Exclusive Interview: Creating the Delightful World of Gilmore Girls
Chatting with George Bell, Sheila Lawrence and Stan Zimmerman about the writing and dialogue of the beloved TV show
Ever wonder about what goes on behind the scenes and in the writer’s room of your favorite TV shows? Without writers, there is no show. Gilmore Girls is known for its unique and delightful writing, both in story and dialogue, and also for the speed at which the characters speak.
During June 2022, we had a month-long Gilmore Girls festival at Remarkist where we hosted the Super Sensational Summer Spectacular. We planned watch parties of the series, games, music listening parties and gab sessions. But most exciting was our Fireside Chats where we had special guests from the cast and crew join us for episode watches and discussions about their contributions to the show. 🗣
In an event we called “Writing the Town,” we spoke with George Bell, Sheila Lawrence, and Stan Zimmerman about their time working on Gilmore Girls. All three of these showbiz giants have enormous credits under their belts.
George Bell, actor and dialogue coach, was responsible for helping the actors on the fast-talking Gilmore Girls achieve the speed of their lines along with word-perfect delivery. You might even remember him in a few episodes of the franchise–notably he played Rory’s teacher, Professor Bell, at Yale.
Sheila Lawrence is known as a writer, director and producer for Gilmore Girls from Seasons 2 through 4. She wrote Season 3, Episode 8 (“Let the Games Begin”), Season 3, Episode 10 (“That’ll Do, Pig”), Season 4, Episode 11 (“In the Clamor and the Clangor”), and Season 4, Episode 19 (“Afterboom”). She directed Season 2, Episode 6 (“Presenting Lorelai Gilmore”) and Season 2, Episode 16 (“There’s the Rub”). Sheila is also known for writing and producing credits on hit shows like Ugly Betty, Boston Legal, Private Practice, Bunheads, Hart of Dixie and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Stan Zimmerman is a writer who wrote for mega hit tv shows like The Golden Girls, and Roseanne. He wrote Season 5, Episode 6 (“Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant!”) and Season 5, Episode 17 (“Pulp Friction”), two fan favorite episodes.
We were excited to welcome YouTube and fan creator Joy at A Vintage Joy to interview our guests, along with former Gilmore Girls cast member
(Brian).Their creative inspirations
Joy asked George, Sheila and Stan if there was a TV show 📺, movie 📽, play 🎭 or book 📘 that inspired them to get into the industry, or informed their writing in any way. George Bell was the first to answer: “I think it was [the movie] Almost Angels, about the Vienna Choirboys. I was a boy soprano singing in my father’s church ⛪️ and I remember I said to my parents, ‘I can do that, I can sing like them.’ I remember that influenced me, although growing up a minister’s kid I sang in church all the time, so I was always performing from a very young age.”
For Stan Zimmerman, “it was Laugh In and becoming totally obsessed with Lily Tomlin because she was from Detroit! From a writer’s perspective, The Dick Van Dyke Show. I wanted to find my [actress] Rose Marie. And of course all the Norman Lear shows taught me that you can add reality and humor and mix that all up and deal with some cool issues.” Norman Lear was famous for writing and producing groundbreaking TV sitcoms like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, and Good Times. These shows from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s depicted the blue collar and middle class experiences of living in America. You can imagine how these inspirations led to Stan’s work on Golden Girls and Roseanne.
Sheila Lawrence articulated that mixing reality and humor in the same show was “unusual on tv at the time. At the time you were required to be a comedy writer or a drama writer. For me the storytelling I love as a writer and as a viewer is the stuff that lies right in the middle: they make you laugh 😂, make you cry 😭, make you laugh again 🤣 shows.” Her inspiration? “Gilmore Girls! I started as a fan.”
The process of writing episodic TV characters
Stan and Sheila briefly discussed how sitcoms in the 70s, 80s, and 90s tended to be episodic rather than serial. There were a few reasons for this, but mainly shows weren’t being rewatched like they are today (DVR, streaming platforms–none of that existed!), so audiences weren’t really concerned about a serialized storyline. The only time they watched an episode again was during reruns and syndication, where episodes would often be aired out of order. Networks wanted audiences to be able to see any episode and understand the plot, usually wrapped up in twenty-two minutes, without having to see any of the previous episodes. They never imagined episodes of shows would be so readily available like they are now, ripe for audiences to nitpick actors who play different guest roles or series plot holes and inconsistencies.
These writers’ experiences in various writers’ rooms prepared them for Gilmore Girls. When asked about how to write for characters that they didn’t themselves create, Stan replied, “It’s a different craft to learn to write existing characters versus your own. I learned as an actor at age seven; my acting teacher said ‘just go to a mall and listen to people.’ So for me writing was an extension of that. It’s always listening 👂 and being sensitive and hearing how people talk and the different ways they talk.”
Sheila said, “Listening to the showrunner gives you a good clue as to how to write the characters, and I think that’s the most true on Amy Sherman-Palladino shows. It is her voice absolutely, and so as a writer spending all day with her in the room, and Dan, that voice is in your head.”
John Cabrera asked, “Where did you hear Dan’s voice the most in characters?”
“Very much Richard,” Stan said. “And he was a music 🎹 freak so everything music related [was Dan’s territory]. Dan was actually a production assistant on Golden Girls, so I remember seeing him just in the halls, and then him meeting Amy on Roseanne.”
Sheila said, “Taylor Doose is a lot of Dan.”
George Bell kept the actors talking fast
George Bell was the dialogue coach on Gilmore Girls. The “keeper of the word,” as he said at this event. Part of that meant keeping the speed at which everyone spoke on the show consistent.
George said, “Part of the job was to make sure it was word perfect and that peoples’ pacing was at that Gilmore rate. I would tell people, ‘ok now Gilmorize it, speed it up.’”
John remembered being on set with George Bell very well. “Whenever they called ‘Cut,’ my first instinct was, out of the corner of my eye 👀I would see if George stood up.” Everyone laughed at this. “If George got out up of his seat then that was my cue to suddenly race through what I had just done to see what was it that I got wrong so I would be able to say ‘I got it, no need to waste the energy; I know what I got wrong.’”
“I was kind of the liaison between the creative staff and the actors,” said George. “I didn’t sit at ‘video village,’ where the director and writer would be. I’d be somewhere on set but out of sight, near to the actors in case they called for a line. I'd be on set so I could quickly give out corrections.”
Joy asked, “Where was your favorite hiding nook?”
“In Luke’s diner behind the counter, behind the wall there’s a staircase. I would be sitting on the staircase,” George said. “I even had a little chair 🪑that would fit in the staircase and I had my own little monitor. When you’re shooting you do the master take with everyone in the shot. Then you do ‘coverage,’ which would mean that maybe the camera was just focused on Lorelai's character, and I’d just follow her lines.” He explained more behind the scenes of how each frame of the scene was filmed for each actor. Next time you’re watching Luke and Lorelai banter at the diner counter, imagine George Bell sitting in the stairwell behind the kitchen doorway!
He went on, “In Lorelai’s house I was usually in the bathroom, which they rarely ever used. It was right between the kitchen and the living room and I could be there to give out corrections.” At the band’s apartment, “I would just be off camera somewhere but I would always be nearby where I could get to everyone quickly.”
“My memory was that you were usually in eyesight,” John said. And George assured him, “you were pretty good with your lines…you didn’t give me a lot of work to do with corrections.” We of course wanted to know which of our favorite Gilmore Girls actors gave him more trouble–but he would not divulge 🤐!
John explained, “There’s only so much an actor can do to prepare. Often me, Todd (Lowe), Keiko (Agena)--we would grab George to run lines before the scene.” “Yeah you guys were very good about that,” George responded.
George Bell the actor
In explaining how “coverage” works, George and Sheila talked a bit about how the shots are set up. The “master shot” would be everyone in the scene. Then, the camera would film each actor in the scene individually or two at a time, from different angles. In those closeups, their scene partners would not be on screen. Almost always on Gilmore Girls, the actor not being filmed would read their lines off screen for the actor on camera. Sheila said, “Actors appreciate when an actor gives it their all even if they’re not on camera. It’s a courtesy and professionalism to be there for the other actor.”
This was only not the case for filming phone 📞 calls–and that’s where George would come in. “For phone calls, I usually was the voice on the other end,” he said. “If they were on the phone talking to somebody when shooting the scene, I was usually doing the other lines. We usually didn’t shoot both characters on the same day for a phone call.” Because of filming schedules and budget 💰, actors are often not called to appear on the same days unless they have in-person scenes together. So George would be on the other end of the phone call when an actor was available to film 🎬 their part.
One of these calls was particularly memorable. “There’s a long monologue (in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, “Fall”) that Lorelai says to Emily about her dad and that he took her to the movies.” We all remember, George! It’s arguably one of the most impactful scenes in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. “It was a pretty emotional scene. But it was shot on a different day, so I saw when Lauren did it; there wasn’t much dialogue for Emily's character. But then the day that we had to shoot the scene where Emily is listening to Lorelai giving that emotional scene, I had to go there. I had to connect emotionally. And I felt really good afterwards because some of the crew guys were crying….that was part of the reason they hired me because I was an actor. I could, when it was required, be emotionally committed to a moment.”
The writing process
Joy switched gears a bit to the length of the scripts, which were longer than most hour-long drama scripts. “I know the scripts were 80 plus pages. How did you do the pacing for those scenes?”
Stan joked, “Coffee! A lot of coffee.” Naturally. ☕️
Sheila explained, “Dan Palladino now has gotten really good at estimating how many pages each scene should be. He’ll give a guideline on how many pages it should be. What’s so delightful about their shows is the dialogue, and you can do that for two pages or twenty pages. So it’s about getting a feel for it.”
In terms of writing credits, Stan said, “You hopefully get many episodes because you get residuals off of those.” The writer’s room, however, is a collaborative space. “You break the stories all together and we’d split the season in half and you spend too many hours stuck in a room beating out each episode and writing it on the board. You figure out the choreography of each scene. That's what Amy really stressed. Not just where they walked around the room, but emotionally where they were arc-wise with each scene. Then someone goes off and writes a first draft and everybody reads it, and if you have time they'll give notes and you do a second draft. Then there’s what’s called ‘table’ and everyone reads at the table and everybody works on it and fixes it in the room together.”
Of course “in Amy’s case,” Sheila explained, “Amy takes a pass at everything, so that’s the final pass.”
Amy often worked late to make sure it was perfect. While this left little time for the crew to figure out the sets and props, “she wanted to do her magic and it needed to go through her brain,” said Stan.
Sheila recalled the “many table reads where scripts were literally being brought in as they were coming off the Xerox machine!” It was clear to the writers that Amy worked so hard all night before every table read. “I don’t know how she did that,” Sheila marveled.
Gilmore Girls was completely unique
Joy asked how the writers would find the balance between the irresistible escapism of Stars Hollow and the reality of keeping the show grounded in the relationship between mother and daughter. Our guests thought about that for a minute.
“That was the magic of the show,” Stan said. “That was the musicality 🎶 of it. As a writer I always thought it’s like music and that was the score of that show. It's the difference between Rodgers & Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Weber. They sound different. That’s just the sound of the world we were living in.”
Sheila added, “I think things were emotionally grounded, certainly with Rory and Lorelai and Emily. I don’t think Amy would have stood for it if people pitched things that didn’t feel emotionally true to their dynamic. If a new writer tried to pitch more typical mother-daughter stories it would be like, no that’s not this relationship. That was always baked into it. And the whimsy of the town and the beauty of it, we didn’t think of that separately; it was part of the whole world. And we delighted in it too! I loved nothing more than walking through that town when it was decorated for a season. The snow was amazing!” ❄️
Stan agreed, “Even if it was like, August, if you walked through that snow you got cold!” John countered, “you weren’t wearing some of the costumes we were wearing!”
Classic episode moments
Of course, one of the biggest stunts in the entire series is the Life and Death Brigade’s secret jump in the “You Jump, I Jump, Jack” episode. Joy asked our guests how that came to be.
Stan was in the writer’s room that season. “We were in the room and I don’t know who came up with that. We were like, ‘wait, what? What are we gonna do? Umbrellas and…are you insane?’ And it was going to cost bazillions of dollars and Amy was like, ‘Who cares?’ We went out for that shoot. There was so much to shoot, and daylight was disappearing…it was beautiful and fun but it was a lot of work!”
When asked if the writers knew when an episode was going to be a big, season-defining one, Stan said, “Yes. You had to, budget-wise [with locations]. You couldn’t do those all the time because it was too expensive. We were aware of how much money you could spend on certain episodes.” Sheila added, “Like the Bracebridge Dinner and the Dance-a-Thon, Festival of Living Art.”.
Stan continued, “Amy loved to plant seeds 🌱of a story. So it'd be a little bit and you’d see something and then you’d see it grow and then it became this big story…it’s more like real life, it felt so much more organic. Even characters like Logan started small and then it grew.” And which of Rory’s boyfriends is Stan rooting for? “Team Logan! I have to, yes, because I was there! I remember walking into the writer’s room and seeing a blonde and a brunette and [the actors] were callbacks for Logan and I said, you gotta pick the blonde. I just thought he’d look really good with Rory. They looked cute together; they just looked perfect.”
Actors who played multiple roles
John asked if there were any characters in the seasons the writers were working on that began small and then Amy or Dan or both realized they wanted to make them a bigger storyline.
Sheila said, “Amy and Dan are so good with spotting talent. If there was someone in a small role at Chilton or something who nailed it, they would look for ways to bring them back or increase their role. I would suspect someone like Paris wouldn’t have become huge if the actor wasn’t as good as Liza Weil was.”
The Gilmore Girls casting directors also took great pains to recast anyone they thought was amazing. We learned from actor Joe Fria that this was why he returned to the show after having a small role in the first season, and why often Emily’s maids would be asked back to do background talent in more episodes. Actor Robert Lee appeared in so many episodes, he was finally given a line in the series finale.
Professor Bell
“I can't think of another show that spoke that quickly and had so much to say in one episode,” Joy said to our guests. She asked, how did that go over for the actors?
George, having coached everyone on the show in terms of dialogue, said, “I think for the regulars, everyone knew what the job requirement was. Sometimes guest actors were a bit overwhelmed by what was asked of them…and a few crashed and burned.”
John asked a tough question: “Were there actors that couldn’t get the speed and were removed from the show?”
George replied, “That’s how I became Professor Bell.” 😳Whoa!
He explained, “They were starting to think [the actors who played] the teachers were jinxed. We had problems with some of the teachers, they couldn’t handle the dialogue. I remember this one particular actress. She knew the lines but she just psyched herself out. She looked at me and said, ‘I want to go home.’ We ended up having to write the lines on cue cards. It happened a couple of times and we were on the last day of taping the episode which is usually the longest day. And the very next day was going to be the first scene of the next episode. And they told me the night before I was going to be the professor at Yale. And I had already just worked a 14 hour day.”
When he was acting, George had a substitute to fill in for him as dialogue coach on set, because doing both was not really feasible. And this was true the entire series, but not on the shoot of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
“My scene is at the cemetery [in “Summer”] with the three generations of Gilmores,” he said. Emily and I walk off camera, and then Lorelai and Rory have this big intense scene. Amy said, ‘George, I just can’t have anyone else be there with them as the dialogue coach,’ so literally as soon as I walked off camera I ran to my seat and then I was the dialogue coach. For the actors, especially if they're doing an intense scene like that, there’s a trust level. And if a stranger came up to give corrections, it's a little more difficult for them, whereas if I come up there’s a comfort level. So that particular day I did double duty.”
Bringing their lives into the writing
Joy asked Sheila, “Weren't you the card swipe person at the dining hall? Sheila laughed. “Yes! Rory’s dumb job in college was my dumb job in college, where you sit at the door of the dining hall and swipe people’s cards 💳 as they come in. I feel like there was a ton of personal talk in that writer’s room and any of your own stuff is up for grabs.”
She mentioned that John Stephens, another writer on Gilmore Girls, talked about his night terrors. That detail went right into the show, when Kirk suffers from night terrors during the soft opening at the Dragonfly Inn.
Stan also put aspects of his personal life and relationships into the show. “A lot of my mother, sister and grandmother [exist in the characters]. I think my sister is very much like Rory and my grandmother is very much like Emily. So that dynamic…I’ve been stealing lines from those three my entire career. I would be sitting at Thanksgiving, listening and writing things down.”
Joy articulated a facet of the show that the fandom has always loved. “The show never talked down to me, it always asked me to level up. I liked that it wasn’t for everybody, it was for me.”
Stan confirmed, “That was Amy. [At the time], on shows you had to appeal to a mass general audience and hers was one of the first shows where they’d say ‘Paul Anka who?’ and she would be like, ‘let them look it up!’ Now when I get a note that says ‘no one will know this’ I would say, ‘well it worked on Gilmore Girls!’”
Sheila agreed. “It wouldn’t have been a hit show if she hadn’t had those fights all the way through Season 6. I have learned so much about not letting your vision get watered down [from Amy], and the result is this show that is more popular now than when it aired twenty years ago. That never happens! And it’s popular in its specificity. If it wasn't, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”
Stan made a sobering point: “But in years before that, that way of working with the network actually lost [Amy] jobs. Back in the day you didn't fight with the network, especially if you were a woman. You did what you were told. And so she fought for it and luckily the stars were aligned and everything came together with this show and it changed the trajectory of her life.” We couldn’t be happier that this was the case.
Want more?
Want more? We’ve got more chats with cast members Sean Gunn, Emily Kuroda, Keiko Agena, Rini Bell, Mitch Silpa, Alix Kermes, Joe Fria and Robert Lee from Gilmore Girls! And head over to our Discord where you’ll find tons of other fans there chatting in our forums about the TV shows, movies, music, games and books we all love! Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, tumblr, and Spotify for more fandom content—and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at rmrk*st!
