Gay writer spills all the tea from his time working on ‘The Gilmore Girls’
The following is an excerpt from The Girls: From Golden to Gilmoreby Stan Zimmerman, published by Indigo River Publishing, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book, available February 13, details Stan’s time working alongside some of the most notable women in the TV industry, including Lily Tomlin, Roseanne Barr, Sandra Bernhard, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, and all four Golden Girls.For whatever reason, a lot of our words stayed in our scripts.
But boy, was it hard to write them. Most hour shows are maybe sixty-some pages. Think a minute per page. Gilmore Girls scripts were seventy-five to ninety pages because the characters talked so damn fast.
What helped me in the writing was how I could draw upon the relationships I saw between my grandmother, mother, and sister. They definitely shared similarities with Emily, Lorelai, and Rory.Subscribe to our daily newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.Although we had our name on two pivotal scripts, “Pulp Friction” and “Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant,” when you write on staff, you have your hands in all of the scripts in a season.
Eventually, you forget which lines you contributed to each.Amy Palladino also did something unusual for an hour show: She’d have table reads of the next week’s script on the Friday before they’d start shooting.
