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Job Title: The 'Gilmore' Noodge
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: January 23, 2005
AFTER being in reruns since November, the warm, witty "Gilmore Girls" returns with a new episode on Tuesday - overseen, as always, by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the show's creator and executive producer. Though Rory (Alexis Bledel) is now away at Yale, her extremely young mother Lorelei (Lauren Graham) is still keeping tabs on her. And Rory's the rare kind of girl who likes having tabs kept on her. Not Ms. Sherman-Palladino, who, as she told Virginia Heffernan over lunch at the Warner Brothers commissary, doesn't like to answer to anybody.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN The central characters on "Gilmore Girls" are Connecticut WASP's from an old American Revolution family. But that's not your background. You're a Jewish woman from Los Angeles. How did you end up in this terrain?
AMY SHERMAN-PALLADINO Well, my writing, my banter comes from my upbringing, my Catskills/Borscht Belt influence. My father's a comic, now in his 70's. He's the king of the cruise lines. He works on the cruise lines 90 percent of the year.
I didn't set out to write a WASP story. I pitched the WB an hourlong about a mother and daughter who are more friends than mother and daughter. And they loved that idea. But I didn't know where they lived. Do I put them in New York? Do I put them in Chicago? I thought a small Connecticut town would be great. I grew up in the Valley, and I didn't know any of our neighbors. I think when you grow up like that, there's always sort of a fantasy of a place where everybody knew each other, and you had that safe sort of feeling.
I wanted the parents in the nearest moneyed area. Hartford seemed right. It kind of dictated WASP. And I also wanted to do a social structure: a daughter who has socially elevated parents and lets them down - it's just more pain. And it's more comedy. So that dictated WASP, too.
But we've introduced everything we can. Paris is a Jew. We had Ramadan the other day. Anything we can throw into the mix. Lane is a Seventh-Day Adventist.
Q. Last season, some people thought the show was off its game. What happened?
A. Rory wasn't in high school anymore. So she wasn't in the little plaid skirt. She wasn't living at home. We didn't have our boys; we didn't have a love interest. There were things that were different. But I stand by last season. If you stay true to what you're doing, that's all you can do.
Q. "Gilmore Girls" is a speedy show. Why does everyone talk so fast?
A. I think in a talk-off, Lauren [Graham] could tie me or maybe best me. These television shows that have 14 shots of somebody looking at each other with the wind blowing through their hair drive me insane. Who's got that kind of time? We got that the girl was pretty when she walked in the door. Come on, somebody say something; let's go. People react immediately when other people talk. They don't go, "Let me think for five seconds," before going, "I would like coffee."
Q. Would you like coffee? You're drinking a lot of it.
A. I'm so tired. The 100th episode has been such a grind. I feel like, everything I wanted to do, I got to do. But it was a lot of fighting.
Q. What kind of things do you have to fight for? Does the studio challenge your ideas?
A. In the beginning, there was a lot of "On 'Dawson's Creek' we do things this way." On the relationship between Rory and Lorelei, I got a lot of notes early on about motherness. "A mother wouldn't do this." And I said: "This mother would. Because the relationship I'm doing here is not mother and daughter, it's best friends." They're used to mothers saying, "That's right and that's wrong," and Lorelei doesn't do that, because she's still trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong herself. That was one thing that was constant.
I don't have those battles anymore. The only battles I have are about money. And this was a much more expensive show than we've ever done. In the old daysthe studio would go and fight with the network for a little extra money. But now the studio and the network are the same person, splitting the same money. It was a lot of like conversations and nervous phone calls.
Q. You seem to thrive in those conversations.
A. I'm not a shrinking violet. The thing about being show-runner is it's a big, big, big job. I believe it is my job, at every step of the road, to see that things are correct. That this bar is very high. From the story breaking, to the writing, to the rewriting, to the stage, to costumes, to set dressing, to the editing, to the music, it has to be as good as it can possibly be in our time frame.
To be really good, you have to be willing to have everybody in the world hate you. That's hard to do, because this is a small town, and everybody plays golf together. And if you flip off the guy at CBS, he's going to be having lunch with FOX, NBC and ABC. And that is your reputation. And that's my reputation - I know it.
Q. Really?
A. People say, "Oh, Amy - great. Comes with a lot of baggage." But my job is not to come to you and say, "How would you like me to do this?" I can't fix your refrigerator. I have no skills - I can't inject you with medication. All I can say is, "O.K., you're paying me to create this world, craft this show, run this show, and if that means sometimes I have to say no to you to give you a better product, that's what you're paying me for."
Q. Do you have a lot of battles with the actors on the show?
A. No. I have great respect for my actors. And I take care of them. I invest a lot of time and energy into every single one of these characters, no matter how small.
Our newest kid, at Yale, was one of the fluke stories. We were having breakfast at the Mercer Hotel, and he was our waiter. And my husband looked up and said: "That guy looks like an actor. He's got that young Tom Hanksy sort of look. Someone like him would be good at Yale." So we said, "Are you an actor?" And he said, "Yeah, I am." So now he's a recurring role. One of those Lana Turner things. He's a very sweet kid.
Q. Speaking of Yale, the show seems to express great admiration for college life. Why?
A. One of my great regrets is that I didn't go to college. I had very little patience for school, and it was never stressed in my household. We were a showbiz family. You don't go to college when you're going to be in showbiz. Those are your good years. You're young and strong and your butt looks great. Why spend four years drinking away at a keg party? My joke about my parents, which is not a joke, is that a year after I graduated from high school, my dad just suddenly turned to me and said: "Did you want to go to college? Cause we would have sent you." I've always felt that college is a wonderful privilege. To have four years where your only responsibility is to learn things! I'd give anything.
Q. So you decided between acting and writing?
A. I was supposed to be a dancer, according to my mother. When I got my job on "Roseanne," I actually had a callback for the touring company of "Cats." My partner - my first year of writing I had a writing partner - called, and she said, "We got the job on Roseanne." And I said, "But what if I get 'Cats'?" She said, "Well, then, you don't go." That's such a weird thought. I can't stay and be a writer! I really didn't want to go to an office every day. I was a night gal. It was a pretty hard adjustment.
Q. "Roseanne" had a reputation for being a very drug-influenced show. Was it?
A. I'm very naïve. My dad worked on "The Bobby Darin Show," and he was like, "We'd come in, and we'd go get high, and we'd leave and go have lunch, and we'd come back, and we'd go get high again, and then we'd write for a couple of hours. And then we'd go out." It was a totally different way of working. Now Hollywood is so, kind of, with the egg whites and no one eats pasta, and no one does drugs even though everybody does. They just go in a backroom.
Q. On "Gilmore Girls," are the characters smarter than the actors? It must be hard to get people to simulate more intelligence than they have.
A. Alexis didn't go to college. She's much more of a free-spirited kind of kid than Rory is. But she's not dumber. She's not as book smart, and as educated, but she's not dumber.
Q. But she can't be as witty as Rory, who, like Lorelei, always has a line.
A. No, but you can't be a moron and have anyone believe that you're smart. I tried to get Christiane Amanpour on the show. And I refuse to give up. And I tried to get Angela Davis on the show. And I tried to get Noam Chomsky on the show. The man is booked up for the next two years, by the way. Noam Chomsky is very busy. But we got Norman Mailer on the show.
Q. As you now enter the golden realm of syndication, are you surprised at the show's success?
A. We were kind of the little show that they put on, thinking, "If 'Friends' kills it, who cares?" And I'm me, so by the time we did O.K., it was a little too late to get in my face. The music was set; the tempo was set. There wasn't much more to discuss. Probably a lot of sighing, "She's insane." But I'm not insane. I'm not.
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*Alexis*
RORY: Originally named Sophie Friedricke Augustine von Anhalt-Zerbst.
LORELAI: But everybody called her "Kitten."
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