The Mind Behind "Mad Men"

Speaking of California, as the Sixties go on, obviously the nexus of culture is moving from New York to San Francisco. Will there be an L.A. office of Sterling Cooper?
I can't tell you if we're going to go to California in Season Three, but as a show, we're following how the Sixties were about the rise of Los Angeles and the decline of New York. People talk about San Francisco but it was really Los Angeles, and I wanted to show that. In 1960, New York is the center of everything, and by 1975 New York is bankrupt and by 1977 it's the most dangerous place in the United States. In Los Angeles, there were the Watts riots and obviously a lot of economic turmoil there, but at the same time, every cultural aspect that dominated the United States in the Sixties was coming from there, whether it was hot rods or roller disco. Also, I always want the audience to be worried that I'm going to pick up and move the show somewhere. Because, you know, I might.

So, the Beatles will be on Ed Sullivan in 1964 and this English company is merging with Sterling Cooper. Will Season Three be the British Invasion season?
Well, I know it's been leaked that I've hired some British actors, but remember, no one ever said that that merger went through. That meeting didn't go that well.

We picked the British because that was the rising tide at the time. America's dominance of Europe lasted until very recently and even though there was the British invasion, what was going on in business all over the world was an imitation of what was going on in America in the 1950s. British advertising was much softer and more genteel, so as companies became international, they created these international divisions to learn how to sell American-style. Which is ironic because the most self-promoting and famous advertising man ever is David Ogilvy, who's from Great Britain.

But it immediately brings up what I'm interested in thematically: what it means to be an American. Whether it's in literature or art or business, we always have this insecurity about Europe. Ralph Waldo Emerson even wrote about it. But someone like Don, who's this self-made man with the American dream, he doesn't exist anywhere else. And we love people like Don.

If you move things to 1964, you'll have a lot to deal with: the Gulf of Tonkin, the Civil Rights Act.
I can't tell you what year it is in the next season. All I can tell you is that I'm interested in how our successes turn out to be failures and our failures turn out to be successes. And the next season to me is about change. They're all about change in a vague way, but the change I'm talking about is how people respond to a changing world — there's an energy of chaos. We're living through this right now. The past and future are existing at the same time. We're in a Great Depression and we're going to have to depend on the government in a way that reminds me of the New Deal.

Are you more compelled to write about smaller, forgotten historical moments that than, say, Vietnam or Civil Rights?
Well, we had this thing where we wanted to have Bobbie go to Jack Kennedy's birthday party at the Garden, and we wanted to end the episode with Marilyn singing to Kennedy, because the episode was all about how Don and Bobbie not getting caught having an affair. But then we had to figure out, did people know that Jack and Marilyn were together? People joked about it and gossiped about it, and two weeks later, Jackie wore the same dress that Marilyn had on, just to mock it. But the party was not on television, so I couldn't use it. No one saw her singing Happy Birthday! They read about it in the paper, but it wasn't even a scandal. Famous events are more about how they're perceived than what actually happened.