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Matthew Weiner has written a lot of iconic television scenes. But one particular case came to mind last year, when the media told stories of women opposed to the powerful men they worked for. It's from season four of Mad MenWhen the young superstar in training Peggy Olson confronts Don Draper in his office, sorry to have accepted a prize for an idea she thought was hers.
"It's your job: I give you money, you give me ideas!" He says.
"And you never say thank you!" Answers Peggy, hurt.
"That's what the money is for! "He shouts.
"I'm these two people," said Weiner, sitting in his production office, nestled in an Art Deco monument in Hollywood. Dressed in a pale blue seersucker shirt and a khaki, the 53-year-old rider is putting the finishing touches to his new series of anthologies for Amazon, The Romanoffs, the first of which this month. Composed of about 50 million dollars, it includes a host of high-level actors (Isabelle Huppert, Diane Lane, Griffin Dunne, Aaron Eckhart, etc.). Mad MenChristina Hendricks and John Slattery) and was filmed in eight countries. This is the kind of TV show that only the highest level of organizers can do, and this should be the turn of the Weiner career win, after the huge cultural success of Mad Men.
Weiner is eager to tell me about the inspiration and the process behind his new show. But in arranging this interview, I made it clear that I should ask a question about a misconduct charge that occurred last November at Kater Gordon's. A former Weiner assistant and later a personal editor on Mad Men, who won an Emmy in 2009 for co-writing the episode "Meditations in an Emergency" of the second season with Weiner, Gordon alleges that while they were working late one night on this series, Weiner said that she owed him to let him see her naked.
While Weiner is sitting in front of me, I realize that he is visibly nervous. His conversation is a tangle of fragments of sentences and digressions. Until last November, Weiner seemed to have an enviable career. Obsessed with cognitive pop culture obsessively for his chic portrayal of 1960s fraud and decay, Mad Men had already reached the top of the television canon at the end of his first season on AMC. This is the first show he has created, after two seasons as a writer The Sopranos. Yet, as an inexperienced show runner, he often fought with Mad MenHis studio and network "try to convince them that the show was a success, whether financially or with an audience". Although the world seemed to him like he was a master of the prestigious television universe, he said he was trying to hide his panic from his writing staff.
It was not just the glamor of Mad Men people responded, however. It was the war of the sexes. The fights of power in the workplace were iron threads crackling through his fictitious book Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, where men rate aloud the bodies of women in the corridors and secretaries cry in the bathrooms. Peggy gets up in the agency only because Don realizes that she can help him exploit the desires of women. Mad Men often used as a landscape of Brüchegeoise history characterized by a dashing masculine dominance and a cunning compromise for women, a stylized dissection of patriarchal malaise.
At one point, while talking to Weiner, I come back to my first meeting in the workplace: a working meeting in a music publication. I was only 19 years old, freelance rock critic overflowing with chutzpah and ideas. Leaving the office, an exciting assignment in hand, I heard the comment from the editor of his colleague, "Nice tits!". I think how much this comment undermined my confidence and my behavior for years. if I have been hired for my job or my body; how that made me want to integrate like one of the guys. I have never forgotten this comment, but I'm sure the publisher has no memory of it, probably one of the many degrading remarks. Casual flippancy is only one of the advantages of male privilege.
This is the kind of underground and distorted exchange that the creator of Mad Men could appreciate. "The show was about my interest, to the exclusion of the plot sometimes, of what you feel when you're helpless," Weiner says now, sitting at a large white table in the void Romanoffs writers' room. "It was partly what I said," Look at how much has changed. . Part of me said, "In fact, the situation has gotten worse since then. That's why it's such a big problem. That's why it's so strange to be accused of being on the other side.
The other side he's talking about is Gordon's accusation. In the story she gave to a News magazine reporter last November, Gordon says that after Weiner told her that she owed him to let her see her naked, she had tried to Ignore the comment because it looked like a "loser-loser". "She continued working on the series for another season, after which she was not invited back (along with other writers, according to Weiner). She has since left the television industry.
Weiner says that he has not spoken to Gordon since his first allegation. "I do not really remember saying that," he says. "I do not mean that it's not impossible that I said, but I do not remember saying it. In realizing this, I realize that I expected that Weiner, an accomplished storyteller, would present me with a more coherent narrative. I call him several days later and ask him to clarify this sentence. If it's not impossible what he said, under what circumstances could he say that? Weiner questions the words I quoted him. "I know it sounds strange, but I can not imagine that I used the word" cover, "he insists. I double-check; He did.
"I can not see a scenario in which I would say that," he continues, echoing Gordon's allegation. "What I can see is that it was 10 years ago and I do not remember saying it. When someone says you said something, like the experience we just had, I do not remember saying that.
He continues more definitively: "I have never felt that and I have never acted that way towards Kater."
In a recent e-mail, Gordon told me, "It was not an isolated incident, but the most serious." She created Modern Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to the fight against sexual harassment. "Bullies in uncontrolled power create environments of fear," wrote Gordon.
Shortly after Gordon spoke, Marti Noxon – a consulting producer from Mad Men who kept running Sharp objects and Unreal"I knew that Weiner was devilishly clever and witty, but he is also, in the words of one of his colleagues, an" emotional terrorist "who will harass, seduce and try to satisfy his needs." Noxon said, "The kind of atmosphere where a comment like" You owe me to show you your naked body "may or may not be a joke. And this may or may not lead to a demotion or even the end of a career. "
Noxon finished with an unequivocal kick: "I believe Kater Gordon."
Weiner says he was surprised by Noxon's tweetstorm. He recalls that it was helpful to him to recommend the most inexperienced members of his editorial team rather than rewrite and frustrate. "You can not continue to act like" Nobody helps me, "he recalls. "And that's where it comes from, because you feel like you're alone in there." Weiner maintained a writing room that sometimes had a majority of women; He has regularly revived the career of novice writers, and then, as Noxon pointed out, he has fought to manage them. "I would say to people: you can write or you could not have come here, but I do not think you can write the showThe women who won awards for co-scripted screenplays with Weiner were described in the press as real-life Peggys, a dynamic charged with tension.
Noxon's tweets forced Weiner to rethink his behavior as a boss, he says. "What you do not realize … I think that goes with all that," he says. "It's all with sexist language, it's okay with jokes, it's okay with everything I think I've considered in my own behavior – it's just that you do not know that you have power. "
Several expressions flicker on his face, which reminds me of something Mad Men so well conveyed: people are strange and contradictory. Someone may be able, on the one hand, to produce nuanced accounts of power structures in an imaginary workplace and, on the other hand, to perpetuate some of these imbalances in an environment real.
The long history of love of our culture with the myth of male genius has only fed this trend, thus reinforcing the idea that being a "tough man" or an impetuous leader makes part of the creative process. Not only that, but many of our most revered movies and TV shows revolve around the anguish and fury of the restless dudes. There is no equivalent myth of feminine genius. For Hollywood women, the label "difficult" has long been a time bomb thrown do not hire them. As Design women Recently, creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason said that even the success of large audiences did not isolate her from the whims of a misogynist network president who disdained her funny feminism.
Weiner spent years as an unemployed writer before putting a foot in the televised scale with the short sitcom of 1995 Party Girl so what Live in captivity, a comedy of Murphy Brown the creator Diane English which has never been broadcast (but on which he met several writers who Mad Men). Even when he had his dream concert The SopranosWeiner says that David Chase "told me no more than 300 times a day. And as far as I know, he has never taken one of my ideas. Weiner says he's inviting frustrated Mad Men writers to think of their favorite Sopranos episode that is attributed to him: "Tell me what you liked, and I will show you that it was David.
He points to Mad Men The character of Pete Campbell, who spends the series criticizing the easy charm and brilliance of the global Don Drapers. "What does it do to press against a door all your life and open it? Are you just going to cross? Do you think you will be different? Weiner asks. "I had anger issues, and they did me where I was."
Weiner says last year's events pushed him to re-examine things and contact former colleagues to see if their memories were in keeping with his, and apologize if necessary. When I talk to him on the phone a few days later, it is the week before Yom Kippur, the day of Jewish Atonement, and I ask him to talk more about his approach to make amends. "Some talked about what it was like to work there and what I was as a boss, unrelated to the allegation," he says. "These things seemed like separate experiences for me last fall. I was a really tough boss.
The world of TV writer's hall is a place of permeable boundaries, where sharing intimate secrets with the boss can be part of the concert. "If you're going to have people in a room who become so vulnerable and dig into their emotional shit," an old Mad Men The writer, who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, told me: "As a manager, you have to be very careful about the situation you have created and not take advantage of the fact that you can to make sure that people do not feel good. " Sopranos director Tim Van Patten once said Vanity Fair of Chase, "If David finds your Achilles heel, he will do it, in time of war or play" – an echo to the description made by another former Mad Men author of Weiner,
"I wish I had been more sensitive and less defensive, and more able to put myself in the shoes of the people who sometimes worked with me," Weiner admits. "If I have wronged someone, yes, I would like to excuse myself." In a general sense I am that kind of person. It makes me sad to cause the misfortune of others or even perceive it that way.
The rapid evolution of public opinion has created an evolving context for the consideration of behavior in the workplace. Powerful men, whether accused of sexual harassment or bully of garden varieties, will not necessarily get a public pass, regardless of the quality of their work. Weiner clearly hopes that The Romanoffs can escape the controversy, that people can focus on the show rather than on him for the thousands of people who collaborated in the series, which had just finished filming when Gordon spoke.
Weiner makes me visit a room filled with monitors where Romanoffs The publisher Chris Gay is working on sound mixes for "The End of the Line". A powerful episode located in a desolate port city of Russia, building on real-life experiences of the episode's authors, the long-time colleagues of Weiner, Maria and Jay R. Ferguson (Mad MenStan Rizzo).
Maria Jacquemetton says that Weiner has always been fascinated by this idea of tragedy in the past and by how the past affects the future. The Romanoffs To her and her husband, André, she said, he spoke of a collection of tales that "all carried this thread of people in contemporary society who believe they are connected with the Romanovs". The series is full of morally compromised characters – a racist aristocrat who develops a deep bond with his immigrant guardian, a married couple caught up in an ethical quagmire. And with episodes shot in different countries, executive producer Blake McCormick said, "These places somehow dictate that it would be different. You could have the same director of photography, but the rest of the team, they bring something different, no matter. "
Weiner says it was not easy to sell, even from the creator of one of the most acclaimed series of the 21st century. Black mirror was a useful comparison, at least with respect to the fact that it would encompass several genera. The former president of Amazon Studios, Roy Price, gave the green light to the series, but by the time it was over, Price had resigned as a result of allegations of sexual harassment. Her successor, Jennifer Salke, had launched an initiative to train more women directors while she was president of NBC Entertainment and insisted on inclusivity as part of her mission at Amazon. Weiner attributes to Salke the support of his vision, allowing him to break with the Amazonian tradition by broadcasting episodes each week rather than in a bingable blob.
Although shoot on The Romanoffs was almost finished by the time Salke took over from Amazon, she said over the phone, she and Weiner "spoke thematically how to link the episodes. And we certainly talked about it when marketing the series, sort of behind this idea of. . . this group of disparate people comes from the same lineage and the same manifestation, which we found very convincing. When asked if she was considering dropping the series because of her harassment, she said: I'm a big fan of Mad Menand this is not a situation I knew a lot about.
Salke says that Weiner already asks, "When can we start the next installment?" She can imagine extending the series to infinity. "There are descendants of Romanov everywhere," she says.
Although the series is an anthology, there will be subtle lines, "like a physical behavior," repeated in different episodes, because Weiner says that he usually writes certain gestures. I push it for an example. "They're looking for an answer at the greatest moment," Weiner said, looking up.
Weiner shows me two objects that were important to him during the Romanoffs shoot: a framed list of rules that he has established for the new series and a small weathered brass bell that one of his writers gave him. The rules include solving stories (each episode is self-contained), banishing coincidence, and avoiding pretense. Having just mentioned Honoré de Balzac, Virginia Woolf and filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, he laughs and says he has already broken his rule of pretense.
The bell is part of Weiner's recent desire to feel more centered; he started doing transcendental meditation. He shakes him and pauses while he sends a slight trill into the room. "We'll call him before we do a script and I'll have him read at the table," he says. "What I wanted to do was make everyone in a really intuitive space. To be grateful for the fact that we were getting there. "
The only person baffled by the bell was Ferguson, Weiner said. "Jay was like," Who are you and what happened to the guy from Mad Men? ""
Over the last year, we have started re-evaluating artists with the #MeToo filter. It transforms the history of television, art, movies and literature – all, if we are honest – into an ethical and emotional minefield. The current moment serves to account for the creative workplace as well as the creatives themselves, asking incalculable questions, including: what room for maneuver, if any, are we willing to give to those we consider to be geniuses ? And – a question The Romanoffs she herself reflects – how much do we control our own stories?
Semi Chellas, who worked on Mad Men and plays the role of executive producer of the show with Weiner, declares "Expectation", the Romanoffs The episode she wrote with Amanda Peet and John Slattery, is inspired in part by the kaleidoscopic novel of Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. He suggests "there is not a single story to tell about your life. This story changes and changes every moment, even during a single day. "
This kind of multi-valence works wonders in the art. The confusion in real life is another story.
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