The next two panels of Sunday were both historical in a way: The History Channel brought us “1968 with Tom Brokaw,” with the former NBC anchor popping in only for the duration of the panel (he had a flight to catch), while AMC brought us the retro stylings of their new ’60s-set drama about the advertising world, “Mad Men.”
First up, Mr. Brokaw:
Brokaw began with a laugh, offering the anecdote that, when he first mentioned to Garry Trudeau that he was planning to do a special on 1968, the “Doonesbury” cartoonist responded, “What are you going to call this, the worst generation?” As it happens, however, Brokaw doesn’t even remotely feel that way about ’68.
“I think that journalists should write about what they experience, what moves them,” explains Brokaw. “’68 — the 1960s — the book is really about the ’60s. ’68 is the nerve center of the ’60s. It’s been an emotional experience for me because I’ve had to review my own life in the course of all this and think about the changes that I’ve gone through. And you have to remember that I arrived in California, working for NBC in 1966, just four years off the Great Plains, working-class family in small towns, a real product of the ’50s, thinking here I am in California, which is on the cutting edge of change, having no idea about how much more change was to come — good, bad, tragic, and triumphant. It’s been tough. This is a big subject. And I want to caution all of you that neither this two-hour special that we do on History nor my book will be the defining history of the ’60s, because we’re still in passage from that time. I am treating this as a virtual reunion, the people who went through it, what they thought then, what they think now. You’ll hear lot of voices. Unfortunately, this is one of those times in American life when everyone has their own prism, and they think what they saw, what they experienced, is the defining experience.”
When it comes to defining the most important historical event of ’68, Brokaw is darkly philosophical, suggesting that it’s the mere fact that we survived at all. “I don’t say that lightly,” he assures us. “This country was up for grabs in many ways. We had this war going on, with kids in the street, marching in Washington, National Guardsmen that you saw there in gas masks, facing them down, that we came out of Chicago where was a breakdown in the streets, and that we were able to have elections, and that people were able to accept the results of those elections, and Richard Nixon was inaugurated, and a lot of the country was unhappy, but a lot of the country had voted for him. And those who had not voted for him, had voted for George Wallace. People forget what a factor George Wallace was in that election. For me, at the time, there were two big lessons. One was how quickly it can change, the fundamental assumptions that we have about society and our government. And then, two, the resilience of the American people. ’68 was the beginning of the — profound distress of the American government, and we’re still working our way through that. That was accelerated by Watergate, but ’68 had a lot to do with it.”
(The folks at The History Channel also had a panel for a new series called “The Human Weapon.” I didn’t stick around for it, but here’s the description of the show: “Human Weapon” follows host Jason Chambers, a top-fighting welterweight champion and Bill Duff, a former professional football player and wrestler, on a remarkable worldwide journey. Over the course of their travel, they reveal the history behind the time-honored tradition of hand-to-hand combat arts. Jason and Bill verse themselves in these fighting cultures, grueling and punishing, to prove that they are worthy by going face-to-face in the ultimate test of their skills. I know, as a guy, I’m supposed to go, “Fuckin’ A!” But it just makes me shrug. Sorry.)
Now, on to “Mad Men.” I haven’t had a chance to watch the show yet, but I will say that, from the clips that’ve been shown, it looks awesome. The show focuses on ad men during the ’60s, so there’s a lot of smoking and sexism in the workplace, so, y’know, isn’t that enough? You throw in the fact that it’s written and produced by a guy who spent quite a lot of time acting in the same capacity with “The Sopranos” – Matthew Weiner – and, c’mon, you know you want to tune in!
First off, Weiner – prounced WY-ner – had to deal with the mispronunciation of his name (“I should just change it, actually,” he laughed), but, from there, he went on to offer up the origins of the series. “It’s actually something that probably I’ve been interested in since I was in high school. And I love this period, and I was interested in — always interested in advertising. In a way it was like, to me, some of the greatest entertainment in my life. But what really happened is I reached a certain point in my life where I started thinking about myself as a man and where I was and what I was feeling, and it just intersected with this period in the United States and I said, ‘This is what I feel like.’ And it had to do with New York at that period, and it had to do with the fact that I was a television writer. And I looked at these guys, at this world, these men who were overpaid and drank too much and smoked too much and were glib and cynical and bit the hand that fed them all the time and showed up late and had no respect for authority, and I thought, ‘These are my heroes.'”
As it turns out, the idea for the series actually originated before Weiner began his work on “The Sopranos”; indeed, it was something that Chase had actually heard about.
“While I was a sitcom writer,” he explains, “I had some thought that I wanted to talk about something and also show people that I could write and also on some level I emotionally needed to be satisfied and I thought, ‘I’m going to write a Playhouse 90.’ And then, of course, once I got into it, I was like “You know what? I don’t have anything to brandish. I want to write about my life” and so I worked on this thing at night while I was on ‘Becker'” and finished it and then I handed it in. As a sitcom writer this is not a great vehicle and the feeling was that we should not show it to anybody and that it was a great piece of writing, but that nothing would ever happen to it, and thanks to my wife and a few of my friends who said, ‘What are you going to do with that thing? You’ve got to do that thing. It’s great,’ and I just kept at it.
“A couple of years later, I actually left “‘Becker’ when my contract was up. I got another job and then I finally said to the agents, ‘Look, there are no more overall deals out there. I don’t know how this can hurt anything. Could you please send this to Alan Ball and David Chase?’ They were both at the same agency and — I don’t know. They never sent it to Alan Ball, but they sent it to David Chase. This is two years after I finished it, and a week later I was living in New York on the show. And then I wrote on the show for three years — four and a half years actually, and during that time, during the hiatus, the people from AMC called me and I went and had lunch with them and Christina Wayne gave me ‘Revolutionary Road,’ which I had not read, and if I had read it, I probably would not have written the pilot because it blew me away and I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I did this right.’ I also thought, ‘These people, they really like this thing and they’re talking about creative control and they want to do a show based on quality,’ and you hear them say the word ‘quality’ and they’re not saying it like the way people say, you know, ‘exciting’ or something. They really meant it. And then they actually let me make the pilot as did David Chase during a hiatus between whatever it ended up being, season six and a half, and season seven, whatever it was — Between the last nine shows and the other one, we made the pilot and then AMC waited for me to finish the end of ‘The Sopranos’ and the day that I finished on ‘The Blue Comet’ we started working here. So it’s seven years, you know. And honestly it sounds like a good story, but when you’re on the other end of it and you’re thinking about it every day and you think it’s going to happen tomorrow, that’s a really long time.”
An issue which will almost certainly catch the eye of “Mad Men” viewers is the amount of cigarette smoking going on within the series…but, hey, that’s how it was back then. “It was ridiculous to try and tell the story without it,” said Weiner, “and, you know, it’s a self-destructive horribly addictive habit that these people suffered from. And when I was trying to find these advertising guys who were there and talk to them about it, it was difficult because they’re dead. So it is not to be underestimated that people who smoke in this show cough a lot.”
In addition to the smoking, another reality of the ’60s workplace was the sexism, which actresses Christina Hendricks and Elizabeth Moss attempt to take in stride.
“It’s so funny,” said Hendricks, “but my father sent me an article (about how) a bunch of businessmen in D.C. recently got busted for paying these girls on the golf course. They were out on a golf thing and paying these girls ten bucks each to flash — you know, lift their shirts. This was last week. And the reason why my dad sent it to me was because it happened on his golf course! I was reading this article and I don’t think it’s, you know, changed so much. I think the way women respond to it — or I think the expectation of it is different, but I — I don’t know if it’s that different. Matt had suggested that I read ‘Sex and the Single Girl,’ by Helen Gurley Brown, and there are chapters of it that tell you how to sort of become the ‘it’ girl in the office and work those situations for your benefit, you know. If your boss is giving you a little extra attention and says nice things and says nice things about your figure, you know, you might get a nice little piece of jewelry out of that, and she really seriously goes through and tells you how to sort of, you know, make that a pleasant and workable environment for yourself.”
Moss agrees with Hendricks’ suggestion that sexism is, unfortunately, still around the workplace in the 21st century. “In 1960, with the show it was expected that that’s what a secretary did. That was part of your duties as a secretary. Here, you know, it might be the same. It’s just a lot more covered up and women are allowed to speak out against it now and men know that it’s not okay and they’re not supposed to talk about it, whereas then it was just sort of the way that it was. It was your job as a secretary.”
