Listening (and watching) Matt Weiner Down Under
Matt Weiner is in the South Pacific, keynoting the annual Screen Producers Conference. Basketcase Claire points us to his interview with Australia’s ABC public radio, for which there is both audio and video. Another session, from ABC’s PM, is also available for your listening enjoyment:
MARK COLVIN: But it was also very dark and that went against the conventional wisdom in Hollywood didn’t it, the movies were always being changed because of focus groups and things to be more upbeat and yet The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood; series like this are very, very downbeat, very dark.
MATTHEW WEINER: You know what it’s interesting no one’s talked about that. I personally just as, I’m gonna say this as an artist and as a consumer, that’s a stylistic thing that is related to, that’s a cyclical thing.
Because growing up on movies in the ’70s you know, supposedly the great moment of change was when Rocky and the movie Rocky Sylvester Stallone and Network were up against each other for best picture and Rocky won, which is, Rocky’s the tragedy with a happy ending.
And so that, supposedly that upbeat Hollywood influence on things. But definitely there is a feeling that TV and David Chase always used to say this was, lying about human behaviour and that it was an escape and in fact in the pilot Don says that advertising is a billboard on the side of the road that says you’re okay, that whatever you’re doing is okay.
And I did not want to be part of that and I think that there is…but you know I gotta say you take a show life Miami Vice, can you have anything more commercial than that, one of the most downbeat series ever created that Crockett and Tubbs those two characters that Michael Mann show they never won. They never beat the drug guys.
And certainly that was a, for whatever this dark period you’re talking about in junk TV that was period of great artistic growth in the television business in the United States because Michael Mann was really the first guy to shoot a TV show in the United States that looked like a movie.
That had a lot of cinema in it, a lot of silence, a lot of action, a lot of style, you may not have liked it, you may have found it shallow and melodramatic or whatever but it was groundbreaking and I know that David Chase admired it a great deal and that part of The Sopranos was like I’m gonna spend my money, I’m not just gonna have people walking and talking in front of an interesting location, I’m gonna actually make cinema out of it. I’m gonna do a lot of set-ups and I’m gonna do film.
Note: PM has an extended version of the interview for download. In case you missed it, Matt previously did a session with New Zealand’s public radio.
November 19th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Interesting point about Miami Vice. It always amazed me just how much cynicism that show got away with. In the middle of the 1980’s, when we were all supposedly rah-rah cheerleaders for Reagan’s Morning In America, the most consistent bad guys on the show weren’t the drug dealers, but the U.S. government. I remember one episode where Lt. Castillo (Edward James Olmos) helped an honorable North Vietnamese spy escape from the evil CIA. You could never do a plot like that now, and I was amazed that they could do it then.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
American films from the late 60’s through the 70’s were full of darker themes–this sense of the end of our country’s innocence permeated the American zeitgeist after the Kennedy assassination and then Vietnam. MW makes the astute observation that Rocky signaled a shift in cinema. I would go further and suggest that Rocky may be viewed as a harbinger of the Reagan years. It certainly coincided with a shift of urban, blue-collar Catholics into the Republican camp.
During the late 70’s and 1980’s, a large volume of cinematic output in the U.S. began to seem more formulaic and focus-group driven, less auteur-driven. Special effects, horror, big romance, suspense, buddy flicks, adolescent comedy. It all seemed pretty much the same after awhile. At the same time, network television drama couldn’t approach the big screen in production values, or int the complexities of character or plot. It was bound by the 1-hour (or 47 minute) limits of scheduling. The prime-time soaps, like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest & Knots Landing had broad popular appeal, but audiences finally grew weary of catfights, big hair and cardboard characters.
Miami Vice really was one of the first TV dramas to employ the newer cinematic techniques and production values in the service of the story and the look. If you remember when it came out, you remember how different it looked from everything else, and what a giant leap forward it seemed at the time. I was so blown away by it that I needed to write a TV column in my friend’s graduate design-school underground magazine. The “no earth tones” policy single-handedly elevated pink and teal to the top of the 80’s color charts and style sheets. Men moussed their hair and sported stubble. Drug dealers got shot while lying on the decks of their swimming pools, their heads lolling back, slow-motion, into the water. The producers wanted the look of MTV, and Michael Mann, a signature visual stylist, gave it to them. For a year or two, it was a great television, but, face it, where was the substance?
The next great leap forward in cinematic television production might have beeen David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which opened in spectacularly eccentric fashion–a serial about the aftermath of the murder of popular young woman in a small town in Pacific northwest. I love David Lynch–nobody has ever come closer to making movies seem like dreaming. But Lynch never seemed interested in conventional storytelling, nor in the tightness of his plotting. Episodes spilled over, too many plot threads were left dangling, and a demise in ratings doomed it. Still, I think that Lynch’s images of wind-buffeted branches in twilight, or a traffic light changing from yellow to red on a dark and desolate road conveyed such a profound sense of place, even after only 30 episodes, that we all knew the town of Twin Peaks, and we’d know it today–and that’s hard to say about a lot of places in television land.
There have been other shows that evolved and sharpened the concept of cinematic television–The Sopranos, the whole HBO dramatic oeuvre, and of course, Mad Men. The fact that each episode now stands alone (well, mostly) by itself is a convention of dramatic television storytelling, as distinct from soap opera–that every chapter has its own arc–and could be seen a shortcoming imposed by the format of television programming, but I think it is a very natural way to tell a long story. Every saga is a collection of stories, with a common cast of characters, but which moves ahead, in ebbs and flows, in big spectacle (a foot in the lawnmower) and in small and private conversations.
I’d like to know what anyone else thinks of about the way television both resembles and is different from film in the way that it tells a visual story.
November 19th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I guess I’ve always been a big “Northern Exposure” fan…til its last season, that is…..but..it was a comedy….