Gilmore Girls famously had more dialogue than most other shows. They crammed it all into an hour (less with commercial breaks) by saying it so fast. Scott Patterson frequently mentions the page counts of scripts on his podcast, I Am All In, and credits star Lauren Graham with her ability to memorize pages in one pass. One time, Patterson admitted the cast would make a game of last minute memorization.
Olivia Hack was the guest on the Oct. 12 episode of I Am All In. After discussing her role as Yale roommate Tana Schrick in season 4 of Gilmore Girls, Hack asked Patterson how the cast was able to memorize each script for seven seasons.
Mind games the ‘Gilmore Girls’ cast played with the scripts
The nature of television is fast. On broadcast, they’re in production every week and trying to write new scripts to produce next week. That means scripts often arrive at the last minute. The Gilmore Girls cast responded by waiting as long as possible to memorize them.
“After the first couple of episodes, it was just kind of there,” Patterson said on I Am All In. “You develop that muscle. I think we all did simultaneously and it just got easier and easier. We started getting jaded. We’d start playing games with ourselves about how much time it would take to memorize it before we went and did it, cut it really close before the scene.”
The first rush job was no game
Going to series was a big adjustment. The very first episode, the pilot, has more prep time. You produce it and then wait to see if the network picks it up. Although, the very first Gilmore Girls already made Patterson realize he had to quit smoking, which he and Graham did. But, memorizing episode 2 was a whirlwind.
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“Listen, we got pages on the very first episode we did which was after shooting the pilot, we started up at Warner Bros.,” Patterson said. “Lauren and I were sitting at 6 a.m., 5:30 a.m. in the makeup trailer and we hadn’t even shot anything yet and they threw a 10-page scene at us they’d just written. ‘We’re going to do this.’ We panicked, we worked on it, we did it and after that we had the confidence like okay, we can handle this.”
‘Gilmore Girls’ never gave the cast advance prep time
The writers room led by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino never got ahead of the shooting schedule. Patterson said he and the Gilmore Girls cast just got used to fast turnaround.
“We didn’t get scripts until sometimes not even 24 hours before,” Patterson said. “You’d get it at your house. But they were always perfecting it. Amy and her team and Dan, they were always perfecting it.”
Fortunately, repetition bred skills.
“But it’s doing it,” Patterson said. “You’ve got to do it over and over again. We had that confidence so confidence has a lot to do with it.”
