Forum Kultury Popularnej

gadz

11.02.2005
Maureen Ryan dla Chichago Tribune

John Mellencamp, Nora Ephron, Louis Armstrong, the ill-fated Broadway musical “Taboo,” Naomi Campbell, Rowan and Martin, Christopher Isherwood, “Mildred Pierce,” the Queen of England, Kabbalah, “Reno 911” and radioactive spiders.

No, that’s not a compilation of every answer on a recent episode of “Jeopardy!” Those are just some of the pop-culture references in a recent episode of “Gilmore Girls,” specifically the Jan. 31 outing, “Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting” (even the title of the episode refers to Elton John’s similarly named hit).

Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator and executive producer of “Gilmore Girls,” and her husband, Daniel Palladino, who’s also an executive producer on the show, swear that they don’t set out to refer to tons of books, movies, cultural figures and song titles on their 6-year old show. It just sort of happens.

“We’d be fine if an entire script went by and there were no references in it,” Sherman-Palladino said in a recent phone call. “It’s never like, `We need a reference here.’”

“It’s a lot of our interests and personalities and opinions that we filter through a lot of these characters, especially Lorelai and Rory [Gilmore],” adds Dan Palladino. “It does reflect who they are; they do consume pop culture. They watch a lot of movies, and they watch TV, and they listen to music. We’ve always tried to make sure that [the references] come out organically, so it doesn’t sound like Dan or Amy voicing an opinion, and I think that generally, we’ve been successful.”

Below, the “Gilmore Girls” brain trust discusses some recent pop-culture homages:

Lorelai now has a dog called Paul Anka, named after the singer. Dan says: “I was writing the first episode that the dog appeared in, and Paul Anka’s record came out at the same time, and I heard it in Starbucks or something. And it sounded good. He actually pulled off singing `Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ It just seemed like … maybe Lorelai would have gone into a coffee place and heard this weird Paul Anka album and would have thought to name her dog Paul Anka. A lot of those decisions we don’t really talk about, they come out in the writing and it makes sense.”
One of the show’s funniest recent homages was to the film “Dig!” -- a rock documentary about the bands Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. In one of the key scenes in “Dig!,” a fight breaks out among Jonestown band members at L.A.’s Viper Room club, and a similar thing happened with Lane Kim’s band on “Gilmore Girls,” in the Nov. 22 episode “He’s Slippin’ ’Em Bread … Dig?” Dan says: “Amy and I saw [`Dig!’] on DVD when it first came out. The second we saw that Viper Room fight scene, we said, the band [on `Gilmore Girls’] has got to go through that. We figured out a way to do it. We got Joel [Gion], the real tambourine player [from the Brian Jonestown Massacre]. He’s never acted before, and he was great. He was very funny and very comfortable. In fact, we’re bringing him back for another episode or two, because we find him really, really funny. That was one of our biggest homages. In fact, the director of `Dig!’ called us, and we’ve been so busy that we haven’t been able to hook up with her. She either wants to complain about it or … .” Amy continues Dan’s thought: “I hope she liked it. We’d hate for her to hate it, because we loved the movie so much.”
Many episode titles contain pop-culture references; this season the show had an episode with the Beatles-inspired moniker “Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out” and another called “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” a film reference. Dan says: “We TV writers, we used to name these scripts, and no one outside of the office or the studio or networks would ever see the titles. And suddenly, with DirecTV and [onscreen] program guides, they put the title there. … We’ve always been careful with the titles, A) to make sure that we can remember, five episodes down, we say, [when referring to an episode] we all know what we’re talking about, and then, B) to be interesting to people when they see it on DirecTV or read about it in the paper.”
The ending of “Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting” had a montage of scenes of the Gilmore clan fighting and laughing before, during and after the elder Gilmores’ weekly dinner gathering. Amy says: “It was inspired a little bit by `Husbands and Wives,’; there’s a great scene in that with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. It was our homage to that. We haven’t done anything like that; it was a really different style for us. We thought, `This could be good or it could be really bad.’” As for the line, in a different scene, “It’s going to be like the opening night of `Taboo’ all over again,” Amy jokes, “That couldn’t be a good moment.”
Here's more from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino (for reference, this interview, which is also excerpted here, was conducted on Jan. 25):

Amy on whether the show continue next season without her and her husband at the helm: “We have no say over how long this goes. It’s all due to the network. They sort of decide year by year if they want another year. A couple times we thought [it was the last season], we thought Season 5 was the last year, but then we had this uptick, so, ‘Oh, there’s a Season 6’!

"We always put things in place [for the next season]; we’ve got a big, huge season cliffhanger finale this year, probably one of our biggest. Whatever happens next year, whether we’re here or someone else is here, it leaves the show with really good momentum and lots of good places to go.”

Amy on Lorelai and Luke: “We’ve got a lot of Luke-Lorelai stuff we’re playing this year. A lot of ups and downs and twists and turns for them, in getting these kids to the altar. And we’ve also got Rory and Logan too, they’re having a tumultuous year also. They’re working their way back together. In [‘Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting’] Logan came through for her in a way she needed. He stepped it up a notch in that episode. That’s their reconciliation. For now.

“We brought Luke’s daughter in not so much to play ‘Oh my God, there’s a long lost daughter,’ but more to play, ‘Who are Luke and Lorelai to each other?’ They’re two mid-thirties people who have built very independent lives, needing no one, they’ve got their own homes, their own businesses; they’ve got things just the way they like them. They’re incredibly independent and strong-willed and stubborn, and those are tough lives to mesh.

“The daughter thing was just a way to tap into an aspect of Luke that makes things interesting for the Luke-Lorelai relationship. Luke is very duty-bound and honor-bound and he feels great responsibility to family, even though family is something he scoffs at a lot. He’s also a very single-minded, tunnel-vision person. So he’s going to feel he’s got to take care of this responsibility before he can take care of any other responsibility. Right or wrong, it’s who he is.

“It’s a great device for us because [the daughter plot] taps into that without bringing in another woman or another romance, because nobody’s going to believe that. These two people are meant for each other, the only think keeping them apart right now is their own baggage.

“And Lorelai, being an incredibly independent, proud person, she’s not a pusher. She’s not going to say, ‘But what about me?’ It’s sometimes their own lack of communication abilities that have kept them single this long, and that causes our conflict -- so we don’t have to bring in the big elephant or the earthquake or ‘We’re trapped in an elevator’ or someone’s in a coma.”

Dan on Luke and Lorelai and Rory and Logan: “We’re really playing through the Lorelai and Luke thing, there will be something that will sort of put a cap on where we’ve been leading them. And Rory is dating a guy who -- Rory is a one-guy girl, very stable, and she’s dating a guy who’s not very stable. And that’s always a part of their relationship. Now, they may get married at some point and live together for 50 years, but that instability is always going to be there, because they’re different people who need each other for some reason. We’re going to be playing out aspects of that friction over the next seven or eight episodes.”

Amy on Logan and Rory: “There are deeper layers to Logan or she wouldn’t be with him. Logan is a kid whose entire life has been preplanned for him. Rory grew up in a household where it was like, ‘Anything you want, kid, you go for it.’ He never had that. He grew up with all the money privilege, but he didn’t grow up with any freedom. His freedoms are sort of self-imposed, ‘I’m going to go act like an idiot, because I’ve never gotten a chance to explore who I am.’ I think Rory sees something deeper in him. This is a very smart guy, and if he ever got his [stuff] together, who knows.

“There are also aspects of Christopher [in Logan], there’s a little daddy issue there. Christopher was also a very rich, charming kid who had no focus. It’s a little bit of daughter and mommy making similar choices. Who knows, years from now, if he gets his [stuff] together, I think they could be long-term. Right now, he’s trying as far as he can try, but he has limits to who he is.

“And he’s done some things for Rory that on the surface seem kind of bad, but I think in the end, are very good. Because Rory was very subdued and needed to tap into a strength in herself that maybe she wasn’t doing so much, because she has a very strong mom and strong friends. She never really had to do that. She never really had to dig down deep and find out who she was. And this guy made her have to do that. So when you talk about it on that level, there could be more there [between Rory and Logan].”