OK. So I just watched “Mad Men”… Not bad, not great. One thumb up, one thumb down. The next Sopranos, it certainly isn’t. Now the details… My first job in the States was in 1964 at Benton & Bowles, New York, so I’m one of the few people who watched it tonight that can speak from experience. First, the nit picks… Yes, we all smoked like chimneys, but we never smoked in elevators as one of the young AE’s did. That was a no-no along with not taking your hat off. Yes we all drank like fishes, but we did it at lunch time and after work. No one had drink trays and ice buckets like the Don Draper character. And no one poured their first Scotch with an Alka Seltzer at nine in the morning as the gay AD character, Salvatore did. Even when I worked for Dick Lord at Warwick & Legler, which was the main Seagram Agency, we’d get ploughed at lunchtime after three martini lunches, but we never cracked open a bottle in the office. Plus, you never served drinks in the middle of a presentation as they did with the retail lady client. And in the over forty years I’ve been in the business, I’ve never heard anyone refer to themselves as “Mad-Men.” Final nit pick… The scene were Don Draper throws DR. Guttman’s research in the trash is dead wrong. In the late fifties and early sixties, all the major agencies went apeshit for motivational research and practitioners like Dr Ernst Dichter and others. You can read all about it in Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” and hopefully soon in the book I’m working on now called “The Ubiquitous Persuaders,” a fifty year update on Packard’s book. The Draper character would have been all over her research like a hound in heat! But my biggest problem I have is with the writing. Yes, it’s written to show that all the male characters are testosterone filled egomaniacs and the women are raging nymphomaniacs, and deep down inside they’re terribly insecure… But the fucking words are wrong… In the scene where Don has taken the retail lady to a bar to apologize, he delivers a series of really limp dick lines, culminating in… “Love is a word invented by guys like me to sell nylons!” Oh fucking please, even when I was a snot nose kid of 26 in my first Mad Ave agency job, I could think up better lines than that to pull chicks. In all the marketing leading up to this series (and there’s been a ton of it) much was made of how they got the interiors, the clothes, even the typewriters correct. It’s too bad they couldn’t get some of the dialogue right. But when you consider most of the writers working on the show weren’t even born in 1960 that may have something to do with it. And my final gripe… The Don Draper Creative Director reminds me of those Doris Day advertising movies, where she fucking does everything, including taking the photography. Even in those days, there were writers and Art Directors and we worked in teams… My first Art Director partner was the legendary Gene Federico. It wasn’t down to one Leonardo DaVinci guy in a corner office who pulled miracles out of his arse. But, having said all that, I’ll keep watching it to see if the sex gets better. But I’ll Tivo it to kill the sixteen fucking ads I had to sit through in the hour it was on!!!
.
My favorite Three Martini lunch bar. Anyone recognize it... Ivan?