Hard as it may be to believe now, there was a point in Matthew Weiner’s life when he couldn’t even get into a writing class.
As he reveals in an essay in “Getting There: A Book of Mentors,” which was excerpted by Fast Company magazine, becoming a writer was difficult from the get-go for the “Mad Men” creator.
“Writers were revered in my home and I wanted to be one since I was a kid, but when I went to college, I could not get into a writing class,” the now-56-year-old wrote. “I went to Wesleyan, a very small liberal arts school. The classes had only 12 to 15 people, and you had to submit writing samples to get in. Mine, apparently, were just not good enough.”
Eventually, he was able to convince an English professor to oversee an independent poetry course. Weiner was pleased with the work he produced during the class, but as another professor would soon tell him, maybe he shouldn’t have been.
I gave it to a humanities professor and he invited me to his house to read the work out loud. After the first poem, he told me to get out a pen and take notes. He began, ‘The infantile use of . . . The puerile . . . The childish use of . . . The cliché awkwardness . . .’ It was one humiliating cruelty after the next. And I had to write these insults down myself. I literally went through hours of this, poem after poem. He finally leaned over to me and said, ‘I think you know that you are not a poet.’ I said, ‘I was not aware of that.’
From there, things didn’t get any easier for the now-revered writer, who couldn’t land a paid writing gig until he was 30, and even then was only doing punch-up work on a comedy pilot.
“The showrunner came up to me afterwards and offered me $600 if I could stay through the end of the pilot,” he wrote. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Yes. I’ll be here.’ I would’ve done it for free just to be able to drive onto the lot again.”
After that, Weiner finally started getting work on comedies, but there was something more meaningful he wanted to work on: a project then known only as “advertising project.”
“It was like having a mistress,” he wrote. “I worked on it at night or during my off-hours when I was not with my family. I paid people to do research, inundated myself with material, and even hired a writer’s assistant to dictate to because I was too tired to type (it also freed my imagination). When I finished the script, I felt like it was something special.”
With a script for “Mad Men” finally in hand, Weiner started shopping it around Hollywood, only to be met with rejection. The script would eventually land him a gig on David Chase’s “The Sopranos” writing staff, and then, after four years of trying, a deal with AMC.
“It took seven years from the time I wrote ‘Mad Men’ until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That’s the faith you have to have.”