THE AGE .

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009

12 News theage.com.au

the business and in his personal life —

Matthew Weiner, creator of hit married to Linda, an architect and
TV series Mad Men, speaks to sounding-board of his work, four

Warwick McFadyen about the He’s an children — then an existential question

substance and style of his show.
MATTHEW Weiner is sitting in a Sydney
hotel conference room. He’s Down Under
for the first time, and geography aside,
he’s sitting on top of the world.
Weiner is the creator of one of tele-
vision’s most applauded and rewarded
shows in recent years. Mad Men, set in a
1960s New York advertising firm, has
taken all before it since its debut two
years ago. There have been consecutive
Emmy awards for outstanding drama
series and best writing in a drama series,
art direction, cinematography, hair
styling and title design. There have been
Golden Globe awards, Writers Guild
awards, BAFTA awards and many more.
The show is a persuasive advertise-
ment for the successful marriage of
substance and style. Matt, as he intro-
duces himself, is proud of the triumphs,
and one suspects even if it had not won
anything, proud of its standards in act-
ing, writing and adherence to historical
detail. Weiner carries this pride in the
infectious enthusiasm with which he
talks about his baby.
‘‘As an artist, it’s thrilling to get to
make it,’’ he said this week on the eve of
his appearance as speaker at the Screen
Producers Association of Australia
annual conference. ‘‘I wanted to make a
great piece of entertainment, and so
whatever delusion goes along with that is
that everyone will enjoy it.
‘‘The success of the show has taken a
long time to sink in, and my fear of
disappointing the audience, of
disappointing myself, is the same as
when I started. I had no idea anybody
would be watching.’’
If success to Weiner is taking a while
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for art among
TV’s artifice
to sink in, then the time between the
thought and the deed must seem now an
eternity. Indeed, Weiner wrote the pilot
in 1999, mailed it to David Chase, creator
of The Sopranos, from which he landed a
job writing for the series. When The
Sopranos was in its final days, Weiner
began thinking again of Mad Men. He
pitched it to HBO, which produced The
Sopranos, but there was no interest.
AMC, a minnow in the television waters,
took the bait.
The genesis of the series, however,
goes back further. Weiner carried the
idea, in some form or other, around with
him for years. There was no ‘‘eureka
moment’’, but rather it was a
‘‘conglomeration of many threads’’.
He was born in 1965 and grew up in
a home where literature was revered. His
ABOVE: Weiner with John Hamm, who plays Don
Draper, and Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy
Olson in Mad Men.
LEFT: Matthew Weiner says the advertising
industry is ‘‘a fantastic model for how society
sees itself’’. PICTURE: BEN RUSHTON
parents were voracious readers, (a poster humour. The biggest influence was
of Ernest Hemingway hung in the Woody Allen. He also acted, though never
house). He was, he admits, a ‘‘terrible in the lead role, ‘‘which was disappoint-
student’’, but words seeped into him ing’’. He obtained a university degree in
from an early age. His ambition was to fine arts, and from there went into film
be a writer. A poet, actually. It was a school, where his love affair with script
‘‘romantic concept’’. His role models were writing and producing began. He was
Poe, Coleridge and Shakespeare. working on the sitcom Becker when the
But alongside the rhapsody and the Mad Men pilot emerged.
rhyme was another thread, that of If he had found a place for himself in
still remained, like a diamond that
needed to be chiselled out of the ore.
What does identity mean? It goes to the
heart of Mad Men, especially so for main
character Don Draper, played by John
Hamm. The advertising industry was the
perfect setting because it was ‘‘a fantastic
model for how society sees itself’’.
In Draper, Weiner has constructed a
man who sells not only product and
dreams, but himself. His journey along
the highway of social mobility is strewn
with car wrecks from his past. His inner
turmoil is masked in silence. Draper is a
constant companion to Weiner, as are all
his characters. ‘‘I have affection for all of
them. They live with me all the time and
I’m very hard on them.
‘‘I like to think that every single
character has a reason for doing
[something]. As long as there’s a reason
. . . you can’t be judgmental. But
audiences like to have a sense of
superiority over the characters, and that’s
fine, but a lot of them realise they’re
looking in the mirror.’’
The series has drawn praise for its
attention to detail, social conventions
and events of the time, such as Marilyn
Monroe’s death and the Cuban missile
crisis.
On paper, as Weiner admits, the bare
words of the script might read like soap
opera, but the art is in the nuanced
evolution of the characters. A scene
between Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson
in series 2 (to be shown on SBS next
year), was ‘‘a two-year pay-off’’. This was
counter to how most television worked.
In Mad Men, viewers’ instant
gratification is not the cocktail of the
hour. Weiner believes that his creation
allows people to ‘‘see how thoughtful we
[Americans] are about who we are’’. Now
that’s an advertisement with a twist.

Guilty plea over drug haul
By STEVE BUTCHER
A CANADIAN fond of gambling
who punted on making $30,000
by helping import drugs into
Victoria worth up to $330 mil-
lion has pleaded guilty to
charges that carry a maximum
life sentence.
Authorities found cocaine,
ice and ecstasy in a shipping
container at Swanston Dock in
June last year marked as hair
salon equipment, foot spas and
pediatric chairs. The drugs were
later found to have a total purity
of more than 100 kilograms.
Commonwealth prosecutor
Matthew Phillips said the drugs,
if sold wholesale or on the retail
market, were worth between
$23.1 million and $330.6 million.
Mr Phillips yesterday told the
County Court the massive
importation was one of the
largest seized in Victoria.
He said the drugs were ship-
ped from Toronto, Canada, in
May and were substituted on
detection by Customs officers
with inert substances.
Ken Quyen Van Tang, 43, was
arrested with two men at a fac-
tory in Braybrook on June 11
with boxes cut open and 15
‘‘blocks’’ in his car.
Tang, a Vancouver mechanic,
pleaded guilty to three charges
of importing a commercial
quantity of a border-controlled
drug. His barrister, John Dickin-
son, SC, said Tang accepted an
offer through gambling to act as
an ‘‘overseer’’ of unspecified
amounts and types of drugs on
their arrival in Melbourne.
Mr Dickinson said Tang, who
was offered $30,000 in return,
was also in Melbourne for legit-
imate business reasons before
visiting Vietnam, but now ‘‘can’t
believe his own stupidity’’.
Judge Roy Punshon expressed
‘‘some cynicism’’ with Tang’s
instructions to Mr Dickinson,
saying he was ‘‘struggling’’ to
accept the propositions put.
Mr Phillips told Judge Pun-
shon an appropriate sentence
was between a maximum of 19
and 24 years, with a minimum of
between 14 and 18 years. Tang
will be sentenced next week.
Church group wins in a
David v Goliath battle
A SMALL Western District rural
community took on the Catholic
Church in a David and Goliath
battle to save its historic church
building, and won.
Tonight, it’s holding a fund-
raising victory celebration.
St Brigid’s in Crossley, near
Port Fairy, was to be put to
tender, but the local diocese has
backed down and agreed to sell
it to the local community.
The Friends of St Brigid’s
fought for 31⁄2 years for the right
to buy the church and hall that
was built and paid for by their
forebears, and where many of
the present generation attended
school, held their wedding
receptions or learnt Irish dan-
cing.
Tonight’s affair is also a fund-
raiser because the friends must
still raise $18,000 to meet the
agreed price of $305,000 by the
two-week deadline for settle-
ment. The community is busy
holding sausage sizzles, inform-
ation nights, and concerts to
‘‘get it over the line’’ said secret-
ary of the friends’ group, Teresa
O’Brien.
The group has already
applied for funding and drawn
up a business plan for the build-
ings. The celebratory concert
begins at 7pm, 186 Port Fairy
Road, Crossley. ANDRA JACKSON
San Remo expansion out
By ROYCE MILLAR
A CONTROVERSIAL proposal to
redraw town boundaries that
would have tripled the size of
San Remo near Phillip Island
has been dropped by the local
Bass Coast Shire.
This week’s decision to opt
for a more modest boundary
extension comes after an inde-
pendent planning panel last
month warned the scheme
could result in a planning
‘‘blight’’ on the clifftops of
Anderson Peninsula.
In July The Age revealed
details of the campaign by
developers, the Labor-linked
Trinity Group and Melbourne-
based Brian Rule, to extend the
boundary more than a kilo-
metre eastwards along the pen-
insula to allow for new housing,
retail and tourism precincts on
land they controlled. At the
time, Mr Rule boasted he had
‘‘bulldozed’’ the council into
supporting the move.
The Age revealed how the
State Government had also
pressured the council to ‘‘exped-
ite’’ the rezoning, and detailed
financial links between the
developers and councillors.
In an embarrassing snub to
both Government and council,
the independent panel warned
dramatic expansion of the town’s
perimeters could result in a sur-
plus of residential land and poor,
ad hoc housing development.
Controversy about the pro-
ject sparked an investigation by
Local Government Victoria of
the council’s handling of the
matter. This investigation con-
tinues.
This week the council accep-
ted most of the recommenda-
tions of the panel, including a
limited boundary realignment to
cater for expected development
over the next 15 years.
Lobby firm Enhance repre-
sents Trinity in Victoria. Yester-
day the Victorian head of the
company, Tim Fawcett, would
only say that Trinity was consid-
ering its options for its interests
at San Remo. Mr Rule has not
returned calls by The Age since
the report in July.

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