloway, the overendowed office manager at Sterling Cooper, Daniel Mendelsohn acutely observes in the New York Review of Books that the show at once critiques and exploits the era’s sexism. It is “simultaneously contemptuous and pandering . . . As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips . . . it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us.” Moreover, it’s only a short step from male wet dream to male weepy. The undertone of sympathy for Don gives him dimension, but works against the critique.
Art director George Lois, who was one of the rock stars of advertising in the 1960s, said, “The more I think and write about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So fuck you, Mad Men, you phoney [sic] grey-flannel-suit, male-chauvinist, no-talent, Wasp, white-shirted, racist, anti-semitic Republican SOBs!”31
Given that Weiner assumed responsibility for every aspect of the show, and given the power accorded white male showrunners, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the same was true of him and his fictional alter ego: “Don Draper, c’est moi.” Says writer Marti Noxon, “There was often drinking and getting high after five or six, and I really felt like he was recapitulating the atmosphere of the show. He wanted to be Don Draper, and he’s not. The women just fell into Don Draper’s arms, but with Matt it was manipulation and power, targeting people about their bodies and their sexuality day in, day out, and an assumption that you have to play to his good side. He was just hitting on a lot of different people. It was pretty relentless. There was a lot of reason to believe that you were only being kept around because he thought you were good to look at. Matt came on to me as well. One time I hit him with a newspaper, like a bad dog. But I felt like I could say no and it wouldn’t end my career.”32
