Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Casey soon grasped that there were two ways to go with Gilmore characters: “It was either good-looking or the quirkier the better. If [an actor] was going to be making out with Rory, he had to be good-looking.” Jared Padalecki came in during a brief visit from Texas and was cast as Rory’s first boyfriend, Dean. Scott Patterson—the actor who plays Luke Danes, Lorelai’s true love—started out as a recurring character rather than a series regular thanks to a tight budget. That was how the Gilmore production team often brought actors on board, slipping them under the radar on an episode-by-episode basis so they didn’t need to get network approval. Sean Gunn was a perfect example of that stealthy strategy: the character actor was cast in the first episode as a cable installer. He returned in the next episode as a swan delivery guy. Jami Rudofsky had heard that Sherman-Palladino’s dad played a series of different characters wearing different hats on the eighties comedy Gimme a Break and suggested they try the same gimmick with Gunn. Eventually the role settled into Kirk, one of the great TV weirdos of all time, who cycles through every job in town, makes amateur movies, and suffers from night terrors that cause him to run naked through Stars Hollow.

  Gilmore Girls’s teething troubles went beyond casting. Sherman-Palladino had written a very wordy pilot script, and the executives were insistent that it needed to be cut down if it was to have any hope of fitting the allotted time. But because the show’s dialogue is delivered at such a lightning clip, after the shooting was done, the episode actually ran fifteen minutes short. There was also the Rory problem: most of the series’ early story lines revolved around Rory and Lorelai, but Bledel was too much of a technical novice to carry scenes on her own. She was like a doe caught in the klieg lights. “So Lauren and Alexis had to be in every scene together,” says Sherman-Palladino. Because the other plotlines and characters were as yet less developed, all the focus was on Lorelai and Rory—and all the work fell on Graham and Bledel. “The two of them—I almost killed them, but I kind of had no choice because I was still figuring out where my other stories were.”

  Midway through the first season, the exhausted actresses came to the showrunner begging for a reprieve. Sherman-Palladino began to expand other characters: Rory’s best friend, Lane, and nemesis, Paris; love interests (Dean and Jess for Rory, Max and Christopher for Lorelai); and of course Emily and Richard Gilmore: “We realized there are two pros sitting there, why not give them more to do?”

  Graham recently rewatched the first episode and was struck by how little plot unfurls: “Nothing happened for easily twenty minutes, and you don’t care because there is something warm and inviting about the language and the people. Here is this person, she likes coffee, and here’s her daughter, and here she is at work and . . . Almost halfway through, you get to the fact that she needs money to pay for her kid’s school. That would be the first three minutes of the pilot today—with an explosion and a vampire thrown in.”

  And yet, seemingly contradicting the leisurely narrative, the show’s dialogue pacing was breakneck, like a Ramones song transposed to television or a Hepburn-Tracy movie on speed. “It is the way I write; I love banter,” Sherman-Palladino told me in 2004. “Woody Allen at his height—it doesn’t get better than that. Those people talk over each other. Comedy plays better faster; it just does.” Editor Raúl Dávalos even snipped frames so that the dialogue overlapped or characters seemed to move faster. Says Sherman-Palladino, “You take the air out of something and it’s immediately more entertaining.”

  When bringing in actors for auditions, “we would have to constantly tell people, you have to be on top of your lines,” says Casey. “It wasn’t about talking superfast, it was about coming right in as soon as the other person stops talking. It’s kind of a rhythm you pick up.” A script supervisor would time takes to maintain velocity. In the second season, Sherman-Palladino mocked her own need for speed: Rory’s debate partner, Paris, complains that Rory speaks too slowly, at 135 words per minute compared to Paris’s 178. When Rory insists that’s a normal tempo, Paris taunts, “For the average Willie Nelson roadie, yes, but not for a winning debate team member.”

  Graham, who studied English at Barnard, idolized Katharine Hepburn, and cut her teeth on Kaufman-Hart plays, says she was born to play hyperverbal Lorelai. She quickly learned to memorize gargantuan blocks of dialogue but found it harder to master the long tracking shots that required marathon sessions of walking and talking while looking perfectly natural. These were tougher still for the inexperienced Bledel, which meant that Graham was constantly manhandling her on-screen daughter in order to steer her into place—something that actually enhanced viewers’ sense of the women’s intimacy on-screen.

  Even veteran actor Edward Herrmann found the rigors of the series frustrating, occasionally rebelling against Sherman-Palladino’s perfectionist desire to have the script performed word for word in repeated takes. Sherman-Palladino fondly recalled him shouting, “We’re not puppets! We’re not puppets!”

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  When the show premiered, its galloping gait and fixation on walking and talking earned it an immediate comparison to The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin’s wordy ensemble drama about the White House had launched just the year before, to great acclaim. A fake Associated Press article posted online even claimed that Sorkin “has been unmasked as the primary voice” of Gilmore Girls and that “Amy Sherman-Palladino” was “a pseudonym representing a writing collective of Sorkin, fellow West Wing scribe Patrick Caddell, and former Sports Night scribe Kevin Falls.” Sherman-Palladino gamely addressed the hoax at the Television Critics Association conference in July 2001, telling a reporter, “What’s funny is that the rumor wasn’t even that I was fronting for him. It was, I didn’t even exist. Like, my whole existence was wiped out.”

  The idea that Sorkin or any of these guys could’ve created Lorelai Gilmore is absurd. After meeting Sherman-Palladino, one can be in no doubt that the character’s DNA stems directly from her brainpan. Her conversational style is a wild onrush of wit lightly creased with crankiness. Although she likes to deflect the idea that Lorelai is based directly on her, pointing out that she has no children nor any desire to be a parent, she does admit, “A lot of my points of view, and of course the fact that I have no attention span, come through in Lorelai.”

  Graham was warned off taking the role by some of her actor friends, who suggested that mother characters are death traps for a young actress. “Before you know it, you go from playing the college student to the mom. [Screen] moms tend to have very similar qualities, and the moms are endlessly folding laundry and stuff,” Graham acknowledges. “But being a mom was like fifth on the list of what [Lorelai] was. She was dynamic and a career person and irritated with her parents and very close to her daughter. None of that had a stereotypical quality to it.”

  Ignoring traditional maternal models, the unmarried Lorelai chooses to coparent her daughter with the entire village of Stars Hollow rather than settle on a partner. A horrible cook, Lorelai takes Rory for breakfast at Luke’s Diner more often than not, and the fridge is always crammed with take-out containers. Autopsies would likely have shown a high percentage of these women’s bodies consisting of coffee and Pop-Tarts. (Chalk up the implausibly perfect figures and flawless alabaster skin to the magic of Stars Hollow and Hollywood.) Lorelai rarely disciplines her child, which works out fine, because Rory is a preternaturally mature girl, craving order in the face of her mother’s seat-of-the-pants chaos.

  The secret to Lorelai is that she is written as a teenager herself. Having given birth at sixteen, she retains a kind of adolescent ferocity and sass. Early on, though, Sherman-Palladino had a tough time finding writers who understood the slightly unconventional narrative she had in mind. “That first year, I had a roomful of writers who looked at me like I was speaking Chinese,” she recalls. “I kept saying: We are not [writing] mother-daughter stories—we are [writing] girlfriend stories. Lorelai is a child herself, you know? There are moments where she has to learn to be a mother
.” Instead, she says, her writers, a largely inexperienced bunch, gave her a lot of finger-wagging moralism. She heavily rewrote every script.

  At the end of the first season, Sherman-Palladino was tired. She begged her husband, Dan, who was working on the Fox comedy Family Guy, to join her as an executive producer. “I told him, otherwise you’re going to be a widower. So he did. Once he came over, I had at least one other person who knew how to write the show,” she chuckles, then adds darkly, “but there was a trail of tears from the writers we fired. We fired playwrights and award winners; we fired the best.”

  Among those was Jenji Kohan, who went on to create Weeds and Orange Is the New Black. She wrote the first-season Gilmore episode in which Rory and Dean sneak a tender first kiss in the supermarket aisle and she flees holding a box of cornstarch. (“I got kissed—and I shoplifted!” Rory trills afterward.) “It was a situation in which the showrunner didn’t want a [writing] staff, and it was being forced on her,” Kohan recalls, with no trace of bitterness. “I took the checks, but it was very unpleasant to be in there, because you are fighting an uphill battle with everything. I have a lot of empathy for Amy; she wanted to do it herself with her husband and maybe one or two others, and she did not think that other people could deliver her vision the way she did.”

  When I ask Sherman-Palladino if she ever posted a list of enemies à la Roseanne Barr, she replies, “I didn’t have an enemies list on the wall. Not officially.” I wait for a sly grin to follow, but instead, she takes a sip of her drink.

  Lauren Graham says, “I don’t know what went on in the writers’ room, but . . . over time, it seemed like Amy and Dan wrote more and more episodes and directed more and more of them. There was an evolution of ‘I like this done a certain way, so why don’t I just do it?’ ” Although the couple worked symbiotically, Amy was often tied up with casting, directing, editing, and dealing with executives or production issues, while Dan tended to run the writers’ room because, Sherman-Palladino admits, “He was more patient. I would say, ‘Let me just rewrite it!’ He would say, ‘Let me try to get them closer to what you want.’ Which is a real art.”

  Sherman-Palladino’s sensibility pulsed at the heart of the show, which meant that every word of each script ultimately went through her hands. That could be frustrating for writers. “Amy understood what made that show, and it was her voice,” says Jane Espenson, who came to Gilmore Girls after writing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “So, no matter what you turned in, she was going to rewrite it in her voice. It was very hard to get dialogue on the air.” Sheila R. Lawrence, who worked on Gilmore Girls and later on Sherman-Palladino’s series Bunheads, notes that writers nevertheless had huge input into the show’s structure, plot, and details. “Because we had such a small staff and because it was such a personal show, we all had our handprints on it in a weird way. On every episode of Gilmore, there would be a little moment or a story line that came out of one of the writers’ personal lives. Dan and Amy were both really great at mining the embarrassing, horrible things that happen in your life and making them happen to Rory, for instance.”

  Sometimes it seemed that Sherman-Palladino’s ambition outstretched her resources. Hours were hellish on Gilmore Girls, and the show ran on a shoestring compared to network series on which she’d previously worked. She had definite ideas of how she wanted everything to look and sound, but not always enough experience to know how to achieve perfection: “I quickly learned, you have to ask for snow! We were supposed to be set in Connecticut, so you just assume that there’s going to be snow available. But nope, you have to negotiate for snow.”

  Then there was the search for directors who weren’t “whiny little baby men,” in Sherman-Palladino’s words. “The misogyny was really bad that first year.” Still, she concedes that some of this early conflict may have stemmed from misunderstandings. “I came from sitcoms, and in sitcoms the writer is king. I didn’t understand that the director of drama has a say. And there was a lot of tension because I didn’t know shit about the camera, but I knew what I wanted.” More than a third of the series’ original episodes would eventually be directed by women—including fifteen by Sherman-Palladino herself.

  She found a directing mentor in Lesli Linka Glatter, who had directed Twin Peaks, helmed the Gilmore Girls pilot, and later went on to run Homeland. “Lesli is the one who taught me about walk and talks,” Sherman-Palladino says. “She is a dancer, and she moves that camera so beautifully.” Linka Glatter helped to create the show’s swift-moving visual style. But to begin with, Sherman-Palladino drove her nuts. “She would yell ‘cut’ and then run away from me. And then I would run after her. After a while, it got kind of funny, because she would say ‘cut,’ and we would both run.” Sherman-Palladino waves her arms around in a mock sprint. “To me, that’s what the creative process is all about: it’s supposed to be a rip-roaring ‘I hate you! I love you!’ When you work with people who want the quality to be as good as you want it, everybody is going to fight to make it the best it can be.”

  It took a while before Sherman-Palladino felt the set belonged to her. “If you’re a woman and you’re too aggressive, you are [seen as] a bitch. You might as well own that. I don’t know any other way to do it. At the end of the day, if you haven’t taken that final cut in the editing room and you haven’t placed the music and you haven’t been in that sound mix, I don’t know how you call it your show.”

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  Scheduled head-to-head on Thursday nights against ratings monster Friends, the series almost seemed like a sacrificial lamb. While Gilmore Girls pulled in an average of 3.6 million viewers an episode that first season, Friends approached 23 million. (A MADtv parody of the show titled Gabmore Girls later teased, “It’s number ninety-two in the ratings, but that’s number one for the WB!”)

  Five years before, My So-Called Life, a series about a smart teenage girl, co-created by Winnie Holzman, had also gone up against Friends, only to face cancellation after just nineteen episodes. ABC’s Stu Bloomberg told the Los Angeles Times in 1995 that the problem with My So-Called Life was that “it only got teenage girls.” Yet within just a few years, that same young female demographic had become a creative and consumer powerhouse, buoying the success of Sassy magazine and the Spice Girls. In 1997, Nick Bennett of brand design agency nickandpaul predicted a girl-power gold rush as corporations homed in on this burgeoning market of single eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds: “You’ll start to see loads of products that reflect this new idea of femaleness. That’s what everyone’s salivating to tap into.”

  The WB was perfectly poised to serve young female entertainment refugees with Felicity and Buffy, but it also needed to raise itself from its dregs as the number six broadcast network (out of six). Appealing to some male viewers seemed key. In the prelaunch publicity thrust, Sherman-Palladino assured Entertainment Weekly, “It’s not just a chick show . . . and I’m adding a couple more guys.” Graham joked in the same article that the network hoped male audiences would be interested: “That’s why my shorts will be very short.” Lorelai did wear some questionable Daisy Dukes in the second episode, in which she takes Rory to her first day at her snobby private school, but this seemed less about sex appeal and more a sign of Lorelai’s disorganized and unorthodox mothering style. (She oversleeps on this momentous day, only to realize her more appropriate clothes are at the dry cleaner’s.) It was clear, whatever she wore, that Lorelai was a MILF, a slang word that gained currency right around the same time as Gilmore Girls’s debut, thanks to the 1999 blockbuster American Pie.

  “The show is called Gilmore Girls; it’s about women, and that right there meant you were going to have to convince your boyfriend to watch it with you,” concedes Graham now. “Maybe some people thought it wasn’t for them because it was a girlie show. These are some of the smartest scripts I have ever read, but there was a presumption . . .”—a presumption that relegated a female-driven show to the cultural margins. In many ways, Gilmore Girls played up that
femme reputation. Gossamer vocals by indie singer-songwriter Sam Phillips washed over every scene. Sherman-Palladino has compared Phillips’s “haunted” music to Joan Didion’s writing, telling one reporter, “it sounded like it was coming out of the girls’ heads. . . . [I]f they had music going in their head during a certain emotional thing in their life, if they were real people, this would be the music that was going on.”

  There was never much danger of Gilmore Girls getting anything but an A on the Bechdel Test. That’s the metric invented by cartoonist Alison Bechdel (inspired by comments made by her friend Liz Wallace) for monitoring how often female characters in a fictional world talk together about a subject other than men. Most Gilmore scenes bring together two or more women talking among themselves. Lorelai banters with Rory and her mom, Emily, but also with chef Sookie; Rory regularly confides in her best pal, Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), and eventually finds kinship with her former rival, the abrasive Paris Geller (Liza Weil). Stars Hollow is also a utopian hive of female enterprise. Mia, who owns the Independence Inn, took in Lorelai as a teenager and mentored her rise from maid to manager; Miss Patty runs the dance studio and hosts town meetings; Gypsy operates the local auto-repair shop; Lane Kim’s mother is the proprietor of an antiques shop; and Sophie Bloom (played by singer-songwriter Carole King) is the music-store owner who enables Lane to play drums.

  Lorelai’s desire for Rory to focus on ambition over romance runs like a spine through the series. Although Lorelai was derailed by her teenage pregnancy and never made it to college, she projects her youthful fantasy of attending Harvard onto her kid. Rory surprises everyone by picking Yale instead, and then rebels against her mother’s aspirations later by (briefly) dropping out of school, choosing instead to organize society parties, live with her grandparents, and get entangled with wealthy playboy Logan (Matt Czuchry). This monied and entitled world is everything Lorelai despises. Ultimately, though, Rory’s dream is to become a serious reporter. She knows that her codependent relationship with Lorelai could make that problematic: “It’s going to be very hard to be Christiane Amanpour broadcasting live from a foxhole in Tehran with my mommy.” Amanpour eventually made a cameo on the show, as did former secretary of state Madeleine Albright—the latter in a dream sequence in which she plays Lorelai snuggling in bed with Rory, telling her the story of her birth.