The Television Academy continued its love affair with Matt Weiner this year, nominating his show “Mad Men” for a best dramatic series Emmy, after giving it the same award in its freshman season last year. He also won a 2008 Emmy for writing the show’s pilot and is nominated again this year in four of the five dramatic writing slots. Before creating “Mad Men,” whose third season premieres Aug. 16 on AMC, Weiner helped write and produce “The Sopranos” -- but he worked for years in comedy before making the switch. He talks with Eric Estrin about how he did it. (Hint: Don’t look for the word “agent.”)
My real break was going to USC graduate school. I made a documentary there, I got a lot of attention, I got married, and when I finished at school my wife supported me as the attention from my documentary disappeared. So I wrote. I stayed home and I wrote.
I wrote a feature that I thought could be done for $100,000, and then I met some guy who was gonna make it. He was like a friend of my wife’s aunt, and his buddy wanted to do movies, and that dragged on for months, literally like six months of, “We’re gonna sign the papers on Monday.” And I gained a lot of weight and I stopped writing. And finally I was like, “You know what, forget this, I’m just gonna make my own movie.”
It was a story very thinly removed from real life, about a guy who had stopped writing. And it’s all about realizing you can live your entire life in the future if you want to, but the truth is, life is passing you right now and you’re gonna miss the entire thing. I shot the movie in 10 days and then I got a job, right after I finished it.
Part of my inspiration was that a friend of mine from Wesleyan University, Daisy Mayer, had made this movie “Party Girl.” And she had sold this movie, and I was very inspired by her. I was preparing for my film screening, and she came out to Los Angeles and they were making a TV show of her movie, and she called me on the phone and asked me for some kind of joke. They were trying to find a joke, and I gave her the joke, and she said, “Listen, do you want to come in and do punch-up?”
I didn’t even know such a job existed. And I went in, and I was really good at it.
So then my movie screened, and within five or six days I had a lot of agents interested in me, and things were happening. And then I got a call saying “Party Girl” had been picked up and did I want a job, and I said yes.
I signed with an agent who was also very excited about my movie. But what happened is the agents who had promised to help me with the movie just kind of threw it by the wayside because I had a job in TV.
