In Tablet magazine, journalist David Samuels begins his interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men (whose final run debuts this Sunday) by asking him, “You’re one of those Los Angeles Jews, right?” Weiner proceeds to explore growing up in 1980s-era L.A. about which he tells Samuels, “I lived in a world of the white power elite of Los Angeles where there was a lot of sexism and anti-Semitism, and I was in their homes, observing,” and would later form the basis of much of Mad Men’s office politics. At the end of the article, Samuels says to Weiner, “So, here’s my story about L.A. Jews. I promise you’re going to like it.”
As usual with an interview, Samuels, who had been asking the questions up until this point is in bold, and Weiner, the subject of the interview is formatted in plain text. But here’s where things get weird, when Samuels tells Weiner, “Twenty years ago, I was staying at a friend’s house and her dad was a personage of whatever note among California architects, and he had a dinner party, and the person sitting to my right was John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now, and—”
I know John!
Right. I was like this is so cool, right? John Milius!!
Yeah, John’s the coolest.
He was so cool. And so he told me a cool story. At some point he was like, “You’re from New York, are you Jewish?” I was like, “Yeah I’m Jewish.” He’s like, “I got a good story for you. You know that I went to film school with Steven Spielberg, right? We’re friends.” I was like, “All right.”
He says, “So, one day I got a call.” This is sometime in the late ’80s, 1990s, something like that. So he got a call and it’s Spielberg, and he says “John, you’ve got to come over right away.”
You should ask John about being an L.A. Jew. He’s another one, he grew up in Bel Air. Anyway, go ahead. He says, “You gotta come over.”
He said, “ ‘You gotta come over right away.’ I said, ‘Is something wrong?’ He said, ‘Just come over, come over.’ And so I said, ‘OK.’ So, I get in my car and I drive up to the Spielberg mansion and I’m going through the gate, I parked the car, Steven comes to the door himself, and he’s like, ‘Come in here, John. I’ve got to show you something.’ And so I got in with Steven and we go in his living room and there are books all over the living room, dozens of books, like Time-Life books, open to these photographs of the ghettos and the gas chambers and whatever else. And he says, ‘John, did you know that they killed 6 MILLION Jews during the Second World War?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Did you know that they had gas chambers where they gassed Jews to DEATH.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Steven. I knew that.’ ”
I was so stunned, for a moment, and then I was like, “No, that’s bullshit.” And Milius said, “No, no, no, that really happened. Steven discovered the Holocaust when he was in his late 30s. He had no idea it happened.”
That is a great story. And I take your point. Meanwhile, his mother owns a kosher restaurant in Los Angeles, so it definitely must have come up.
His parents knew about it, for sure. But he was a suburban prodigy. Then he was doing Jaws, he was doing Close Encounters, E.T., he didn’t have time for much history until he was older. Plus it was California in the ’70s and ’80s. So it does make sense.
You know what, that’s amazing.
So, is that a story about Los Angeles Jews?
He’s from Arizona, he went to college in California but he’s not a Los Angeles Jew. So it’s not that. It’s hard to explain it, but it’s missing a little bit of the spiciness. I honestly think that we blend a little bit better, for better or worse. We pass a little bit better because it’s so casual out there.
As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Spielberg was notorious amongst his fellow young Turks of the 1970s for his comparative naivete when compared to a crowd that fancied themselves the second coming of Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut. On the flip-side, that naivete is also what led to his superstardom and fortune: they wanted to make Art to appeal to their fellow self-styled elites, he was making popcorn movies for the masses. And while Milius is a hugely expansive raconteur and teller of tall tales (his bio movie on Netflix is loads of fun and highly recommended), I don’t think he’d lie about this — besides, who would make it up?
So as John Podhoretz asks on Twitter, is it possible this is true? That when Spielberg was directing Raiders of the Lost Ark and its hordes of cartoon Nazis, he didn’t know about the Holocaust? That someone who went to high school in the early 1960s wouldn’t know about the Holocaust?!
If so, chalk it up once again to Malcolm Muggeridge’s Law: there’s no way a satirist can improve upon real life for its pure absurdity.
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