Bruce Handy on Mad Men and Matthew Weiner (link)
Photo by Annie Leibovitz
Not that the staff’s passion for minutiae stops at bird-dogging historical accuracy. I asked David Carbona, the show’s composer, about a lovely piece of music he used to score a small but key scene in the second-season opener (Episode 201, by the production’s accounting), in which Don, intoxicated for once by his wife, watches a mink-clad Betty descend a hotel’s grand staircase as she arrives for a night out in the city. This was Carbona’s answer, by e-mail: “It’s a piece written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov called ‘Song of India’ from his opera Sadko. Tommy Dorsey had a hit with an up-tempo version in 1937. Matthew Weiner wanted a harp in the hotel lobby to be playing the song, then have the arrangement become larger for scoring Betty’s entrance.… But my favorite use of ‘Song of India,’ and sadly I don’t think anyone noticed, was in episode 211, ‘The Jet Set.’ This time it’s played as a jazz samba in yet another hotel bar as Don thinks he sees Betty! It’s played as source music with a bit of score overlaid on top hopefully calling us back to the previous hotel lobby in episode 201 [which had aired 11 weeks earlier in the series’ initial run], when they were very much in love. I admit it was a bit subtle, but maybe (hopefully!) it had an effect in the viewer’s subconscious.”
I saw the O.C.D. in action when I sat in on a “concept meeting” in preparation for shooting the new season’s first episode. This was a chance for the show’s various departments—production design, set decoration, props, costumes, casting, hair and makeup, cinematography, postproduction, etc.—to sit down with Weiner, go through the script, and hear how he envisioned things. Roughly two dozen people were sitting around a large conference table as the first assistant director, Nina Jack, walked the group scene by scene through the bare-bones requirements of the script. Jack would tick off the sets that needed to be built, or the roles to be filled, but Weiner was the real focus of the meeting, the religious authority interpreting his own text—often in evocative, even pungent terms. (As a condition of sitting in, I agreed not to divulge any plot details, or as few as is writerly possible, and if you’re a fan of the show you wouldn’t want to know anyway. If you’re not a fan, well, thanks for reading this far.)
It’s cliched nowadays to say that television is the popular literary medium of our time. If you want to tell a story, it offers you everything, a large crowd, a long time, great tools (actors, props, support). I’m feeling very jealous after reading about Weiner and the control he has to wallow in the details that make him so happy. His achievement is as high as anything that has come before. And I mean anything.
Click the link in the title.
Posted 2 years ago
