Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Rejecting Mad Men

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

In case you missed it, the team behind Under the Influence has more podcasts. Five, to be exact. Executive produced by Terry O', meet the Apostrophe Podcast Company.Apostrophe brings you Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe, Surviving Life with Survivorman Les Stroud and We Regret To Inform You: The Rejection Podcast – where we tell stories of how the world’s most celebrated people overcame debilitating career rejection to achieve mammoth success.We Regret To Inform You has 2 million downloads across 70 episodes – and there's one in particular we think you might enjoy. Brylcreem those strands, suit up and take a stroll down Madison Avenue. This week, we tell the rejection story of AMC's Mad Men:According to Rolling Stone, Mad Men is the fourth-greatest television show of all time – bested only by Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos. But before Sterling Cooper ever opened its doors, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was rejected by every major network – including HBO, FX and Showtime. Weiner was told no one would watch a series about advertising, that his main character was an unlikable smoker slash philanderer and that viewers hated period pieces. Mad Men gathered rejections, then dust. Until Weiner got a phone call from a basic cable movie channel.Listen to Part 2 here.Follow Apostrophe:InstagramTwitterYouTube Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. Hi, everybody. This week, we're sending you a bonus episode. It's from our sister podcast called We Regret to Inform You, The Rejection Podcast. In every episode, we tell the stories of people who faced debilitating career rejection, then somehow they overcame all the obstacles

to achieve amazing success. You've heard me talk about the Mad Men television series many times on Under the Influence. I love that show. And it's one of the very few shows that depicted the advertising industry accurately, albeit in a 1960s storyline. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Mad Men is the fourth greatest

television show of all time. But before fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper ever opened its doors, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was rejected by every major network, including HBO, FX, and Showtime. Weiner was told no one would watch a series about advertising, that his main character was an unlikable smoker-slash-philanderer, and that viewers hated period pieces. So, Mad Men gathered rejections, then dust, until Weiner's agent got a phone call from a basic cable movie channel, and the rest is history. It's a great story.

Give this episode a listen. And if you like what you hear, search for We Regret to Inform You on this podcast app for part two. Enjoy. This is an apostrophe podcast production. to meet the requirements, the rejection podcast. It's filled with smoking, which you're not allowed to do on TV anymore. The main hero is a philanderer. It's a period piece, which people hate. And I'm a nobody. Matthew Weiner.

32 years ago, the University of Southern California Film School's Class of 1990 crossed the commencement stage, and the latest crop of green filmmakers, master's degree in hand, spilled onto the streets of Hollywood. 25-year-old named Matthew Weiner. When Weiner looked around the room, he realized he stood out from his fellow graduates. He had fewer miles on his odometer, and he felt behind. Unlike his classmates, he hadn't been shooting home movies on an 8mm camera since age 7. No, he had spent his college years thinking he'd become a poet and chose postgraduate film school in a moment of quarter-life panic. For his final assignment, Weiner and his classmates had presented theses in the form of 20-minute films. Weiner figured it was a tall order to arc a narrative film in just 20 minutes, so he opted for a different genre entirely, documentary.

Having grown up in Los Angeles, he'd become quite accustomed to watching paparazzi congregate around the city's hotspots, so he decided to turn the cameras on them for a change and take a closer look at the cost of fame. But he kept it light and even funny. He presented his documentary to the class, and the head of the program said it wasn't his best work. But undeterred, Weiner entered his thesis into USC's mini film festival. One thing worth noting about USC's film festival is that it's very well attended. Industry folk often buy tickets as a means of scouting fresh talent.

And interestingly, of all the movies, including the narrative films, Weiner noticed his documentary was getting the most attention. He says it helped that a doc about paparazzi featured a handful of movie stars in the background. So to Weiner's utter surprise, following the screening, he was approached by producers, agents, and studio executives. It seemed everyone wanted his phone number, wanted to take him to lunch, wanted a copy of his documentary. Suddenly, Weiner realized laid out in front of him was a new life plan. He would pivot from poetry to script writing, spend his days writing movies and documentaries, drumming up interest and selling those scripts, leveraging the amazing connections he'd already made. But within three months, Weiner says all that excitement and buzz around his work fizzled out, the phone stopped ringing, and all his prospects that had become the envy of his fellow graduates disappeared. Not long after graduation, Weiner and his girlfriend Linda got married. It was an

exciting time in his life, except he was a newlywed with no means to support his new family. To pay their rent, the couple relied solely on Linda's architect salary, which wasn't much. When they couldn't make ends meet, they borrowed money from her mother. But in spite of their struggles, and with the support of his new wife, Weiner made the bold decision to stay home and write. He wrote script after script, sending them to studios, but he couldn't sell a single one. It didn't take long for Weiner to become depressed. As he sat and typed and consumed all the TV and movies he could, he said he started gaining more and more weight,

and becoming more and more bitter. He began thinking, maybe he'd never sell his work. At this point, Weiner said social situations became traumatic. Cocktail parties were spent dodging the inevitable question, so what do you do? With each vague, sidestepped answer, they'd ask a follow-up until it became clear to everyone in the room he had no discernible career to speak of. On his coffee table sat a stack of scripts that went either unsold or unfinished, one of which was about a soldier who steals the identity of an officer who died in the Korean War. A few years passed since Weiner graduated USC, and his wife Linda gave him a nudge. If he wasn't getting any bites from Hollywood, she encouraged him to write an independent film. So he did.

In one month, Weiner completed the script for an indie movie, a comedy. He submitted it to independent film companies, but was rejected. So he decided to take matters into his own hands. On top of writing it, Weiner would star in it, produce it, and direct it himself. The cast would include his wife and his friends. He dusted off his student ID to buy discount film, and he used his parents' computer to print invitations to a screening. He really put the micro in micro-budget.

Weiner's movie would tell the story of a struggling screenwriter waiting by the phone and leaning on his vices to stay upright. He called it, What do you do all day? No doubt one of the dreaded cocktail questions. But according to Vanity Fair, what do you do all day would go largely unseen, save for one review in Variety that called it, a slight, basically unimaginative comedy that tediously rehashes ideas from other indies about wannabe filmmakers. Regardless of the outcome, Weiner says making his independent film bought him another 10 years in the business, not because it offered him opportunities or earned him a career, but because it affirmed his passion and reignited his spark.

Weiner got himself a series of odd industry jobs. Then one day, his phone rang. It was a college friend and director, Daisy Mayer, who had recently made a film called Party Girl. Now, she was pitching said film as a television series and wanted an extra eye on her pilot script, someone with the comedy chops to inject it with a little life. So Weiner pitched her a few jokes. They hung up, and that was that. Then a short while later, the phone rang again. It was Mayer, again.

She told Weiner the studio threw out everything in the script except his jokes. So she asked him to come on board with the writing team in hopes his quick wit would help get the pilot picked up. So, for the very first time, Weiner drove to a major studio lot, and he took a seat at the table. In the party girl writer's room, Weiner learned how it felt to come up with the perfect joke, and how to foster a safe environment to toss out bad ones. It was fast-paced and fun, and most importantly, Weiner says he was good at it. The Party Girl pilot was picked up and aired on September 9, 1996. But by October of that year, the network pulled the plug. It was canceled after just four episodes.

Suddenly, Weiner was jobless yet again. But there was one marked difference this time. Working on a TV show for only three months, despite starting on the very bottom rung of the television ladder, actually paid. Turns out, there was money in TV, enough to cover the bills while he searched for his next gig. But little did he know, while he furiously scribbled spec scripts, word had traveled around town there was a guy who had been hired to write on a sitcom with zero previous television experience who was really good at punch-up, meaning he could sharpen a script with energy, one-liners, and cultural references. That guy was Matthew Weiner,

and suddenly, he started getting calls. He got a seat in a couple sitcom writers' rooms, including The Naked Truth, starring Taya Leone and Holland Taylor, and another called Living in Captivity. But both series were cancelled, one after the other. Weiner started making himself available to write for pilots, for free. He figured it was good experience.

If one got picked up, he'd be in on the ground floor. And, if nothing else, the people in the room, who very well may go on to write for successful series, could see that he would make a decent person to spend time with on a sitcom schedule, aka 12-plus hours a day. And that's when he landed a gig on a new sitcom called Becker. Becker was a 1998 CBS comedy starring Ted Danson as Dr. John Becker, a talented but perpetually irritated Bronx GP who loves his patients and not much else. The series aired on primetime, right after Everybody Loves Raymond, and it became a top 20 show, running six seasons. For Weiner, Becker was an illuminating experience. He later said in an interview with the Television Academy that it was there he learned the right actor can pull off an unlikable character. He learned he brought more to the table than just punch-up.

He learned to mourn the great lines that ended up in the garbage. He learned what it felt like to work full-time in television and make a good living. But the biggest lesson he learned was that he was miserable. Weiner had landed in television by accident, then in sitcom by chance. He should have been on top of the world, writer on a hit series. But he wasn't. He had the crushing realization that if this was his future, it would be a long life. He loved writing. He loved the energy of a writer's room. He relished the challenge of shaping a complex story. But he needed to write something he was interested in, something that didn't largely end up on the cutting room floor,

something that met the standards he'd set for himself. So one night, after work, Weiner got a strange idea. What if he wrote a period piece set in the 50s or 60s? Weiner was born in the 60s, but he'd need to do some major research. So he hired a freelance researcher to do a little digging on mid-century America. And the first batch he got back was about the crisis in cigarette advertising in 1960.

Weiner started cultivating a secret life at night. After long hours working on Becker, he'd come home and pour over anything and everything 60s. The clothes, the office buildings, the cars, the hairstyles, the decor, the alcohol, the politics, the music, the technology, the cigarettes, the ads. Did I mention the alcohol? And what Weiner realized was that what he really wanted to write, more than anything, was a series about someone like him. Someone 35 years old, who had everything, and yet was miserable. So he started crafting a character. A New Yorker. An ad man.

A frustrated artist who had sold out in some way, knee-deep in an identity crisis. He learned through his research that Madison Avenue was home to many of Manhattan's major advertising agencies back in the day. Ad Men plus Madison Avenue equaled Mad Men. And Weiner had himself a title. Weiner molded his idea for months. Then between the third and fourth seasons of Becker, he decided to take his secret project to the next level and plot out a pilot. It would go something like this. We peer into a day in the life of New York City businessman Don Draper, the creative director of an advertising agency who is facing a quandary. It's 1960, just after Reader's Digest released an article called Cancer by the Carton, and just before,

the Surgeon General is set to release a definitive report linking smoking cigarettes with lung cancer. And yet, Draper has a meeting with Lucky Strike Tobacco in nine hours to present them with a strategic response to the controversy. Draper meets up with his girlfriend to talk it over. They share a contemplative cigarette. The meeting inevitably arrives, and Draper has no campaign idea ready to present the Lucky Strike client. Panicked by the silence in the room, a junior executive throws out a bad idea and nearly blows the account. Then, at the last minute, Draper throws out an off-the-cuff idea in the form of a single line,

a slogan that saves the presentation and wins over the tobacco executives. Lucky Strike leaves the building satisfied. He's quick, he's handsome, he's calm under pressure. Draper is applauded by his colleagues. They celebrate with a drink. Draper then takes his cufflinked charisma out to a late-night meeting with a prospective client, a woman, the owner of a major department store. Over a semi-flirtatious cocktail in a dark restaurant, he wins her over too, and the pair set up a

business meeting for Monday morning. Draper is then seen pulling his Oldsmobile into the driveway of a picket-fenced home in the suburbs. He unlocks the door and walks up the staircase, past the rooms of two sleeping children, to a bedroom where a woman is half asleep, waiting. His wife, Dawn Draper, is married, and the credits roll. Weiner says when he finally sat down to write the pilot script, it just poured out of him. After having mulled his idea over for nearly two years, he suddenly had on his desk a completed script in just ten days. Then on January 10, 1999,

a new television show aired on HBO called The Sopranos. Weiner watched the first episode and thought, meh, it was okay, mostly black humor. So he didn't tune in the following week. But his wife, Linda, did. And by February, she told her husband he simply had to see the fifth episode. If you're a Sopranos fan, it's the one where Tony takes Meadow to visit prospective colleges.

So Weiner sat down on the couch, flicked it on, and watched. He watched as Tony Soprano, the lead character, strangled a man while his daughter attended a college interview down the road. And yet, he was still rooting for him. The Sopranos subverted everything Weiner learned about television, widening his aperture irreversibly. And it hit him. If Tony Soprano can kill people, Don Draper can sell cigarettes. Hold that thought. We'll be right back. Weiner said if no one ever got his pitch, if no one ever bought his script, if no one put Mad Men on television, at least he had something that proved to himself that he could write. He'd created his dream job. The only question was whether the powers that be would let him do it. He'd worked his way up to supervising producer on Becker.

But one day, Weiner decided he couldn't do it anymore, and he left the series. He says if he stayed, it would have killed him. So with his wife's support, Weiner walked away from steady income on a successful sitcom. Now, he was unemployed. He said worst case, he'd get a job at a local video store. Best case, he'd get bad men under the right nose. So Weiner signed with a talent agent. He gave his pilot over to the agency, and as Weiner tells the story, they had zero interest in it. They didn't even read it for three or four months. What Weiner really wanted was to get his script to someone at HBO, because The Sopranos was the top. They were the Yankees. They put sophisticated storytelling and complex characters

on television. HBO was Weiner's dream home for Mad Men. Plus, David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, was also represented by the same firm that represented Weiner. So he asked his agent to slip the script to David Chase. But they said no. Access to Chase was reserved for people who came from film or one-hour dramas, not for sitcom writers. So Weiner pushed back. At this point, he had no choice but to put his foot down. He was a successful writer, so he gave his agent an ultimatum. If they didn't get Mad Men in front of at least David Chase's agent, Weiner would leave the talent agency altogether. And it worked.

Weiner's agent got the script to Chase's agent, who then got the script to Chase. And one day over his lunch hour, David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, called Matthew Weiner. Chase wanted to chat through Weiner's pilot. Weiner couldn't believe it. The pair talked for 45 minutes.

Weiner told Chase how much he respected The Sopranos and how important it was for him to see a show that was that revolutionary and that good be that financially successful. Chase told Weiner he loved his Mad Men script. In fact, he said this is the show HBO should make after The Sopranos, and he told Weiner he'd help him get it there. Then Chase told Weiner they were looking to add a few chairs to the Sopranos' writers' room, so he offered him a job. Weiner was shocked. This giant, this titan of his industry offered him a job to write for the greatest series in television history. It wasn't exactly what he was expecting. He went into the meeting hoping to get his Mad Men script in front of HBO,

but he left having done the impossible. He jumped from a sitcom writer to a dramatic writer by way of a spec script. It wasn't the goal, but it was the gig of a lifetime. So Weiner gladly accepted. He moved his life to New York City, and he tucked Mad Men in his nightstand drawer, where it would stay for three years. Weiner officially joined The Sopranos in its fifth season. He was terrified.

The Sopranos writers' room reeked of intimidation and competition. As Weiner tells the story, most writers on the series didn't stay long. And because of that, a lot of the staff was hesitant to get to know him. What was the point if he'd be gone tomorrow? He rewatched every episode of the series until it was time to submit his own. He waited anxiously for feedback. Then, come the end of the week, he was summoned to Chase's office. On what felt like a mile-long hallway to the boss's door, Weiner passed another writer walking in the other direction. They were carrying a box containing what used to be their office.

To Weiner's surprise, Chase was enthusiastic about his script, something he'd later learn was not a given. Chase wouldn't be enthusiastic about every one of Weiner's scripts, but enough that he kept him on board for the entirety of the fifth season, then the sixth, until Weiner worked his way up to executive producer. Weiner says he learned invaluable lessons watching Chase run a team. How to break down episodes and skeleton story arcs, how to trust the intelligence of the audience, how to decide where to and not to push viewers, how to subvert genre, humanize even the most awful characters, and how to tell subtle stories. Soon The Sopranos reached its final season, and now Weiner had the chops, the reputation, the leverage, and the confidence to dust off his Mad Men script.

At this point, his HBO connections were vast. It was a natural fit, so Weiner reached out to the network to set up a pitch. But no one at HBO would pencil him in. He could not get a meeting at the very company he worked for. When Weiner's first choice, HBO, wouldn't even reject him, he set up a meeting at FX. Weiner met with the FX execs. They suggested he change his format from a one-hour show down to a half-hour. Then, they rejected him.

So next, Weiner went to Showtime, a network that was about to premiere its breakout original drama, Dexter. Talk about an anti-hero. But Weiner was rejected. Weiner says the consensus was they didn't like the fact the premise hinged on the characters smoking, that it was about the niche world of advertising, that the characters were all so unlikable, that it was period, which Weiner was told people hated, and that the plot was, quote, too abstract.

One executive told him his script was great, nice writing. They could see why David Chase would hire him. Then they proceeded to ask Weiner, So what do you actually want to do? But this was it. This was 52 pages worth of what he actually wanted to do. But they told him the premise of Mad Men wouldn't interest anyone. Even as the script was repeatedly rejected,

Weiner kept jotting down ideas for future episodes. He collected MP3s of great songs he thought could punctuate a scene. He even bought a 1960s watch he thought Don Draper would wear, hoping one day to clasp it around the wrist of an actor bringing his character to life. Weiner says he knew the script by heart. He carried it in his bag every single day for years. He says if you sat next to him on a plane at that time, he would have shown you the script from Mad Men and asked you to read it, or talked you through the idea at length. In his lowest moments, Weiner's wife Linda reminded him of how good his script truly was. She told him he just hadn't found the right home for it yet,

and encouraged her defeated husband to persist despite the door slams. How could his script be so problematic if it's what got him a job on The Sopranos? So David Chase decided to help Weiner win over HBO. True to his word, he approached the network and gave Mad Men and Weiner his stamps of approval, handing top network executives the Mad Men script himself. So they finally gave it a read. HBO was interested, but under one condition. Only if David Chase came on board as executive producer. They had a history with Chase. He created the series that earned them the status as one of the most respected television networks

and, at that point, 16 Emmys. Chase says he was very tempted. But after nearly six full seasons of The Sopranos, not to mention going all the way back to The Rockford Files decades before that, he was done with weekly television. Their rejections compounded one another. Weiner felt embarrassed, delusional. He considered financing it himself, but he couldn't afford it.

Then he got a call from his agent. An executive at AMC contacted Weiner's talent agency, asking if they knew of anything interesting lying around for AMC to take a look at. Here's why. AMC stands for the American Movie Classics. And as you may remember from our Breaking Bad episode, at that time, AMC was exactly that, movies. A 24-hour basic cable movie channel. AMC's president said their slogan back then was essentially, stop by when you want and we'll have a movie for you. But when Showtime and HBO in particular ushered in a brand new era of prestige original content, AMC fell behind. And suddenly, when it came time to renegotiate its deals with cable providers, the company found itself without a bargaining chip.

AMC needed a rebrand. They needed original programming. So Weiner's agent's assistant passed along his Mad Men script. When AMC discovered the pilot script for Mad Men, it had gone from gathering dust in a drawer to gathering rejections from corner offices over the course of five years.

Again, they echoed the same major concerns of HBO as Showtime and FX. It was a period series, which were notoriously disliked and expensive. The lead character was a philanderer, a liar, a smoker, an absentee father, the epitome of toxic masculinity. And it centered on advertising, of all things. AMC executive Rob Scorcher said everything about the script told him to never greenlight the series. Meanwhile, Weiner's writer friends told him AMC would be the worst home for Mad Men. It wasn't even a network. It had no experience with original programming, no real experience with TV. They said no one would see it. He'd be squandering in opportunity.

Weiner's talent agents told him he couldn't come off The Sopranos, then go to a low-status movie channel with no money. He'd be their guinea pig. But Weiner took the meeting. In our next episode, Mad Men finds a home that can't find financing. A struggling unknown actor named Jon Hamm auditions for the lead and goes to the bottom of the list. Christina Hendricks' agent drops her for accepting the pilot. And Matthew Weiner writes a whole new story.

Join us next time for Rejecting Mad Men, Part 2. The Rejection Podcast is an Apostrophe Podcast production and is recorded in our Airstream mobile recording studio. This series is hosted and written by me, Sydney O'Reilly, Research, Allison Pinches, Director, Callie O'Reilly,

Engineer, Jeff Devine, Producer, Debbie O'Reilly, Theme music by Ian Lefevre and Ari Posner. The major sources for this episode are the Television Academy Archive of American Television Interviews

with Matthew Weiner. Other significant sources are listed in the show notes on our website, apostrophepodcasts.ca slash rejection. We regret to inform you we're on social at apostrophe pod. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like Rejecting Breaking Bad from season two. Read and review this podcast wherever you like to listen. And while you're there, let us know of any this podcast wherever you like to listen. And while you're there, let us know of any rejection stories you'd like to hear. This series is executive produced by career admin Terry O'Reilly.

See you next time.