When the first season of Mad Men won six Emmy Awards–including Best Drama and Best Writing For A Drama Series–in 2008, the temptation was to think of the show as an overnight success. After all, it seemingly came out of nowhere to become the first basic cable series to garner the Best Drama Emmy, and has since had repeat wins of that honor in ’09 and ’10. Yet while the series has blazed a trail, it’s been a long and winding path as touched upon by its creator/producer Matthew Weiner during a session on Mad Men at The Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference last week in Los Angeles.
Weiner noted that he wrote the pilot 10 years ago while he was maintaining a full-time writing job on a sitcom. The Mad Men pilot became a creative means of expression and part of his dream to one day be in charge of a show as its creator. Weiner put much of his spare time into the project, noting that it had been an obsession, “my drug habit, my mistress.” This obsession pre-dated his putting pen to paper for Mad Men. Weiner shared that he bought a wristwatch three years before writing the pilot. He had the watch in mind for a character in the show (presumably that worn by the star ad man Don Draper character).
Weiner laughingly described himself back then as “delusional…buying a watch for a fictitious character.”
Among the first 20 or so people to read the pilot script was Weiner’s fellow panelist at the Film & TV Music Conference, composer David Carbonara. “He was my audience,” said Weiner of Carbonara who went on to score the pilot seven years after receiving that initial script.
Weiner values Carbonara’s contributions to the pilot and the ongoing series (which just wrapped season four), citing a scene in the Mad Men pilot: “Don [Draper] looks at his Purple Heart–and David, you have this thing with the Chinese flute and bombs blowing up in the background,” said Weiner. “It’s a really complicated cue that’s telling the audience, ‘You are going to be in this man’s head.’ He’s having a private moment and the music is going to let you experience that.”
Weiner also recalled a musical cue in the second episode for the Betty Draper character. He remembered thinking, ‘Oh, my God, Betty has music, and it’s melancholy and it’s got these little bells and all the shit that I love.”
Prior to Mad Men, Weiner enjoyed a tenure (’04-’07) on The Sopranos which saw him serve as a writer and eventually an exec producer as well on the show. He concluded his Sopranos duty on a Friday and embarked on Mad Men the next Monday once AMC committed to the project. He said this was the first pilot AMC had ever made (production house on the pilot was @radical.media) and it was after seeing the pilot that Lionsgate bought the show.
Thus far Weiner has turned out 52 episodes of Mad Men over four seasons. He sees a parallel between ad-makers and television series creators/writers/producers. “The advertising business is very similar to the TV show business,” he said, citing the shared bond of “a creative person who is on some level making compromises.” Weiner credited the ad industry with being “one of the few places where a creative person can make money,” adding that the inherent clash of accounts vs. creative and art vs. commerce bring another interesting dimension to the 1960s’ workplace in Mad Men.
By Robert Goldrich
Martin Scorsese On “The Saints,” Faith In Filmmaking and His Next Movie
When Martin Scorsese was a child growing up in New York's Little Italy, he would gaze up at the figures he saw around St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. "Who are these people? What is a saint?" Scorsese recalls. "The minute I walk out the door of the cathedral and I don't see any saints. I saw people trying to behave well within a world that was very primal and oppressed by organized crime. As a child, you wonder about the saints: Are they human?" For decades, Scorsese has pondered a project dedicated to the saints. Now, he's finally realized it in "Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints," an eight-part docudrama series debuting Sunday on Fox Nation, the streaming service from Fox News Media. The one-hour episodes, written by Kent Jones and directed by Elizabeth Chomko, each chronicle a saint: Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian and Maximillian Kolbe. Joan of Arc kicks off the series on Sunday, with three weekly installments to follow; the last four will stream closer to Easter next year. In naturalistic reenactments followed by brief Scorsese-led discussions with experts, "The Saints" emphasizes that, yes, the saints were very human. They were flawed, imperfect people, which, to Scorsese, only heightens their great sacrifices and gestures of compassion. The Polish priest Kolbe, for example, helped spread antisemitism before, during WWII, sheltering Jews and, ultimately, volunteering to die in the place of a man who had been condemned at Auschwitz. Scorsese, who turns 82 on Sunday, recently met for an interview not long after returning from a trip to his grandfather's hometown in Sicily. He was made an honorary citizen and the experience was still lingering in his mind. Remarks have... Read More