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 break 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.