The fourth season of the AMC series “Mad Men” begins July 25, but we are already awash in spin-offs from the show, with more to come.
On Tuesday, the paperback division of Simon & Schuster is reissuing Jerry Della Femina’s hilarious 1970 book about his life in the advertising world of the “Mad Men” era — “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.”
The only quote on the cover is from GQ which reads “One of the key texts for ‘Mad Men.’”
In his new introduction, Della Femina writes, “The original Mad Men are all dead. Ironically, they died from consuming the products they sold with such gusto. Their lungs went from the cigarettes they advertised — and smoked by the carton. Their livers melted from all the scotch, gin and vodka they made famous — and the three-martini lunches they enjoyed in the process.”
The author admires “Mad Men” but notes that the AMC series about life in the New York advertising world is a fairly cleaned-up view: “We made the antics depicted on every episode…look like ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’…Life was easy back in the days before human resource departments controlled business and someone decided we all should be politically correct…Everyone smoked (I had a four-pack-a-day habit). Everyone drank martinis…and everyone screwed around.”
Della Femina writes that the business he still works in has changed “dramatically” since the era of the AMC show: “…the lunatics are back in their cells, dead or retired. The internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising…A few nineteen-year-old students from the School of Visual Arts in New York can design and produce a brilliant campaign in a few hours that once would have taken weeks of late-night creative work by fifty people to produce.”
Collins Design has just released a very stylish oversized paperback — “Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Throuigh 1960s America” — in which critic and journalist Nastasha Vargas-Copper smartly assesses the influences on “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner. She and the book’s designers also take us through the zeitgeist in which the show was set — a time of growing luxury goods consumption, easier travel options, and corporations that more or less guaranteed lifetime employment if you played by their rules.
So far, “Mad Men” has been about the early 1960s — the years just before the sexual and feminist revolutions transformed the lifestyles depicted in the series. Clothes would get much less formal, pot would replace booze for many people, and women in offices would start to rebel against the sexism that is treated in a scathingly satirical style on “Mad Men.”
The AMC show was launched before the financial debacles of 2008, but over the past two years the show has benefited from a new nostalgia for a long-lost time of relative economic stability — if you were white and middle class — and relatively guilt-free hedonism.
Vargas-Cooper does a great job of showing how the pop culture of the early to mid-60s shaped the characters in “Mad Men,” from protagonist Don Draper’s love of the 1961 Michelangelo Antonioni sexual alienation drama “La Notte” (below) to his wife’s reading of the pivotal 1963 Mary McCarthy bestseller “The Group,” about college girls of an earlier generation who were ground down by a male-dominated society.
The “Mad Men” influence has extended to Broadway as well, where a revival of the 1968 business world musical comedy “Promises, Promises” has been doing so well that the same production team has announced a new staging next season of the 1961 corporate satire, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” that will star Daniel Radcliffe.
