Melissa McCarthy says Gilmore Girls scripts ran 93 pages and she could not change a contraction
Everyone who has watched Stars Hollow knows the sound of it: talk that never lets up, references stacked three deep, jokes that land before you have finished the previous one. Somebody had to stand there and produce that every day, from paper handed over at breakfast, and one of them has finally described the job.
McCarthy played Sookie St. James for seven seasons, and in a new interview with Variety, written up by Entertainment Weekly on Monday evening, she put a number on what that involved. The scripts ran to 93 pages. Nobody was permitted to alter so much as a contraction. Some of them landed the morning they were shot.
The part she keeps returning to is that she had no yardstick. Gilmore Girls was her first series, so a 93-page script containing a ten-page unbroken take, handed over at breakfast and locked word for word, registered simply as how television worked.
The constraint was not arbitrary. Amy Sherman-Palladino's dialogue is built on rhythm, and rhythm survives nothing being changed. McCarthy's own verdict on the experience is that it was "good training," which is a reasonable thing to say about a job that taught her to hit marks nobody else was asking actors to hit.
"It was hard! It was really hard. But to me, that was normal, because it was my first show. So I was like, 'Oh, our scripts are 93 pages, and you can't change a contraction, even if you get them that morning and it's a 10-page oner.'" — Melissa McCarthy
She credits the showrunner for holding the line
McCarthy is explicit about why the rules were that rigid, and about what it cost to keep them. Her reading, reported alongside the rest of the interview, is that a woman running a network show at that point had no room for negotiation, and that the inflexibility was the price of the thing surviving.
"I love that she fought for it, because a woman running that show at that time, I think you kind of had to be like, 'It's my way or the highway.' And I'm glad she did, because it stood the test of time." — Melissa McCarthy on Amy Sherman-Palladino
She has recently had it played back to her from an unhelpful angle. Watching the pilot with her daughter Vivian, who had seen none of it, McCarthy was interrupted by a question about what she was doing with her voice. Her answer was that it was youth, and that she now sounds, in her own phrase, like a grizzled old man.
- Seven seasons as Sookie St. James, from 2000 to 2007
- Scripts of 93 pages, delivered as late as the morning of the shoot
- No changes permitted, down to contractions
- Ten-page unbroken takes among them
- Her first series, so she assumed all of it was standard
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What is actually in development
A documentary about the show is in the works at HBO Max with Lauren Graham and Sherman-Palladino attached. Anything beyond that is speculation, and McCarthy is not the person to ask: she says she wonders whether something else will happen with it and knows nothing at all.
The last return was the 2016 Netflix revival, A Year in the Life, which she describes in social rather than professional terms — she wanted to see everybody. She is still close to Graham and to Yanic Truesdale, to the point of going on holiday with him.
Nearly twenty years after the original run finished, the recognition has not shifted to anything else, which she finds funny and slightly exasperating in equal measure. The consolation she lands on is the one people keep handing her: that it is the thing they watch to fall asleep, and that making something which does that for people is not a small achievement.
Her current work is a long way from Stars Hollow. She stars opposite Clive Owen in Netflix's The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey, which released a first look earlier this year.
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