Matt Weiner live from New Zealand
I am posting this email verbatim, removing only the name of the kind Basketcase who sent it (since I didn’t get permission):
Hello Lipp Sisters,
I am a huge Mad Men fan from New Zealand. I wrote my honors dissertation on Mad Men last year at University, your website was a invaluable source of background information, thanks so much!!.
Anyway, I thought that you guys may be interested that Matthew Weiner is visiting us down here in the South Pacific as the key note speaker at the Screen Production and Development Association of New Zealand annual conference. Sadly I don’t live in Wellington so I was unable to get along to here him speak about Mad Men.
However, Mr Weiner is being interviewed on New Zealand public radio tomorrow morning at 10:10 am ( 01:10p.m. Friday November 13 in Los Angeles) by a Kim Hill (a woman regarded as one of our better interviewers). [oops, guess it's too late to stream live: Sorry!!--Deborah]
…or you can listen to a archived recording after the fact from this link:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday
It should be worth checking out. Thanks heaps again!
Kind Regards
November 13th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Very illuminating interview.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I adored the interview! I love the woman. Thanks so much for this. Nice to hear about the “sopranos” “wire” “mad men” triumvirate. I want to write a paper on them.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Is there a way we can read your dissertation?
November 14th, 2009 at 7:14 am
I agree with 25framesaminute
I would also like to read your Thesis!
November 14th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I’d love to read that dissertation!
November 14th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Thank you for the link. Love the interviewer and the insights.
November 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Loved the interview. Matt’s description of filming the pilot in NY, talking to his family in La and being so happy in his work life he can’t quite muster missing them and wondering if he’s dead really reminded me of the last scene in the last ep. Don is as purely content as we’ve ever seen him.
Also, lucky Kiwis to get such a luxurious interview.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Hey there!
Hope you enjoyed the interview,
Thank you all so much for the interest in my dissertation. Its kind of humbling to think that people that aren’t me, my supervisor, marker, or proofer are interested in my work (not that I think the latter was particularly interested)
However, although I would like to share it with you all, I am afraid that I now only have it in its finished state as a hard copy. I still have some very rough electronic drafts, but my laptop and notes were stolen from the boot of my car at the beginning of this year (thankfully I had finished, it could have been so much worse three months earlier!)
For what its worth the dissertation was a exploration of Mad Men as an example of historiographic metafiction – in that the show is self reflective of humanity and America, whilst also mobilizing historical knowledge and recognizing ‘context’ rather than trying to inscribe the past with contemporary meaning.
I think writing about Mad Men was some of the most fun that it is possible to have whilst studying (whilst studying sober anyway).
November 15th, 2009 at 10:56 am
millhouse, I’m so sorry about your laptop but thank goodness you didn’t lose your dissertation! Congratulations. If you ever restore it to electronic form we’d certainly consider publishing it, although we’re not exactly a prestigious academic journal!
November 15th, 2009 at 11:19 am
‘Basket of Kisses’ is prestigious enough for me!
November 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
You can scan the hard-copy into a PDF, which is simple if you know anyone with a scanner or take it to a photocopy place. (And if you ever need to work on it again, say for a journal or publisher, you can get it OCR’d from the PDF back into a Word doc. There would be lots of mistakes which you’d have to fix, but it sure would beat typing it all over again. For Basket, the PDF would do fine.)