MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

XP I think it's still April (Don's been back three weeks, he watched Model Shop last ep which opened in early April '69).

Don's penchant for modern poetry/literature and foreign films has always seemed a little odd to me - like, where would a poor farm kid raised in a whorehouse pick up these more "intellectual" pursuits

not saying that it's unheard of or unrealistic or whatever, it's just not something that's ever been elucidated

i think he would go to the movies. to pick up a penchant for the movies.

well no one got excited about the '69 Mets til May/June, and they didn't really catch fire til August.

Shakey: modern advertising, esp that period, relied on the cultural cachet of foreign films and intelligent and or "racy" best sellers.

Model Shop def has that '60s cool vibe, tho it was a huge flop i think

(well not huge in that it's shot mostly on the LA boulevards and in homes, and Anouk Aimee and Gary Lockwood couldn't have cost that much)

It wasn't a success. Fun Fact: Demy wanted Harrison Ford for the Lockwood part, but got shut down by the producers.

Roth, Gore Vidal, Updike, Bellow, Mailer -- they were actually best sellers.

xp...and The Doors were approached about doing the score, a job that ended up with Spirit (who appear in the film).

yeah the foreign film thing is pretty understandable (boobs! "intelligence"!). The earlier seasons poetry chapbook namedrops are a little more perplexing.

xp

Thanks youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnavvQjYV8

portnoy's complaint was the top selling novel of 1969 iirc. one writeup of this episode i read somewhere (nymag maybe?) noted a ton of echoes and callbacks to a season one episode where don is reading leon uris' exodus lol.

Also most of this Draper stuff is in line with him being a auto didact.

^^^ yes. He reminds me of what I've read about JFK: he could read novels and papers at an alarming speed and recite and summarize them w/out getting the sense that they'd affected him in any way.

we all reinvented ourselves in the '60s you see

Excellent episode! Definitely the zippiest and funniest of the season. Thought the office was looking v Kubrickian, then you lot pointed out the 2001 connection.

love the hippie transformation of Marigold...all those mundane little details of her dress, hair, demeanor were a+

and i loved the "must've been real hard to leave ME, DAD" standoff

just kinda pondering but is part of the reason don didn't do the work for peggy (aside from hi i am don draper world's biggest douchecanoe) that he was scared he had lost his touch?
there was that look of rigid panic in his face when freddy said "do the work" that to me seemed to say "but what if i can't"

roxy otm x 100 about hippies being corny, all the eyerolling details were otm

i loled at roger's joke abt putting a man on the roof

just kinda pondering but is part of the reason don didn't do the work for peggy (aside from hi i am don draper world's biggest douchecanoe) that he was scared he had lost his touch?
there was that look of rigid panic in his face when freddy said "do the work" that to me seemed to say "but what if i can't"

but wasn't he doing work for Freddy during his exile? i interpreted it more being Don as constant douche, tbh.

He was appalled at the idea of working under Peggy mainly.

his face in the meeting with her says it all

Peggy deciding where to stand, etc - really great

http://images.dangerousminds.net/uploads/images/turnonadvertisement234235.jpg

it was don all of the sudden being at the bottom of the ladder again. you felt that.

I think it was super weird for him because he's never been at the bottom of the latter in the ad industry. Wasn't he scouted as a car salesman for an immediate entry into a creative wunderkind job?

fwiw Mad Style confirms that Peggy was in Lane's office before Don

Oh, I was totally wrong. (I never rewatch previous Mad Men seasons once I've seen them.)

From wiki: "Not many details have been provided as to how Don Draper became the Creative Director at Sterling Cooper. Draper moved to New York City, where he worked as a fur salesman and attended City College at night. It was at this job that he met his future wife, Betty, a model who did a photo shoot for the company. Roger Sterling claims that he "discovered" Draper in this job and brought him to work at Sterling Cooper. In actuality, Sterling met Draper when he wanted to purchase a fur for his mistress Joan Holloway. After selling him the fur, Draper repeatedly lobbied Sterling for a job; Sterling declined Draper's repeated bids but accepted his offer to share drinks. Sterling became very drunk, and the next day, Don reported to work at Sterling Cooper, explaining to an astonished Sterling that he had offered Draper a job the night before."

that's maybe overselling the ambiguity a bit, but yeah it was not shown whether Sterling had actually drunkenly offered him a job (which, let's face it, is absolutely possible) or not

I'm sure Don admits it at some point, maybe in a drunken pit of self-loathing. Or was it to the woman in California that dies of cancer?

he does not

Fair enough, only watched the episodes once each myself.

http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/Waldorf_Stories

It was bugging me so I looked it up. I was obviously conflating a number of events, and invented Don talking introducing the flashback, but Don's and Roger's faces in the last picture make it obvious (although not explicit) Don totally scammed it.

OK episode, although Don gets another hit on the charts.

Ginsberg blew my mind (and his own).

I was a little confused by Megan apparently chasing Stephanie out the door with the offer of money. Why did that happen?

i assume jealousy? like he was ready to drop everything and show up for stephanie, with a kind of enthusiasm he rarely shows for megan.

fucking ginsberg tho, how awful.

Yeah, that makes sense. It just seemed like Megan turned cold as hell on a dime.

Megan's been hardened by putting up with Don's shit these past few years. She's not the person she was in past seasons.

More than just that jealousy. She was fine until Stephanie said "I know all his secrets".

Yeah, I just caught that on the replay.

Sort of wish they went In a different direction with Ginsberg's character.

liked that episode a lot

iirc megan has trouble in the fertility department (she miscarried), so maybe there's some jealousy over the pregnancy too.

https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/465676115353546753

The final scene with the three dudes and the cab put this quote into my head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8_GVfPuw4M

Cutler has become quite a loathsome character, it's true.

this url

http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/review-mad-men-the-runaways-its-my-nip-in-a-box