Matthew Weiner
Matthew Hoffman Weiner is an American writer, producer, director, actor and author, best known as the creator of the television series Mad Men and The Romanoffs. He is also noted for his work as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos and for his work as a writer on Becker. He wrote, directed and produced the comedy-drama film Are You Here in 2013, marking his filmmaking debut. He published his first novel Heather, the Totality in 2017.
Weiner has won nine Primetime Emmy Awards, two for The Sopranos and seven for Mad Men, as well as three Golden Globe Awards for Mad Men. Mad Men won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series for four consecutive years ; The Sopranos won the same award twice, in 2004 and 2007. In 2011, Weiner was included in Time annual Time 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World". In November 2011, The Atlantic named him one of 21 "Brave Thinkers."
Early life and education
Weiner was born in 1965 in Baltimore, to a Jewish family. He attended The Park School of Baltimore and grew up in Los Angeles where he attended Harvard School for Boys. His father was a medical researcher and chair of the neurology department at University of Southern California. His mother graduated from law school but never practiced. He enrolled in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, studying literature, philosophy, and history and earned an MFA from the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television.Career
Weiner described the start of his career as a "dark time. Show business looked so impenetrable that I eventually stopped writing." During this time, his wife financially supported them with her work as an architect. He began his screenwriting career writing for the short-lived Fox sitcom Party Girl. He was a writer and producer on The Naked Truth and Andy Richter Controls the Universe. Weiner wrote the pilot of Mad Men in 1999 as a spec script while working as a writer on Becker. The Sopranos creator and executive producer David Chase offered Weiner a job as a writer for the series after being impressed by the script.Weiner served as a supervising producer for the fifth season of The Sopranos, a co-executive producer for the first part of the sixth season, and an executive producer for the second part of the sixth season. He has sole or joint credit for 12 episodes overall, including the Primetime Emmy Award-nominated episodes "Unidentified Black Males" and "Kennedy and Heidi". He received two Primetime Emmy Awards as a producer of The Sopranos — one for the show's fifth season in 2004 and one for the second part of the show's sixth season in 2007.
In addition to writing and producing, he acted in two episodes, "Two Tonys" and "Stage 5" as fictional mafia expert Manny Safier, author of The Wise Guide to Wise Guys, on TV news broadcasts within the show.
Weiner also spent the hiatus between the two seasons teaching at his alma mater, the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, where he taught an undergraduate screenwriting class on Feature Rewriting during the Fall 2004 semester.
During his time on The Sopranos Weiner began looking for a network to produce Mad Men. HBO, Showtime and FX passed on the project. HBO offered to produce the series if Chase would be on board as a writer or producer, but Chase instead chose to focus on developing feature films. Weiner eventually pitched the series to AMC, which had never produced an original dramatic television series. They picked up the show, ordering a full 13-episode season. Mad Men premiered on July 19, 2007, six weeks after The Sopranos concluded. Weiner served as showrunner, an executive producer, and head writer of Mad Men throughout its seven seasons. As the showrunner he has had a major role in the writing and directing of each episode, also approving actors, costumes, hairstyles, and props. He is credited with writing or co-writing seven episodes of the first season, eleven episodes of the second, twelve episodes of the third, ten of the fourth, nine of the fifth, ten of the sixth, and twelve of the seventh. He has also directed all seven season finales, along with the season seven midseason finale and the penultimate episode of the series.
Mad Men has received considerable critical acclaim and has won four Golden Globe Awards and fifteen Primetime Emmy Awards. It is the first basic cable series to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning the award in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Weiner won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for the pilot episode, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", in 2008, as well as being nominated for "The Wheel". He also won Primetime Emmys for the same category in 2009, for "Meditations in an Emergency", and in 2010, for "Shut the Door. Have a Seat.". In 2009, he was also nominated for "A Night to Remember", "Six Month Leave", and "The Jet Set"; he was also nominated in 2010 for "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency". In 2011, he was nominated for "The Suitcase". In 2012, he was nominated for "Far Away Places" and "The Other Woman", both with Semi Chellas. Most recently, in 2015, he was nominated for "Lost Horizon" with Chellas and "Person to Person."
Weiner and his writing staff also won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series and were nominated for the award Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for their work on the first season. They were nominated for the WGA award for Best Dramatic Series a second time at the February 2009 ceremony for their work on the second season. Weiner and the writing staff won the WGA Award for Best Drama Series at the February 2010 ceremony for their work on the third season. Weiner was also twice nominated for the WGA award for episodic drama at the February 2010 ceremony for his work on "The Grown-Ups" and "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency".
Weiner's first feature film, Are You Here, filmed in North Carolina, premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in 2014.
Weiner's first novel, Heather, the Totality, was published in the fall of 2017.
In 2018, Weiner created The Romanoffs, an Amazon Video anthology series.
Personal life
Weiner married architect Linda Brettler in 1991. He filed for divorce in July 2019. One of their four sons, Marten Holden Weiner, played the recurring role of Glen Bishop on Mad Men.On November 9, 2017, former Mad Men writer Kater Gordon accused Weiner of making a comment at the office one night to the effect that she owed it to him "to see her naked." Gordon did not express discomfort to Weiner or file a complaint at the time, saying she was afraid of hurting her career. She says she turned down subsequent offers to write for other series because the series were all "salacious", which she chalked up to innuendo around her exit from the show and her relationship with Weiner more than her work on Mad Men. Gordon has not publicly pursued screenwriting or filmmaking since. She made the allegation against Weiner after sexual assaults in Hollywood came to light, saying it provided her a safe space to reveal her allegation, her experience helping to inspire her to launch an anti-sexual-harassment non-profit startup Modern Alliance. Weiner denies any memory of making the alleged comment.
In August 2015 he signed – as one of 98 members of the Los Angeles' Jewish community – an open letter supporting the proposed nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers led by the United States "as being in the best interest of the United States and Israel."