How to Satirize the 60's Ad World
Here's the best entertainment piece you'll read all weekend: Alex Witchel's New York Times Magazine profile of Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, a brilliant drama on AMC entering its second season that does to the 60's advertising industry what Boeing Boeing tried to do to the 60's airline industry. Lots of sex, booze, smoking, shellacked hair, and modular furniture, but also some of the smartest scriptwriting on television. Whether or not Weiner stays true to the nature of jingle-and-tagline executives as they formerly existed (the secretaries' breasts are right out of the John Currin catalog) is almost besides the point once you hear him describe a plot motive:
"I wanted to do a story about a woman getting fat because she couldn't deal with being sexualized all the time, and that more important, she was never going to be taken seriously professionally until that happened. She becomes a guy, and they give her a big punch in her shoulder. She makes it."
Well, that's one way to turn a period glutted on stereotypes on its head. Another is to dismiss Nordic ingenues at casting calls because you want a gal Friday who looks Jewish. Though some graying manes of the 60's ad-world aren't so very keen on Mad Men. George Lois, the art director who co-founded Papert Koenig Lois in 1960, thinks the show misrepresents the workaday tedium he remembers. Were there three Martini lunches?
"Of course not, are you serious?" he retorts. "We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night. We had three women copywriters. We didn't bed secretaries. I introduced Xerox. It was hard, hard work and no nonsense. ‘Mad Men' is typical of ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,' those phony S.O.B.'s. I was a Greek bigmouth, a Korean War veteran. I used my ethnicity to promote my talent. Before you knew it, most of the great creative talent was Italian, Greek and Jewish. We broke through the terrible WASP-ness of the business."
Maybe. But one of the other ethnic talents, Jerry Della Femina, says Weiner pretty much gets it right:
"People had bottles in their drawers...For lunch, we used to go to the Italian Pavilion, which is now where Michael's is...The bar was still in the same place, and the bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. They would literally serve us the first martini as we were sitting down, the second, the third, then we would figure out what to eat. It was such a wild time, and the best period for advertising, so much looser. We had Blue Nun, which was a terrible wine to sell to people. If there were a Nuremberg trial for selling bad wine, we should have been hanged."
That last line even sounds like dialogue.
