Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  The most generous assessment was that in John from Cincinnati, Milch was groping toward a kind of new narrative language. “My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is [that] any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters. And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or characters that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end,” he told one blogger. The least generous assessment was it was an inchoate mess.

  • • •

  I will go to my grave saying the first four episodes of that show were as interesting and valid as any show I’ve worked on,” Albrecht said, blaming at least some of the harsh criticism on residual anger over Deadwood. In any event, by the time John aired, Albrecht was no longer at HBO. A month before, early on the morning of May 6, he had been arrested outside the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas, where Floyd Mayweather had just defeated Oscar De La Hoya in a light middleweight fight broadcast by HBO pay-per-view. Police reports described him dragging his then girlfriend, Karla Jensen, toward the hotel with both hands around her neck. He slurred his speech and smelled of alcohol. After being pulled off Jensen, who was left with red marks around her throat, Albrecht was booked for suspicion of domestic assault and spent that night in the Clark County Detention Center. He would eventually plead no contest to misdemeanor battery, pay a $1,000 fine, and attend domestic-violence counseling.

  The career ramifications far outweighed the legal ones. Time Warner Chairman and CEO Richard Parsons immediately announced that Albrecht would take a leave of absence. Albrecht released a statement saying he had lapsed in his treatment for alcohol abuse and would return to Alcoholics Anonymous. Several years later, in an interview with GQ that portrayed him drinking while on a business trip in Dublin, he would disown that statement, saying instead that the story about his alcoholism had been cooked up by HBO’s PR team and that he had reluctantly gone along with it in an effort to save his career. “After years of reflection and working with specialists, I have recognized that alcohol is not an issue in my life,” he told reporter Amy Wallace. “What I really needed to get at the heart of was my complicated and often very difficult love relationships with women.”

  Whatever the truth, Albrecht’s story and HBO’s damage control strategy lasted only a few days. On May 9, the Los Angeles Times ran a story revealing that in 1991, HBO had paid a settlement of at least $400,000 to a network executive with whom Albrecht had been having an acknowledged affair and who had accused him of physical abuse. (Albrecht denied any such abuse.) Blogger Nikki Finke followed with suggestions of a history of hidden, contentious relationships with female co-workers and subordinates. On May 10, Parsons announced that Albrecht, who at fifty-four had spent nearly his entire life working for HBO, would no longer be employed by the company.

  It may have been a measure of both the power Albrecht had consolidated successfully and the conviction that, after all, it had been too much for one man to handle that Bewkes created a whole new power structure for HBO. Chief Operating Officer Bill Nelson took over as CEO, while creative leadership was divided between Plepler in New York and Lombardo in Los Angeles. If it seemed ominous to some that neither man had come up through the ranks as a programmer or developer, it was also seen as reaffirmation of the principle that executives were there to facilitate creativity, not indulge dreams of creating themselves.

  Carolyn Strauss, meanwhile, remained as president of entertainment, but it was a short tenure. She and Albrecht had been well suited as partners, in part because Albrecht was more than happy to handle the charismatic, schmoozing duties to which Strauss was almost pathologically averse. Over the course of twenty years, those roles had grown more calcified and extreme.

  “Over time, she leaned into what she was, which was the really smart but not very sociable executive. And he became a little bit too much of the glad-hander who said he’d read the script but hadn’t really,” said a former colleague at the network. “So when he was not there anymore, the balance fell apart. It was one thing when Chris was there, because Chris gave a great meeting. He made talent feel comfortable and welcome and smart, never left anybody feeling like they had wasted his time. And he hadn’t trained or encouraged Carolyn to do those things because it had worked. That duality worked.” Once Albrecht was gone, though, the colleague went on, “All an insecure writer could see was that she’s texting while he’s trying to pitch.”

  A writer who pitched Strauss during that period confirmed that impression: “She wouldn’t look you in the eye, couldn’t give you a fucking coherent response. She was just weird. You didn’t walk out saying, ‘Boy, I want to work with this person.’ Not at all.”

  “She really is incredibly shy,” said Sue Naegle, who was both a friend of Strauss’s and her replacement when Strauss was forced out in 2008. “She doesn’t go out to lunch with everybody. She was incredibly uncomfortable in those situations.” After some time on the job, Naegle had reason to be sympathetic. “You’re going to say no to 99.9 percent of the people who knock on your door, and that’s it,” she said. “That’s the job. So she’d been here a long time, saying no a long time. And people were so tired of sitting through the Emmys watching HBO win everything, so tired of hearing how great The Sopranos and The Wire were. When they had a chance to watch the prom queen lose her crown, they couldn’t wait.”

  The fact remained that, whatever the reason, the perception that HBO had become a hostile place to bring new material was real—and it had very real consequences.

  “The word had gone out: ‘These guys are a fucking pain in the ass,’” said an industry executive close to HBO programming. “And the greatest case study for all this arrogance was Mad Men.”

  Twelve

  See You at the Emmys

  Matthew Weiner would not have disagreed with that executive’s diagnosis, nor would he have missed an opportunity to remind anybody who happened to be listening. Even before Mad Men had reached the critical mass that made it the biggest quality-television phenomenon since The Sopranos, Weiner would happily relate the story of how HBO blew off the pilot script he’d sent them—the one that he’d nursed for seven years, that had landed him a writing gig on The Sopranos. The network, he said, had never even bothered to call him with a no.

  • • •

  Weiner, like David Simon, was born in Baltimore, the second-youngest child of a high-achieving, argumentative, left-wing Jewish family. His father, Leslie Weiner, was one of the most eminent neurologists in the country, responsible for breakthroughs in the treatment of multiple sclerosis and Ronald Reagan’s personal neurologist. Weiner’s mother had given up a career in law to raise her family. When Matt was nine, the family relocated to a gaudy manse in Hancock Park in Los Angeles, so that Les could join the Department of Neurology at the University of Southern California. He would eventually become chairman of the department. Theirs was an intensely close but intensely competitive family, with enormous pressure put on the children to achieve. Both parents could be demanding and severe. Television was mostly off-limits; homework was taken as seriously as an army drill. Later, Weiner’s blend of supreme confidence and blatant insecurity would reflect the mixed messages of such an upbringing: You’re better than everybody else, and you’re never good enough.

  “If everything David Chase ever did was about his mother,” said one person who had worked closely with both men, “everything Matt’s ever done is about his father.” By other accounts, not least a barbed New York Times piece on holiday giving penned by Weiner himself, he harbored as many complicated feelings about his mother as Chase ever had. In any event, the Weiner family dynamic remained both close and fraught enough that, as late as 2009, at age forty-four, Weiner asked a reporter not to mention his having a cigarette before their interview, because his parents didn’t know that he smoked.

  Weiner’s siblin
gs more or less fell in line with their parents’ expectations. The oldest and youngest became doctors and Matt’s nearest sister a lawyer, though she would eventually end up in entertainment journalism. Matt was less clearly directed. He was the salutatorian of the tony Harvard School for Boys but then decamped for Wesleyan University to study liberal arts. He aspired to be an actor, but, cognizant that acting would not be an acceptable academic major in the Weiner family, he chose a multidisciplinary humanities program, which gave evaluations instead of grades. (“I can read,” said Les upon seeing one of these. “And I can see you got a C.”) When college friends decided to experiment with mushrooms, he was pointedly uninvited, perhaps having been deemed the person most likely to set off a bad trip. As for the family business, Weiner did take a class called “The Human Brain.” He failed. At times he must have felt like the Mad Men character nicknamed HoHo, the son of a shipping magnate, determined to turn jai alai into the next sports sensation to both tweak and impress his father.

  Weiner said he gave up acting when it became clear he wouldn’t be a leading man. “I didn’t realize there was anything else to be,” he said. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he resolved to go to film school at USC. The primary achievement of his two years there was a well-received twenty-minute documentary about paparazzi. It was also the era, he later noted, during which the school added the word television to its name.

  After graduate school, Weiner married Linda Brettler, an architect. The connection between her profession and his, he later suggested, is hardly as tenuous as it might at first seem. Both are rooted in a fine, “pure” art—drawing, writing—but then move out into the real, physical world, drawing dozens, if not hundreds, into their construction. If that means compromise with the realities of the outside world, it also offers a different level of satisfaction. As Weiner would say, once his work started to be produced, “We’re drawing plans, we’re doing the plan check, we’re going through the city, we’re finding materials—and then they build the building. I walk on set and I see the person that I’ve cast, the costumes I went to the meeting for, somebody’s done something amazing with the set, all these people’s creative input comes into it. It’s ridiculous.” (The veteran Hollywood producer Mitch Glazer, who created and ran the series Magic City for Starz, had a slightly different spin: “It’s like being an architect, except if Frank Lloyd Wright went to the bank to get money for Fallingwater and they said, ‘Sure. Does it have to be over a waterfall?’”)

  Weiner and Brettler began a family that would eventually grow to four sons. Professionally, though, he spent several long years in the wilderness, without work or prospects, supported by his wife. Eventually, he self-produced a metafeature, What Do You Do All Day?, in which he played an aimless aspiring filmmaker and compulsive gambler, being supported by an architect wife, played by Brettler in her one film role. The movie went all but unnoticed, save for a blistering review from the critic Emanuel Levy. But Weiner saw within it the first intimation that he could take control of his own career, the faint stirring of a future auteur.

  First, though, work had finally begun to come. Through a friend, he landed a job writing jokes on a show called Party Girl, then moved to The Naked Truth and, finally, Becker, starring Ted Danson as a doctor cranky enough to be the palest premonition of future antiheroes to come. (The third act of Danson’s career—on Damages and then HBO’s Bored to Death—would be one of the nicest side effects of the Third Golden Age.)

  Becker was a plum job, but Weiner was unsatisfied. (His feelings about the show were perhaps best expressed in an episode of The Sopranos several years later, when he placed Becker creator Dave Hackel’s name on a gravestone about to be desecrated by teenage goths.) At night, Weiner began working on another kind of story. He had always been taken with the decades of his parents’, and his grandparents’, youth—those years’ shiny, attractive surfaces and the darker realities beneath. (In high school, asked to dress as any historical figure, he had chosen Joseph McCarthy, donning one of his grandfather’s suits.) In another act of self-confidence, a bet on himself, he hired an assistant, Robin Veith, to take dictation as he began to tell the story of a slick, mysterious, but troubled traveler through the upheavals of the 1960s.

  There was more to the idea than mere nostalgia. As he told Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, he remembered the thought that led him to first hearing Don Draper’s voice: “I was 35 years old; I had a job on a network sitcom; it was rated number nine . . . there’s 300 people in the country that have this job, and I was one. I had three children, and . . . this incredible life—you know, I was like, ‘What is wrong with me? Why am I unhappy? Why is there so much going on in my head that I can’t express to other people because it’s all awful? And what is enough? And I’m going to die one day.’ And I’m looking at it and saying, ‘This is it?’”

  As it happened, a show about exactly those feelings was about to transform television. Weiner watched the first four seasons of The Sopranos as a rapt fan. He was thrilled by the new, sophisticated rules that David Chase had imposed on TV. “The Sopranos was saying, ‘Guess what? You don’t know who the show’s going to be about this week. You don’t know who’s going to die or disappear, even if you love them. We’re not giving you a formula.’”

  By this time, he had been carrying his script for the pilot of Mad Men around with him—literally; it never left his briefcase—for four long years. Though not yet forty, he categorized himself as a hopelessly late bloomer. David Chase’s story of a long struggle in the trenches was an inspiration. (It was telling, if puzzling, that he often invoked the Beatles, who were world-famous before age twenty and finished before thirty, as kin in this late success.)

  Weiner lobbied his agents to send his script to Chase, who was staffing up for the beginning of season five of The Sopranos. Since Todd Kessler’s dismissal, the show had made do for a season and a half with the tiny staff of Terence Winter, Robin Green, and Mitchell Burgess and the contributions of freelancers. The agents were reluctant but finally agreed. Within seventy-two hours, Chase was on the phone with Winter: “I’m sending you this thing called Mad Men to read,” he said. “I’m flying this guy out and, if he’s not a complete asshole, I’m hiring him.”

  • • •

  Chase did hire Weiner, though whether that was a definitive verdict on the “complete asshole” question was open to interpretation. As a sitcom writer, Weiner had demonstrated a certain difficulty playing well with others, an ability to rub people the wrong way. He would later recount the story of one actor getting so angry with him that the actor literally kicked him in the ass and challenged him to a fight. (The Web site Splitsider.com hypothesized that the actor was Mark Roberts, who himself went on to become showrunner of the sitcom Mike & Molly.)

  Upon arriving at The Sopranos, by then a well-oiled juggernaut, Weiner made immediate waves. He could be funny and charming, colleagues said, but also childishly underhanded. At times he seemed a classic bully: obsequious toward those above him, condescending and harsh toward those he perceived as having less power to help or harm him. After one confrontation, costume designer Juliet Polcsa began carrying a minicassette recorder to tape her interactions with Weiner. In a more serious incident, Weiner was on a location scout with co–executive producer Henry Bronchtein, himself a combustive personality with whom Weiner had a contentious relationship. Upon wrapping up somewhere in New Jersey, Weiner, by then an executive producer, had not made it back to the van when Bronchtein ordered it to depart, leaving Weiner stranded and furious. The incident caused a several-day internal dustup, with Weiner demanding that Bronchtein be fired, though Chase ultimately kept him. And although it had clearly been a breach of protocol on Bronchtein’s part, it was also an indication of the kind of dynamic that Weiner brought to the workplace. It was rumored, though Carolyn Strauss flatly denied it, that her eventual rejection of Mad Men sprang from a personal desire to never work with Weiner again.

/>   All of this was balanced, of course, by the fact that he was undeniably good at his job—brilliant, even. The writers’ room, with its competitive atmosphere and opportunities to shine, had always suited Weiner to a T. Here, if nowhere else, he had a thick skin. “I think that part of my success climbing the hierarchy of the writers’ room was that I knew that when the boss came in, no matter what mood they were in, I was not going to take it personally,” he said. “I’d be like, ‘You don’t like that? Okay. Well, I’ve got something else. No? I’ve got something else. Did you actually say “Fuck you” to me? Okay. Well, you don’t mean it.’”

  How had he developed that skill?

  “That’s the way my family is. You can’t take it personally,” he said.

  Inevitably, such a strong voice affected the dynamic of the room. Even Winter, a friend, admitted, “There were some days where it’d be nice if he stopped talking. But he was always interesting and funny and smart. He never talked just to hear himself talk. He always had a point . . . just a lot of it.”

  His presence also dialed up the already high level of tension between Chase and Robin Green. “Matt was a comedy writer, so he was always vibing the room,” Green said. “He had his head so far up David’s ass. . . . I would be trapped in the room with the two of them. They would just smack their lips over all these French foreign films. It became increasingly intolerable.” Chase said that Weiner’s growing prominence made Green jealous.