“It’s like getting a chance to go to college all over again, but this time you know what classes to take, and you know how to really appreciate all the, uh, classes, and the people, and, uh…”
No, that’s not what it was like.
“It’s like, if you got back together with an old boyfriend, but now there were only the good parts about him, without all the stuff that bugged you, and you got to fall in love all over again, without making any of the mistakes you made when you, uh…”
No, that’s not it either.
“It’s like if you were diagnosed with a disease, but then the doctors realized they’d made a mistake and you were actually okay, so you experienced the feeling of enjoying every day that much more, because suddenly you’d been reminded how precious the days were, and you were even more thankful to have them because you’d been faced with the reality of how rare they actually are, when before you’d taken the days for granted and thought you were sick but you’re not, and…”
Uh, no.
I have an old email from Amy from December 2014, where she mentions the possibility of taking a pitch out to some streaming services. That must mean that we’d already had our lunch at the Greek restaurant in Los Angeles where she first told me some of her ideas and started sketching out the early plotlines. Inspired by the British series Sherlock, which has no yearly set number of episodes but instead does anywhere from one to four specials, she envisioned four mini-movies that would run about ninety minutes each.
At that lunch, she asked if I’d read the Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Yes, I had, I replied. She also kept asking me if I’d read Wild and/or seen the movie. Yes to both, I told her, and why was she asking? We hadn’t seen each other in a while and the reality of getting back together to do the show again seemed so far away, which meant we kept getting distracted and going off on tangents and she never really answered me about either. What she was mainly there to ask me was, if it was possible to somehow put this thing together, would I be interested?
Why, yes—yes, I would be.
A few months later, in early spring of 2015, Amy and Dan felt we were inching closer to the reality of making the show at Netflix, but we were still too far away to make any formal announcement. Warner Brothers and Netflix had to agree to a deal first, and then Amy and Dan would go in and pitch the story ideas, or was it the other way around? Would it be better to pitch the ideas first, then see if everyone could make a deal? This was all new territory. The two entities would be paying for the show, and they had to make nice with each other first, and that process was complicated. The existence of streaming was new, rebooting a show on a different network was new, and turning a show that once had been an hour long minus time for commercials into uninterrupted ninety-minute movies was new. And notice that no one was even talking about the actors yet. This could all take a while. “The Green Eggs and Ham deal took eighteen months,” Amy told me. Eighteen months? Also, they’re making Green Eggs and Ham into a movie? Anyway, I knew we didn’t have that much time, in part because of the back lot.
The back lot. Oy.
You’ve heard of the town of Stars Hollow? Well, I’m here to tell you, it is real. It’s a wonderful, happy place with cheerful neighbors, ballerinas taking classes at Miss Patty’s, and a seasonal festival of some sort happening in the town square. It’s a place where the coffee flows freely, junk food has no calories, and Kirk has somehow found yet another job. There, the town meeting might be in session (although I’m usually late for it), with Taylor Doose presiding, and outside, near the gazebo, there could be a hay bale maze set up for your enjoyment. It’s a place where, on one special day every year, I smell snow. If that’s where you’d like to leave your understanding of our beloved town, please skip the next paragraph.
Because sometimes it’s also a place in Los Angeles on the Warner Brothers lot, where other people from other shows come to visit, and sometimes they stay for a while—occasionally for years. Shockingly, it turned out that no one had reserved that spot for us indefinitely and held it frozen in time in the event of our triumphant return. Lots of other shows needed the back lot around the same dates we needed it, so we’d been given a very narrow time frame in which to use it. Obviously, when you’re returning to Stars Hollow, you have to have an actual Stars Hollow. But the reality of the scheduling was that if we couldn’t find a way to start filming by February 2016, basically we wouldn’t be filming at all.
In March 2015, with everything still very much up in the air, we were invited to the ATX Festival in Austin, Texas, for a Gilmore Girls reunion. In my emails with Amy from that time, we discussed where to stay in Austin (the St. Cecilia), our shared eye doctor (Dr. Sacks), and theater (Hand of God—so good! And no, even back then you couldn’t get Hamilton tickets). We also discussed the many rumors that were flying around. I heard the deal was getting close. I heard the deal was falling apart. Scott Patterson went on a podcast and mentioned there were “talks,” which had basically been true since the day the show ended in 2007, but the comment caught fire and people thought he knew more than he was saying, when in fact none of us did. A few weeks after the festival I got a call from my agent saying that he’d finally heard Netflix had committed to making eight to ten episodes of our show. Great news! I emailed Amy, who said she’d heard no such thing.
In the meantime, Amy’s mysterious questions continued. She asked me if I knew fellow Barnard alum Jeanine Tesori, and I said I didn’t, but I loved her musical Fun Home with all my heart. Amy told me she was having back trouble and wondered if I’d ever had back trouble. She asked me if, on the old show, I remembered asking her to write the longest monologue that had ever been done on TV. Our scripts back then had averaged eighty-five pages when most one-hour shows are under fifty pages, but still, I wanted more!
Anyway, there were many emails going back and forth. We kept trying to meet for drinks, but plans kept moving (I forgot I had tickets to Fish in the Dark and other New York City scheduling problems), and I started getting confused as to which of her inquiries was regarding real life and which might be potential Gilmore plotlines. Does Lorelai deliver a long monologue about straining her back while listening to the works of Jeanine Tesori as she cleans out her closet wearing hiking boots? I wasn’t sure.
Then one day, out of the blue, there was a press release that said Netflix would indeed carry the new episodes—four 90-minute movies. This was exciting, but news to practically everyone. Alexis, Kelly, Scott, and I had been involved in these casual conversations for months, and I’d had all those mysterious questions from Amy, of course, but suddenly it was real. Or, more accurately, suddenly Warner Brothers and Netflix had been able to make a real deal with each other to make movies that needed to start filming in under two months, and which had no sets built and zero actors formally attached. Fun! Sean Gunn posted a picture of himself on Twitter next to the announcement on his computer. He looked completely surprised, because he was. Amy and I spoke on the phone, and I congratulated her—er, us? But weeks after you were already excited about watching it, and I was being congratulated on being in it, no one had yet called me about actually doing it. Plus I was in Atlanta by then, filming the movie Middle School, which had months left to go, and as far as I could tell, the filming schedules totally conflicted. Um, was anyone else worried about this? It seemed no one was.
Finally one day the phone rang.
Deal making in Hollywood is a fun and straightforward process where everyone puts their cards on the table and then proceeds, like proper ladies and gentlemen, to respectfully agree to terms and sums of money that are fair to both sides…is a sentence that has never before been written.
Let me attempt to explain how it really happens.
Negotiating in Hollywood is like dating a horrible guy whom you have to keep seeing because he is in charge of your paycheck. In order to get your money from him, you will have to put up with a lot of crap and pretend to enjoy it. Once he pays you, you can bre
ak up with him, but only until the next time you need him, at which time you’ll have to pretend to be in love with him all over again and act as if you have no memory of the past. Paycheck Boyfriend does not return your phone calls, or else calls you only at weird times when he knows you can’t talk. He compares you to other, hotter girls he’s dated and finds you lacking, dismisses your past accomplishments, and makes sure you know he has twenty-five other people he can call to go to dinner with him. You have earned this treatment by being very successful! Aren’t you lucky! The problem is that if Paycheck Boyfriend treats you better, you might want him to pay you more, and he really, really, really doesn’t want to do that. It’s not entirely Paycheck Boyfriend’s fault either, because he himself has a Corporate Paycheck Boyfriend who is treating him even worse, who cares mostly about how the stock of whatever company owns the studio is doing, and doesn’t understand why drones can’t star in TV shows instead of actors, since they are just as talented but have less body fat. “Why can’t we do a show starring the self-driving Google car?” CPB is fond of asking.
It seems insane to me now, but the truth is that up until about a week before filming started, the reality of making the show was still very much up in the air. So many pieces had to come together, so many people’s schedules had to align. Some actors weren’t approached at all until after filming had actually started, because the days and weeks leading up to that first day were so chaotic, plus we have a cast that numbers in the hundreds. Among other oddities, this meant I had almost no time to prepare or to process the fact that I was going back to the character I’d loved so much. Maybe that’s why so much of the show had such a surreal quality. But in the beginning, I was just relieved not to be negotiating anymore. To let you all know it was really happening, I tweeted this photo:
The caption read: “I can now confirm: it’s time for me, and this jacket I stole in 2007, to return to work.” By the way, stealing is wrong! (Unless it’s fun material for your book. Then it’s okay.)
You’d think that all those years of being asked about the possibility of making a movie would have prepared me for finally doing one. Or four. But we’d spent seven years without a real possibility, over a year with only a vague one, and then a flurry of a few weeks in which major decisions had to be made and suddenly everything was a go. Even though I knew it was real, in a way, I don’t know if my brain ever quite caught up to the reality of what was happening. I still sort of can’t believe it happened. It happened, right? I have honestly never had an experience like it.
For starters, I was very, very emotional the whole time. I don’t usually cry easily, but throughout the days and months of filming, I welled up a lot. I’ve told the story before about how Alexis was so green when we first started, and our walk-and-talks so lengthy and complex, that I’d sometimes put my arm through hers to help guide her to our mark. But the first day we returned to Lorelai’s house it was me who reached for her arm for support—I was so overwhelmed that I felt a little shaky.
And then there was the day I walked onto the grand Gilmore house stage for the first time. It wasn’t just emotional because it had been re-created. It was also genuinely sad because Ed Herrmann had passed away the previous winter. You know how some people have such a big presence they just fill up a room? You might enter, and before you even see them you know they’re there? That was Ed. His presence was as tall and warm as he was. So his absence had a feeling too—the room was entirely different without his booming voice and easy laugh. Kelly spoke to him that first day on set. “Ed? We know you’re here. We miss you,” she said, and everyone choked up.
Those tears made sense. But some of my other teary reactions were just bizarre. For example, when Chris Eigeman, a dear friend, came to do his cameo, we sat down for a casual rehearsal, and as we started to read through our scene, I could not manage to get through my first line: “Why, Jason Stiles, as I live and breathe.” Normally, saying hello to someone in the beginning of a scene is not the emotional high point for the character or the actor. I was just so happy to see him again. My normal state of happy-to-see-someone does not usually involve tears, but on this show tissues were being handed to me a lot.
In another scene, I had trouble getting through the simple sentence “My name is Lorelai Gilmore, and I’m from a little town in Connecticut.” All I’m doing in that scene is giving some strangers basic information. Still, for some reason, tears. I guess I was overwhelmingly happy to get to say her name again.
For the reboot, all the sets had to be reconstructed, which also contributed to the surreal quality. No one had saved any set pieces from the old show, because why would they have? Netflix didn’t exist when the show ended, and no one had had any concrete reason to believe we’d be back in the Gilmore house or Luke’s diner or Stars Hollow ever again. There was no gazebo on the back lot anymore—they had to build one. There were no precise measurements of the rooms either, so while sets were reconstructed as closely as possible, in most cases the measurements were slightly off. This added to the eerie quality of being back: in the Gilmore house, for example, the foyer was completely familiar, yet just a little bit larger than it was in the original. Everything was the same yet brand-new. I noticed the slight changes because I knew these spaces as intimately as if it were a real house I’d actually lived in for years.
We were back on the Warner Brothers lot, as we had been the first time around, but all the stages that housed our sets were in different places. It was a constant surprise to walk out of Lorelai’s house and run into friends who work on the Ellen show, because previously we hadn’t been anywhere near Ellen. But on the other hand, because certain sets were so familiar, I’d sometimes lose track of where I was in time—for several fleeting moments every day, I’d think I was still doing the old show, until something from the present would remind me that time had passed.
Then there was El Niño. Given how tight our time was on the back lot, we couldn’t afford to lose any days there. But huge storms were predicted. And lots of rain. There aren’t many cloudy days in a town like Stars Hollow, so we worried. And we waited. But not only did it not storm, the weather played its part during the seasonal episodes as though it too had been cast in the show. When we were filming “Summer” it was balmy, “Fall” had a bit of crisp in the air, in “Spring” breezes lifted us up, and during “Winter” we had an unseasonable chill. For usually predictable Southern California, this was nothing short of magical. And the predicted El Niño storms? They didn’t happen.
Through it all, the emotion I felt most was gratitude. I treasured every experience and savored every scene in a way that was different from when I did the original show. Partially this had to do with being in a different place personally and professionally. I wasn’t new to the business anymore, and I had a much more acute sense of how lucky I was to be part of this cast and crew. I treasured the chance to speak words written by the Palladinos once more. And I now understood in greater depth how rare it was to have had the opportunity to be part of something this special in the first place. In the flurry of the first incarnation it was hard to have much perspective. This time I was thankful for every single day.
We were also buoyed by the enthusiasm we felt from all of you. Normally, when actors start a new show, we have no idea if what we’re doing will work, or if people will like it. To know we were making something that at least some people were already very excited about seeing was a thrilling novelty, and your support was a big part of what made every day feel special. Thank you so much for that. After all those years of having no answer when asked by you (and Mike Ausiello!) about the possibility of a Gilmore Girls movie, finally I had something to say. And that we’d landed at Netflix was an honor too. Executives usually walk around looking jumpy, but these Netflix and Warner Brothers execs were happy and smiling throughout it all. “We knew it was big, but we had no idea it was this big,” they said. Everyone was excited and proud.
So, what was it like? The truth is, it was so many t
hings at once that there is no short way to describe it, no sound bite that does it justice. But I did keep a diary of sorts (which I wish I’d done the first time around), to try to cut through how overwhelming much of it was and to have a record I could look back on when it was done, to see if that could help me process the whole experience.
Here are just a few of the most memorable days of filming Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2016
It’s the first day of filming. As I said, we had very little time between “Are we doing this?” and “Wow, we’re doing this!” Plus I was on location in Atlanta until less than a week before Gilmore Girls filming was supposed to start. So while normally I’d have had a bunch of fittings with Brenda, the costume designer, and we’d have planned at least the early round of outfits, in this case we had time for just one fitting and had chosen only a handful of looks.
The morning is a bit of a scramble, as they usually are. The first scene we’re filming is not the first scene you see, but it is a piece of the opening sequence, so basically I’m choosing the outfit for the first time you see Lorelai, and I keep fussing over what it should be. Whatever we chose already just doesn’t seem right to me today for some reason, so I ask for more choices. “Just bring a bunch of tops and let me mess around a little,” I say to Cesha, my on-set dresser. Cesha and I worked together for all seven years on the first show, so she knows what that means. She loads up a rolling rack with a ton of stuff. I keep trying things on and taking them off—nothing feels right. A knock on my door tells me the cameras are ready, so I pull a blue blouse off its hanger—when in doubt, blue! It’s a little big, so Cesha pins it in the back for me. Then I jump on my bicycle and speed to set.