Sailing on a writerly wind

Matthew Weiner, writer-creator of the award-winning television show Mad Men, talks of the literary inspirations for the show

April 02, 2015 04:18 pm | Updated 04:18 pm IST

Matthew Weiner on the set with Christina Hendricks who plays office manager Joan Harris. Photo: Special arrangement

Matthew Weiner on the set with Christina Hendricks who plays office manager Joan Harris. Photo: Special arrangement

It is the show that made advertising and the Sixties even cooler. One wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Mad Men , set in the world of advertising in 1960s America, did precisely that. At a press conference in Los Angeles promoting the final season of Mad Men , show creator and writer Matthew Weiner talked about the literary inspirations for the show. “I’m a product of a very expensive education. My father is a professor and my mother was a teacher. Writers were heroes in our house. I definitely was influenced by the writers that I love and there are a lot of them. I love J.D. Salinger and I’ve spoken at great length about the relationship of John Cheever and the show. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson….”

“During the show itself I was reading all kinds of things: Betty Friedan’s book, Helen Brown’s book. Some of them are cultural, some of them are just writerly.”

While Weiner has not read Joseph Heller’s Something Happened , which is set in a media house, he says: “I have read Catch 22 . It was very influential on my parents and on that whole generation. Catch 22 is not only a great distillation of military psychology, but American aspiration.”

Commenting on the relationship between writers and ad agencies (Heller worked in one) Weiner says: “Every single writer that I mentioned, spent some time in an ad agency, maybe not Charles Dickens. If you’re a writer and you need to make a living, that’s one of the ways you do it. Describing himself as “a materialist” Weiner said he has taken a lot of souvenirs from the set. “I have Don Draper’s Cleo Award, I have Roger Sterling’s bar, I have Peggy’s stapler. I just have little things from everybody. I have all the business cards that were ever made for the show.”

Weiner says he knew how the show was going to end when he sold the show. “I knew what was going to happen if we got to go long enough for me to get there. I did not know how it would happen or how it would be executed. That came to me three years ago and I stuck to it.”

Mad Men tackles social issues of the time including sexism and racism. When asked which social ill is still prevalent, Weiner said: “I’m pretty sure that the show either helped or was coincidental with a rebirth of a conversation about gender. The most stunning thing to me is economic inequality. I think racism, sexism, all these things stem from it. We’re living in interesting times. The world does not feel any cosier than it did when I was a little kid.”

Talking about the effect of social media on the show, Weiner said: “People may not remember this but we were kind of instrumental in the popularization of Twitter. It was really part of the advertising community. A couple of ad executives became @BettyDraper and @DonDraper and started writing fictitious tweets as the characters. I was kind of like, this is great! This is advertising. Here’s what I consider to be the negatives: I don’t like people doing it while they’re watching the show. I think it’s infuriating. It’s like you’re watching the show and someone is next to you going, oh my God, oh my God! Or you are reading a book and someone says, wait till you get to the end of the page! The person who is feeding on the tweets and the person who is feeding the tweets, neither of them are paying attention to what they’re doing and that’s not kind of how you like it. On the other hand, I think that there’s so much stuff that I wouldn’t have heard of if some sort of buzz had not happened for it. I like the democracy of it. All that said, we got on this thing right away: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff was happening right away on the show because I believe in every kind of advertising and I’m an early adopter and I have no judgment about it.”

The End of An Era: The Final Seven Episodes of Mad Men premiers on April 6 on Star World Premiere HD

The author was in Los Angeles at the invitation of Star World India

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