Okay, okay, I know I’ve posted a lot today, but the DVDs got me all excited.

A long while back, we were discussing the song “Babylon” (which I misidentified as “Rivers of Babylon”). I spent all sorts of time on the Web trying to figure out what song and what version it was, and we got close, but man. All you really need is a DVD. (For the record, I also emailed AMC and SAG but they were no help at all.)

So, the Disc One feature on “Scoring Mad Men” is mostly David Carbonara talking about the musical themes used in the show, but he also talks about Babylon. Turns out it’s a Don McLean song from American Pie. (Not really, it is the traditional song we ultimately identified, but that’s where Matt Weiner got it from.) And I’m seriously bent, because I know my brother had this album (on like, vinyl) and I’ve heard it and I DID NOT KNOW. But anyway.

Weiner asked Carbonara to use the song at the end of the Babylon episode, and to be one of the three singers (he’s the one with the zither). Weiner’s instructions were to arrange the song and get two more singers.

So now we know.

In Hobo Code she was still a party girl (witness The Twist, and also ‘we all work so hard’). By Nixon vs. Kennedy, not only was she a tight-ass, but she had a reputation as such.

Ken: Draper has plenty of booze.

They look towards Peggy, working at her desk despite the party around her.

Ken: (continues) We could ask her to join us. That might soften her up.

So what happened?

Okay. In Hobo Code she finally gets to have sex with Pete again. And I’m sorry folks, goodness knows I am not a fan of Mr. Campbell, but it was kind of beautiful. Evidenced by the tenderness between them afterwards… even from him.

Later that day her copy is sold and the old boys club pours her a drink. And this combination of events brings out the most confident woman in the world. She already had shown us she has balls (‘We have manners!’) but on this day, it’s all just perfect.

And then Pete cruelly rejects her.

Next episode, Shoot. She rips her skirt and borrows an outfit from Joan. The next day is the exquisite scene between the two of them in which Peggy exhibits, again, balls of steel. And does appear undaunted by the fact that she’s getting fat (and being observed as getting fat).

And also, she’s now aiming towards an actual career goal.

In Long Weekend, she tells the bitch where to go.

Pete: Peggy, dear, I think I understand what this is about, but you’re not being professional right now.
Peggy: I cannot believe I am in this conversation.
Pete: You think this is easy for me?
Peggy: I don’t know. I don’t know if you like me, or if you don’t like me. I’m just trying to get along here. And every time I walk by, I wonder if you’re going to be nice to me, or cruel.
Pete: Cruel? What am I supposed to say? I’m married.
Peggy: Yes, I know. And I heard all about how confusing that can be. Maybe you need me to lay on your couch to clear that up for you again.
Pete: That’s some imagination you’ve got. Good thing you’re a writer now. What do you need me for?

(Maybe she’s thinking he’s right. What with the Relax-a-Cizor and all.)

So, more focused on career, and those wide eyes are growing sharper and sharper.

Indian Summer

Let’s see. She is asked by the guys to test and write about the “PER: Passive Exercise Regime” weight-loss belt. This becomes both a professional and personal journey. Her marketing instincts are shrewd, asking right off the bat if she is allowed to change the name. That shows a real nose for the bigger picture. Testing this product, as we all know, led her to the discovery of self-pleasure. What is also quite significant is that Don would not let her back down. She went, in one episode, from a woman who hadn’t masturbated, to a woman who was presenting, to a roomful of men, a product that had this pleasure factor.

Later, she approaches Don for a raise. And gets it. And gets permission to break it to Joan, which is a scene I’d pay to see.

And in the same episode she goes on a blind date. This is harder to get at. Her confidence, most times disarming, crosses over into transparently pretentious (and so perhaps it was her lack of confidence?) with this guy. He gets rude, she gets up, he tries to apologize, she’s not having it.

(The confidence theme comes back in the Wheel.)

So, in different forms, we are seeing her get a sense of her own worth.

Now, we haven’t solidified timelines, but Indian Summer is, I believe, October, and of course NvK is early early November. So what we didn’t see was perhaps a month of Peggy as acting ensign copywriter. But Weiner clearly wanted to show us that this is who she has become.

Anonymous person, telling me he liked reading the New York Times Magazine article:

Matthew Weiner sounds like he’s Aaron Sorkin minus the drugs.

Read it here, or find it on C-6 in the Business Day. It’s just huge, this Season Two launch.

Okay, first nugget.

“People in the business are talking about it, gathering to watch it,” said Mary Warlick, chief executive at the One Club for Art and Copy, an organization in New York that honors creativity in advertising.

Really? WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY WATCHING IT? But I digress.

The club is presenting an exhibition intended to “bring back the real-life men and women” on whom “Mad Men” is based, Ms. Warlick said, like Mary Wells Lawrence, George Lois and David Ogilvy. The exhibition, at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library, runs from Tuesday through Sept. 26.

Emphasis mine. Cool as shit, right?

Much of the hoopla surrounding “Mad Men” is promoting either the DVDs or the start of the second season.
For example, Lionsgate is sponsoring the make-believe issue of Advertising Age, which comes out on Monday and takes the form of a 16-page ad section in the actual June 23 issue. The idea was the brainchild of Initiative, which is the Lionsgate media agency.

The ad supplement is designed to resemble how Advertising Age looked in 1960, when the first season of “Mad Men” is set. One highlight is an imaginary interview with the main character, a conflicted creative director named Don Draper. (Mr. Weiner provides his answers.)

“We worked very closely with Matthew Weiner on all of this so it has his touch,” said Anne Parducci, executive vice president for marketing at Lionsgate Home Entertainment in Santa Monica, Calif.

I cannot tell you how much I love that.
LOVE THAT!!!

That is also why the maker of Zippo lighters, founded in 1932, became involved with the DVD release. Zippo supplied period lighters and advertising signs for the series, said Pat Grandy, marketing communications manager at the Zippo Manufacturing Company, to help convey how omnipresent smoking was in 1960.

That led Lionsgate to design a box for the DVD set shaped like a Zippo lighter. And that led Zippo to bring out two lighters with “Mad Men” logos, to be sold online and at the company headquarters in Bradford, Pa.

We knew the first part, we didn’t know the second part. More cool!

Another nod to history comes from JWT, part of the WPP Group, which is buying a 10-second commercial that appears on the first disc in the DVD set.

The spot uses letters from the logos of JWT clients to spell the words “Mad Men” and concludes, “Making brands famous since 1864” — when the agency was known, as it was in the “Mad Men” days, as J. Walter Thompson.

I used work for WPP. I feel very special.

Two different commenters found this for us: The New York Times has an extensive interview with Matt Weiner, behind-the-scenes at auditions and other production, and general article. It’s too amazing to pull out a quote.

Okay, here are the quotes that hint at season 2, but please, read the whole thing, because otherwise I’ll just quote the whole thing (Nothing is spoilery, because Weiner wouldn’t allow that, but I’ll put the quotes below the fold for those of you averting your eyes):

This season, African-Americans are moving beyond operating the elevators at Sterling Cooper, though to what extent remains unclear.

The author says it’s unclear because Weiner is secretive, which segues into:

Weiner is incredibly paranoid about plot details finding their way to the media. “How do you know that?” he snapped about even the most innocuous things I mentioned about the second season. He is used to the secrecy of “The Sopranos,” and every leak, large or small, is a wound. He’s not wrong, of course. Why ruin the suspense? The first season ended on Thanksgiving 1960, and the fact that I knew that the second season picks up on Valentine’s Day 1962 horrified him.

Our commenters are the smartest people in the world, because Dan already guessed that. Yay us!

Weiner reveals a little about Betty, and the article also confirms the horseback riding:

“Betty Draper is getting angry,” Weiner said of Don’s Stepford wife and the mother of his two children, played by January Jones. “She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. Her mother has just died, and she’s realized that when her beauty disappears she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband, and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over. She is somewhat puritanical.”

Finally, my guess that Patrick Fischler and his wife are neighbors was wrong. Fischler was hired to play “a comic à la Don Rickles who is used in a Sterling Cooper ad campaign”—the character also has a “Jewish wife, who doubles as his manager.”

Roberta and I found 3 phrases we thought were anachronisms. Commenter latenac did the research and none of them are, in fact, anachronistic for 1960. This isn’t the first time we’ve discovered this sort of thing.

Here’s an interesting question: Why did they sound as if they were?

I think it’s because people in the movies and TV of 1960 didn’t talk much like the real people of 1960; certainly not to the extent that realistic dialogue exists (or attempts to exist, depending upon the skill of the writer) today.

This is one of Weiner’s themes, of course, that the people in Mad Men aren’t people in movies; they’re people who watch people in movies. 1960, I am so over you.

This is a delightful piece about the screening the other night of 2:01 written by Pat, the former college roommate of Linda Brettler, better known to us as Matthew Weiner’s wife. Yeah. There were five seats reserved. Matt, Linda, Pat, Roberta and Deborah. What? Oh, I’m sorry, there were only three. Anyway, enjoy!

Before I know it, I am linking arms with Jon Hamm, smiling like I’d died and gone to Heaven. Next thing I know, there I am, squished between Christina and January, the two most beautiful women I’ve ever been physically close to (apologies to Linda, my other college roommates, and all my female friends and relatives). And did John Slattery actually touch my waist (if it can still be called that)?

One thing we haven’t gotten much of a look at is the women’s grooming process. We see them all look so perfect (or, occasionally not, like Carol the day she got fired and Francine freaking out over Carlton’s affairs).

For the most part all we see is the occasional lipstick application. But we don’t see what it takes to get Joan’s and Betty’s hair so flawless, or Helen Bishop’s face looking photo-ready.

Although as I write this, it occurs to me that neither do we ever see the meals being made. This, I believe, is quite deliberate. The women who do ‘nothing’ all day serve these multi-component meals. (Meat, potatoes, vegetables, probably salad and fresh-baked rolls and always dessert.) I am always aware of it. Especially in the case of Trudy, the newlywed, who may well spend the better part of her day planning and preparing Pete’s dinner (it takes awhile to get the rhythm, right?). Washing and ironing the tablecloth and napkins. And by the time he is home, she’s relaxed and ‘lovely’, but I bet that requires a full behind-the-scenes revamp.

So maybe it is Weiner’s intention that we never see it. Never see either; the grooming or the meals. The housework. Maybe the statement is that no one sees it. That it is so invisible and unappreciated that he can’t even bring himself to expose it.

Yet.

An article in the Montreal Gazette provides this juicy Matthew Weiner quote:

The culture views the ’60s as this kind of golden glory. The election of John F. Kennedy is memorialized as a time of great innocence. And yet, reading the New Yorker from April 1960 and reading the movie reviews in there of Psycho and The Apartment, I thought to myself, ‘This is not a particularly innocent society.’ We forget that the wave of youth and enthusiasm that swept the country then was decided by about 100 votes.

Psycho and The Apartment? Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. Here’s a Mad Men conversation about The Apartment:

Aw, Red, that’s not how it is. Look, it was crude. That’s the way pictures are now. Did you see that ridiculous Psycho? Hollywood isn’t happy unless things are extreme.

Roger Sterling to Joan Holloway, Long Weekend

What were the big movies of 1960? I perused the IMDb (it’s like a home to me) and found:
Psycho
The Apartment
Inherit the Wind
BUtterfield 8
Elmer Gantry
Exodus
Midnight Lace
Little Shop of Horrors
Ocean’s Eleven
Spartacus
The Alamo
Murder, Inc.
Sons and Lovers
The Sundowners
Can-Can

I haven’t seen all of them, but there are some definite themes. They are movies about distrust, betrayal by authority, sexuality, isolation, sexuality that is isolating, religious tyrants, and noble rebellion against oppressive authority.

In the Great Hooker Oscars of 1961, Elizabeth Taylor won the Best Actress award for playing a whore in BUtterfield 8, defeating Shirley Maclaine’s tragic “other woman” in The Apartment; while Shirley Jones won Best Supporting Actress for playing a whore in Elmer Gantry, defeating Janet Leigh’s frankly sexual portrayal in Psycho. Heady stuff, and, while the previous year’s award show wasn’t exactly tame (Suddenly, Last Summer and Anatomy of a Murder saw to that), Ben-Hur, Some Like It Hot and Pillow Talk were considerably more wholesome.

Perversity plays a role in Little Shop of Horrors as well as Psycho. Spartacus and Exodus are optimistic fights against oppression, and praise religion as they fight authority, but Inherit the Wind and Elmer Gantry show the dark side of religious authority, and The Apartment is a screed against institutional authority, which destroys decent men and women unless they fight back.

The overall effect is remarkably dark, even though this is also the year of Pollyanna and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The world is a dangerous place, twisting us up and spitting us out, turning women into whores and men into slaves and pawns.

For Mad Men Season 2, some interesting movies show up. 1962 gives us:
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lawrence of Arabia
Tom Jones
Hud
Irma La Douce
8 1/2
Lilies of the Field
The Manchurian Candidate
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

A lot of the themes continue, violating social norms, amorality, illicit sexual behavior are all present. The last two movies listed are about lies and divided men; the stories told about them versus who they are. They are Dick Whitman versus Don Draper movies. I think they are the Apartment and Psycho for next season; they paint a picture of some of the mysteries to be revealed.

In addition, two movies that address racism suggest another possible theme of season 2.

A note from Roberta. Deb’s coming home soon; I swear! But she left me this one too.

I can’t remember where I read this or heard this. Maybe…probably…at the Burns Center event about which we’ve written so much, but maybe not.

When Matthew Weiner is telling a writer they’re going in the wrong direction, what he says is, “I’ve seen it on TV.” He went on to explain that Mad Men isn’t people on TV or in the movies, it’s people who watch the people on TV and in the movies.

I think that’s so brilliant.