Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (30 page)

“Well,” said Chase, “it better be good.”

With the cast in place, the pilot shot at Silvercup Studios over ten days while
The Sopranos
was on hiatus, borrowing heavily from that show’s crew and creative staff—including director of photography Phil Abraham and production designer Bob Shaw. With the final product in hand, Wayne and Sorcher once again toured the studios. This time, Lionsgate bit. Immediately after wrapping production on his final
Sopranos
episode—the next to last of the series, in which Bobby Bacala is killed and Silvio ends up in a coma—Weiner headed to L.A. to start writing.

• • •

W
hen the
Mad Men
writers’ room convened, eight years of thwarted ambition was unleashed. Among those in the room were the husband-and-wife writing team of Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, whom Weiner had known since film school; an old colleague from
The Naked Truth
, Tom Palmer; a longtime sitcom veteran named Lisa Albert; and two young writers with little experience, Chris Provenzano and Bridget Bedard.

For the first week, Weiner spoke almost nonstop. He had spent years imagining plotlines, reading reference materials, even collecting music that he wanted to use on the show. Now he downloaded reams of information while his writers scribbled furiously. At one point, he had written about 80 percent of a screenplay about Don Draper’s backstory, which he recounted in intricate detail. “He knew every side character, what towns they’d lived in, everything,” Bedard said.

Every writer was tasked with bringing in a handful of random plot ideas—“An Episode About Brassieres,” “Pete Gets a Haircut”—which were written down on three-by-five index cards and pinned to a bulletin board, to be used in a pinch.

Weiner paced nonstop, speaking in the voices of his characters, in particular the imperious office manager Joan Holloway. “It would just overcome him, as if he were in a trance,” said Provenzano. “Of course Joan is the bitchiest character. And Matt is a quintessential Queen Bitch. He could write that character for days and days.”

He also held forth on details of the period, wheeling in a television for group screenings of
Sweet Smell of Success
and
Bachelor Party
.
He assigned reading lists—
Sex and the Single Girl
and
The Feminine Mystique,
John Cheever and David Halberstam, David Ogilvy’s
Confessions of an Advertising Man
. On either end of the room were huge calendars crammed with month-by-month details from 1960.

“He had fully internalized the movies, the literature, the topical news, the restaurants, the
New Yorker
articles. It was a world inside his head he knew inside and out, like uncorking a vintage wine that had been sitting on the shelf, waiting,” Provenzano said. When the writer began working on his first assigned episode, the WGA-nominated “Hobo Code,” Weiner plied him ceaselessly with notes, once even forcing Provenzano to pull over his car to get them all down. He was especially concerned with the “Sketches of Spain” scene, in which Don gets high with his mistress and other beatniks, while listening to that seminal Miles Davis album. “He’d say, ‘This scene is about America and corporations and Norman Mailer and “The White Negro.”’ I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way I can cram all these ideas into a single scene. This guy wants
The Great Gatsby
distilled into three and a half minutes.’”

Early on, the writers’ room had been collegial. The staff, Weiner included, often decamped from Los Angeles Center Studios in downtown L.A. to cocktail bars in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood nearby. (If there’s any justice in the world, they were heavily comped for the boost they were about to give the vintage cocktail revolution.) It was only when the first new episode—the second of the series—was submitted to AMC and Lionsgate that the tension began to rise. In it, Pete Campbell, a major figure in the pilot, was totally absent, off on his honeymoon. Conversely, the episode lingered primarily in Ossining, with Betty Draper, a character who had barely appeared in episode one. In came the notes from Lionsgate: Where were the cigarettes? The old-fashioneds? The sexy single broads? Had they been baited and switched?

Sorcher, too, remembered having to swallow hard. “I think it was the first time the enormity of what we were getting into hit home,” he said. “‘We’re really going to do this? And this slowly?’ We were in, but at the same time we wanted something to happen, instead of
nothin
g
to happen.”

Staffers could hear Weiner’s heated arguments with the network through the walls of his office. Meanwhile, the next episode, “Marriage of Figaro,” was
Mad Men
’s “College.” In it, Don, clearly chafing in his domestic life, gets drunk while building a playhouse for his daughter’s birthday and ends up missing the party altogether by never returning from a trip to get the cake. When he does return, long after the guests have departed, it’s with a new dog, to smooth things over. In a show that would go on to be filled with bad mothers and fathers, this was the first example of flagrantly awful parenting, on the part of a character we were growing to like. “They’re never going to let me do this to this character,” Weiner predicted, girding for battle.

HBO may have shunned Weiner, but he seemed intent on pretending his show was on the network. He could recite by rote exactly the quota of curse words he was allowed per episode. As for act breaks, he ignored them altogether, refusing to hit any of the “buttons” that Shawn Ryan so celebrated. Instead, commercials appeared haphazardly, almost always awkwardly, as though being punished for their presence. “Let the network figure that out,” Weiner said.

And if any question was left about how he would view network interference, Sorcher and Elice were equally shocked and amused to show up at the first table read at Los Angeles Center Studios only to be handed nondisclosure contracts to sign. “It was a very strange thing for a writer to be handing his executives,” Elice said. “Why would we leak something about our own show?”

Once production began, tension in the writers’ room ramped up dramatically. Weiner tended to respond to work that fell short of his expectations with withering disappointment, as though it were a personal affront. “He would get so annoyed, like, ‘Why would she say that?’ ‘Why would she do that?’” said Bedard. “He took it really personally. And then it would all get worked out and he’d be thrilled beyond belief. He’s elated when things are what he wants.” It became routine for writers, leaving note meetings on their scripts, to hit the bathroom in order to let the tears subside.

Equal pressure was placed on writers covering set, who would find themselves in a state of terror over missing something important that Weiner wanted, or didn’t want, in a scene. Infractions could be as tiny as a gesture: Hamm repeatedly brushing ashes from his suit sleeve once drove Weiner to castigate the writer on duty for not catching and stopping it.

“It was like a parent. Like you had taken a shit on the rug and he was like, ‘What did you do? Bad! Bad!’” Provenzano said.

Weiner demanded a strict protocol in the room. “There is deference based on age and experience, and it better be there,” he said. Frank Pierson, the legendary screenwriter of
Cool Hand Luke
,
Cat Ballou
,
and
Dog Day Afternoon
, as well as TV going back to
Have Gun—Will Travel
and
Naked City
,
started making weekly appearances in the room during the show’s later seasons. One day, he was telling a story about his dog, and a young writer made the error of interrupting with a story of his own pet.

“This was somebody who was very low on the totem pole,” Weiner said. “I literally pulled them aside afterward and said, ‘No one gives a
shit
about your dog.’” When Pierson was talking, he said, “only
I
interrupt him.”

For all that, Weiner insisted that the room was vital to his process—as a source of stories and bits of dialogue and as an audience, a kind of creative conductive jelly in which to immerse himself, not dissimilar to David Milch’s hushed vestal virgins. Michael Patrick King, the longtime showrunner of
Sex and the City
,
had given him a piece of advice on building a writers’ room: “Find people that make you sparkle.”

“And it’s true,” he said. “You want people who haven’t heard your story, and who make you behave better, or think better, that you want to try and impress on some level. And then it becomes what Pierson once said to me. He said, ‘I honestly feel like there’s a kind of psychoanalysis that goes on in that room, and that everybody on some level is helping you discover what the story is.’”

• • •

A
MC, deciding to build on its identity as a classic movie network, made an early decision regarding how it would promote
Mad Men
.
The PR campaign, the network’s PR team decided, would focus not on Hamm or any of the beautiful women in the cast, but on Weiner himself. In effect, AMC was claiming auteurship as its brand. “Honestly, it was all we had,” said one person instrumental in building the strategy. “Our tagline was ‘Created by the Executive Producer of
The Sopranos
.’”

It was a measure of just how far television had come from the days of the anonymous, presumably replaceable, showrunner. And Weiner was the perfect person for the job. He could be a dazzling speaker—eloquent, confident, persuasive, a natural storyteller with a world of anecdotes and references at his fingertips. At an early press event—the presentation of clips to specially selected “tastemakers” at Michael’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan—he wowed the room, outshining such other speakers as Arianna Huffington and Jerry Della Femina.

Though he treated upcoming plot developments with the overwrought secrecy of nuclear codes, once they had aired, Weiner was willing to expound at astonishing length upon themes, references, callbacks to previous episodes, inside jokes, important costume decisions, and other aspects of his grand design. “Wasn’t that amazing?” he would say. Or, “That was hilarious.” And it would take an interviewer—used to the usual rules of human discourse—a moment to remember that Weiner was speaking unabashedly about his own work.

Indeed, for somebody who had not grown up, say, in the wilds of Africa, and who was not obviously autistic, Weiner could be shockingly oblivious or indifferent to how the things he said and did appeared to others. Either that or he genuinely could not control his most self-aggrandizing and competitive impulses. In one characteristic, oft-repeated piece of industry gossip, he was introduced to the showrunner of a hugely successful and popular network hit. On the way out, Weiner stopped to say, “See you at the Emmys.” “Actually, we’re not nominated,” the man said. “That’s right,” Weiner said, turning on his heel. “You’re
not
.”

At the same time, he could inspire fierce loyalty among colleagues. The negative stories, Christina Wayne insisted, were the product of jealousy and grudge holding. “I’m sorry, people got fired from that writers’ room”—Weiner seemed determined to eclipse even Chase in writer turnover—“because they weren’t any good,” she said. “Him being ‘difficult’ . . . I think of it as his passion, and I respect it. I’ve been on the other side, when people took my work and tried to change it. So, whenever Matt got upset, or pissed off, or screamed, I felt like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Protect your work.’ That’s your
goal
, to work with somebody like that. When I work with somebody who doesn’t care, or phones it in, that’s what pisses me off. That’s when I feel like, ‘You’re a fucking douche bag.’ I’d work with somebody like Matt, who gives it all up, hands down any day.”

Weiner, of course, had been raised to not shy away from accomplishment. His biggest fear, at
The Sopranos,
had been that nobody would ever know how much he had written. (A first-time visitor to the set once made the mistake of chatting with the director about the episode being filmed; Weiner, who had written it, pulled him aside. “In TV,” he said after introducing himself, “the director means
nothing
.”)

Having his own show was vindication. Because of the writers’ strike that stretched between 2007 and 2008, neither cast nor crew could attend that season’s Golden Globe Awards, gathering instead on the top floor of the Chateau Marmont to watch on TV. When the show won for Best Television Series, the party erupted. Weiner climbed up on a chair to make a speech. “This is what you wait for,” he said in this, his moment of triumph, “so you can tell all those people who ever said anything bad to you to
go fuck themselves
!”

And he had zero qualms about making sure that the world knew exactly how much of the show belonged to him. A writer’s draft, he maintained, was almost always just a shadow of a blueprint for the eventual episode, the frame of a house with barely any walls, let alone wallpaper. “The problem for many writers,” he said, “is that once they’ve executed the outline, they feel like it’s finished. And you know that it’s nowhere near finished. And you know that that’s a stab at it. Actually, I don’t think they could even work if they knew how unfinished you know it is.”

Rewriting, even drastic rewriting, had always been part of the showrunner portfolio. According to custom, except in extreme cases, the first-draft’s writer’s name would remain alone atop a script, no matter how much work the showrunner had done. His or her involvement, it was understood, was implied by the job title. Chase, as time had gone by, had grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that this often meant his work was going unrecognized. As
The Sopranos
proceeded, he had added his name to the authorship of scripts with growing frequency. Weiner, though, brought the practice to an entirely new level. He adopted a rule that if more than 20 percent of a writer’s script remained, he or she would retain sole credit. If not, Weiner added his name. A measure of how difficult that benchmark was to reach: Of sixty-five episodes through season five, fifty were at least partially “written by” Weiner. It became enough of an industry inside joke that it was the subject of a sight gag on
30 Rock
.