TV

Drama's creator drives us 'Mad' with his reticence

By Dale Roe
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, October 18, 2009

Sorry, "Mad Men" fans, no spoilers here. Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, isn't spilling. "I just really don't like to talk about the future of the show," he says.

That crumpling sound you hear? That's a reporter wadding up pages of questions — How will Joan get back to Sterling Cooper? Will we ever see Pete and Peggy's baby again? How will the Kennedy assassination play out? — and tossing them into the circular file. The bad news is that I'm burning with curiosity. The good news? My hook shot is getting really good.

The 44-year-old Weiner is on the phone in advance of his appearance at the Austin Film Festival, where he will participate in two panels: "A Shot of Inspiration" at 2:45 p.m. Thursday and a script-to-screen session at 9 a.m. Friday. He'll also be on hand for a special cocktail hour screening of a favorite episode at 6:15 p.m. Thursday at the Alamo Ritz.

Weiner says he's thrilled, as a TV guy, to be participating in a film festival. He's never been to Austin, but he's heard that it's "a better version of Berkeley." He's excited about interacting with the people here, "who seem to be really cool." He hopes that interaction proves to be inspirational.

"I tried to do this with my Emmys speech," he says. Weiner just brought home two more statues — the show's eighth and ninth — for writing and Best Drama Series. He was criticized in some circles for delivering what some considered a pompous acceptance speech, saying, "I may be the only person in the room with complete creative freedom. That's why the show is so good." But I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. In our conversation, Weiner comes across as enthusiastic, not arrogant, and he wasn't saying the show is so good because of him (although, clearly, that's a huge part of it) but, rather, because of the creative freedom he enjoys.

He says he looked for people like himself to inspire him when he was starting out, "people who had stuck it out and who had fought for stuff and who were not just chasing the marketplace and doing what they were told. I'm not kidding. I do feel like that. That's part of this whole thing and I try to do it in the show, too."

Ah, the show. I thank him for the recent, shocking hook-up between junior copywriter Peggy Olson and the much-older Duck Phillips that's been seared into my brain, and Weiner lets out an evil laugh.

"I knew that people would freak out when that happened," he says. "Most of all the actors — when they read the script, they were like, 'What?!' " But then everybody who knows Peggy knew that it made perfect sense, for both of them."

I guess. But it's still one of those things that I will never be able to un-see.

OK, let's give Weiner some practice for his AFF panels: "Mr. Weiner ... Dale Roe, Austin American-Statesman. Is it difficult for you to wed your characters' storylines into an era that's been so well and thoroughly documented?"

"This is not a history lesson," Weiner replies. " 'Titanic' is like the most successful movie ever and everybody knows the ending. You know, the entertainment comes from watching people who you don't know and what decisions they make in their lives and, of course, there is a little bit of this on the show, of people walking around and talking about how safe the ship is." He laughs.

"On the one hand, you know what the calendar is and you know the ending to all of the stories, but on the other hand you have no idea what's going to happen in those people's lives. And there are very, very few things like that in life and I want people to — as an entertainment — to enjoy that."

"Thanks. Dale Roe again. Did you always plan to set your show in the 1960s? And why?"

"It was always the late '50s, early '60s, and I actually went all the way to 1960 because that's when the pill came out. I picked it because it was the height of American power, in every aspect of world culture."

Weiner talks about how he was raised in an era of nostalgia for the '50s, when "Happy Days" was the No. 1 television show, and how that nostalgia was colored through the 1960s — how that period was sold to him as vastly superior to his own. And though he realizes that "Mad Men" exists in a period of manners and a "politeness (that) allows people to keep secrets," he sees unfortunate parallels between the reality of the '50s and today.

"I do feel that despite our desire to talk about everything about ourselves right now and to live in complete exposure, that we are in a very repressed period," he explains. "And that was something that I was interested in talking about, and I saw it happening, and it turned out to some degree that I was right, although it was not something I wanted to be right about."

He aspires to have "Mad Men" regarded similarly to works such "The Catcher in the Rye," he says, "as pretentious as that is." And when he describes that novel, the comparison seems apt: "It's historical, it lives in its moment; it's trans-historical because it lives across moments to us and it's also meta-historical because it's about a little boy. It's about a little boy, you know, and little boys are little boys."

Isn't ad man Don Draper — seeking approval in the arms of countless women and fatherly love from clients such as Conrad Hilton — really just a lost little boy?

"Mad Men's" stories do really seem timeless in spite of being so rooted in such a meticulously re-created, particular time. Weiner talks about footage of Anne Frank making the rounds on the Internet. "It's black and white and everything, but you can totally smell the air and experience life the way it is right now. You know, jelly tastes the same. And, you know, perfume smells the same and holding someone's hand feels the same and having your heart broken feels the same, and that's sort of what I'm always dealing with."

Weiner knows he's privileged to be able to struggle with that reality on such a grand scale. "If you're an artist," he says, "this is a very happy ending. you know? And I hope that other people can do that. And I say that not to just make myself feel better, or appease the gods, but because I am a consumer of entertainment and I know everything that I love comes from this process."

'Mad Men'

9 p.m. Sunday

AMC