The art of Mad Men, a moving McGinnis painting -

OK, we love Mad Men. It’s a classic TV show with very rich, well written characters set in a time period that we at American Pulps are very much into. I can’t say much about the show that hasn’t already been said. It’s been off the air for three years now and it’s been picked apart and dissected so many times I’m not gonna bring anything to the table these articles and videos haven’t already said:

What’s So Good About “Mad Men”? – By George Packer – The New Yorker (November 9, 2009)

‘Mad Men’ at 10: The Last Great Drama of TV’s Golden Age – By Sonia Saraiya – Variety (July 18, 2017)

What we will say about the show is how it is so beautifully shot. They obviously looked at Robert McGinnis paintings when they were story boarding the show, they had to. He did the poster art for so many movies of that time, he was a contemporary of Don Drapers. And like Don, he was a trendsetter. You could seriously stop the show at any time and it will more than likely look like either a Robert McGinnis painting or an Edward Hopper painting. And that is such a huge part of it’s appeal. It’s written very well with great acting but the shots are just beautiful. Here’s some stills (and promos) along with some McGinnis and Hopper paintings so you can see for yourself.

This is straight up Robert McGinnis blocking right there. Jessica Paré looks like a McGinnis girl in every one of these shots.

Obviously, you’ve got to give Don or Roger a gun for these to work entirely but you get the drift.

Mad Men – Season 5, Episode 1 – Photo Credit: Ron Jaffe/AMC

There’s good reason they’d look to McGinnis for inspiration, he did some iconic work during the time period Mad Men takes place.

McGinnis work for the James Bond movie, Thunderball

This one’s kind of McGinnis meets Hopper which brings me to:

Another subliminal appeal for us is the fact that so many of our favorite writers, creators, and artists of that time worked in advertising. Except of course Raymond Chandler:

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
– Raymond Chandler

But F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herbert Kastle, Salman Rushdie, Joseph Heller, Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, and James Paterson (the first books were great at least) all started as copywriters. So did Hugh Hefner, Sir Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan “Old Ben” Kenobi), John Hughes, and Jim Henson. Our favorite artists who did great ad work, Mort Künstler, the aforementioned Robert McGinnis, Al Parker, Ernest Chiriaka, Coby Whitmore, Robert Maguire, the list goes on.

This from Mort Künstler is just begging for some Draper (Or Ogilvy) copy.

Most of them hated working in advertising, and writing pulp fiction paperbacks or doing cover art for them was a means of escape. Like Ken Cosgrove, who had a short science fiction story published in The Atlantic early in an early season. Later in the show he got shot in the face by a Chevy executive while hunting, shoulda stuck to writing there Ken.

Although we like other shows more (and will talk about them in articles to come) Mad Men is, womanizing aside, the embodiment of American Pulps.

In closing, I can’t talk about Mad Men without showing this clip. Cheers.