(2005) Family Values Equal Success

May 30, 2005
By A.J. Frutkin

When broadcasters announced their 2005-06 schedules, the Family Friendly Programming Forum added several more feathers to its cap. Among the projects it supported this year through its script development fund were ABC's Commander-in-Chief, UPN's Everybody Hates Chris and the WB's Related.

Of course, the meaning of “family friendly” continues to evolve. In fact, the Forum’s greatest success to date is having funded the pilot script for the WB’s Gilmore Girls, about a mother (Lauren Graham) who became pregnant as a teen and gave birth out of wedlock.

Dawn Jacobs, a Johnson & Johnson advertising vp and a co-chair of the Forum, said the group’s definition of family friendly has more to do with a program’s cross-generational appeal than it does with promoting a particular set of moral values. “At the end of the day, a show has to be engaging. And the best way to do that is by depicting real-life situations and problems,” Jacobs said. “There can be issues, but we ask the networks to resolve those issues responsibly.”

While ABC entertainment president Stephen McPherson said Commander-in-Chief is as much a family drama as it is a political one, he added that the show will feature “adult-themed story lines dealing with politics and power.” He also noted the Forum’s support of the series is a credit to the organization. “I think there’s a misperception that family friendly requires an exceedingly soft depiction of the nuclear family,” McPherson said.

Perhaps surprisingly, even Chris Rock’s edgy stage persona hasn’t prompted advertisers to squirm when it comes to Everybody Hates Chris’ family-friendly label. “The salt that [Rock] dishes out on stage is not in the fabric of the series,” said Shari Anne Brill, vp/director of programming at Carat USA. “This is about a family whose core values are working hard, getting the best education for your kids that you can and making something of yourself.” For the Forum, a group comprised of more than 40 national advertisers, its biggest win this year may be that all six networks participated in the initiative for the first time.

With the new shows’ pickups, Jacobs said its job is done for this year. “We don’t drive content,” she said, noting that should sensitive subject matter arise in these programs down the line, “typically the networks will let us know as individual advertisers.”

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000938196
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(2005) Sisterhood reveals secrets of 'Traveling Pants'

May 29, 2005
BY CINDY PEARLMAN

LOS ANGELES -- Size matters. It's especially relevant when you star in a movie about a pair of magic Levi's. At the moment, three young actresses are lamenting the jean size of Lindsay Lohan.

You might have heard that Lindsay recently dropped some pounds.

"Weight. It's a very emotional issue," says America Ferrera, who at 20 has enough curves to have starred in a movie called "Real Women Have Curves." "Lindsay is thinner, but it could be stress," says "Gilmore Girl" Alexis Bledel, 23. What if someone in Hollywood told either of them they needed to get down to size 0 for a role? Now it's "Joan of Arcadia" herself, Amber Tamblyn, 22, who begins to spaz out. "I'm sorry, but the size of my butt doesn't make me a good or bad actress. Give me a break!"

Actually, each is getting a big break this summer by starring in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," which opens Friday and is based on the best-selling teen novel by Ann Brashares. The book revolves around lifelong friends who must spend their first summer apart. Tamblyn is the future filmmaker, Bledel is shipped off to Greece to stay with her grandmother, and Ferrera is the overweight girl mandated by a custody agreement to stay with her father and his fiancee. They bond by shipping a pair of magic jeans back and forth to each other.

Over breakfast at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Century City, the princesses of "Pants" -- each wearing jeans -- took on bigger topics to see if they fit.

Q. Has anyone ever told you girls to drop a few pounds for a role?
Bledel: Before I got "Gilmore Girls," I was modeling. I went in for a call and was told, "Sweetie, you need to lose two inches off those hips." I was 14.
So I just replied, "I have more jobs than I can do. I'm in high school. I can't go to all the trouble of losing the two inches, so I'll pass." Someone might tell you to lose weight, but you can say no.

Ferrera: I think Hispanic women are beautiful with their curves. I'm not sure who feels that way in Hollywood. I was never told to lose 50 pounds. If they think that they just don't bother with you. You just don't get the role and you never know why. That's still better than physically harming yourself and becoming unhealthy just to star in a movie.

Q. Did any of you borrow from your very recent teenage years for the angst in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants"?
Ferrera: Well, I play a girl visiting her father who is absent in her life. My parents separated when I was younger and my father was completely absent. So I wouldn't say my acting in this movie just comes from my life, but I didn't have to stretch too far for the feelings of being isolated, abandoned and out of place.

Bledel: I have my first kiss in the film, but we're not going there on how it happened in real life!
Tamblyn: To me, the film is about best friends and how you don't have to see each other all the time. But then you're back in each others lives and just immediately connect. That's a great thing.

Q. What makes something a good teen film these days?
Tamblyn: This movie will be a shocker for most people. They're going to expect something fluffy and sweet. A teeny-bopper film. People might even make fun of this film before they see it, which is fine. I just give them a nice smirk and say, "Go see it and talk to me afterward." It's about issues of life and death. It's not fluff.

Bledel: My character is pretty, but doesn't see herself that way. She's extremely shy and has a very active inner life. Her life is also sort of a mess and she really doesn't know how to behave. I think a lot of girls can relate.

Ferrera: I love that the movie isn't about who is your boyfriend and are we going to the prom. It's about an internal transformation and not about wearing a pretty dress. It's also not about young girls being jealous of each other and hating each other. I'm sick of those movies.

Q. When something different like "Joan of Arcadia" comes along, it gets bashed by the media (and now it's canceled by CBS). Why did the ratings dive, Amber?
Tamblyn: Honestly, I think certain magazines really had it out for us from the beginning of the season. We were the show about God, and the magazines didn't like that.
So when it came time to stick it to us when we were going through a little rough spot they were really able to help push the whole "Don't watch this show anymore because it's gone to hell." Even though the show didn't at all go to hell. It's a great show about something.

Q. How do you handle fame at your age?
Bledel: Well, I remember it was 5 in the morning. I'm leaving my house to go to the set of "Gilmore Girls." I'm really tired and just when I walk outside, a bus slowly goes down the street with my face on the side of it as Rory Gilmore. I thought, "Ewwww." It's so early. I just can't stand seeing me.

Ferrera: I called her and said, "You have this huge billboard in Times Square." (Bledel shakes her head.)

Q. Is it hard to have a regular life when you're Joan of Arcadia? Can Joan go to her high school prom?
Tamblyn: I did go to the prom with my friend Sam, and it was horrible. I left early. I couldn't stand it. It wasn't like I was too good for it or whatever.
I just didn't identify with the whole school dance thing. This has nothing to do with my television show. I just don't get into the whole school dance thing. I do like to break dance, but they don't have that at the prom.

Q. Have you met any adult stars who have made you really go weak at the knees?
Ferrera: I think Tom Hanks was at the same hotel I was staying at to do an interview and I got so scared. I didn't want to see him. I love him so much and what if I fainted? I'm serious!

Bledel: Oh, we're not going there. It's private.

Tamblyn: I love David Bowie.

Q. So many young girls are obsessed with these "Pants" books. What was your entertainment obsession as a little girl?
Bledel: The Secret Garden or Little Women. Can I also say A Little Princess?

Ferrera: I loved that movie "Now and Then." My friends and I saw it about a million times when it came out, and we assigned each other characters. I was the girl with the big boobs.

Tamblyn: Oh, I loved that movie "Labyrinth." David Bowie. In spandex! Enough said.

Q. For every young girl who wants to act but has no industry connections, what is your best advice?
Tamblyn: Just don't take no for an answer. Audition, audition, audition. You have to get out there.
Ferrera: Just act. I wouldn't hear "no" when it came to auditioning for the junior high school production of "Romeo and Juliet." I was 7 and in third grade. My sister said, "You can't."
But I went down to the junior high and they took pity on me. That's how it began for me. When I was 17, I went to a professional audition and booked my first role in a Disney cable channel movie, which led to "Real Women Have Curves." You have to start with baby steps. Who knows where you'll end up.

Q. What's next?
Bledel: Sleep.
Tamblyn: Who knows?
Ferrera: I'm in "Lords of Dogtown" this summer and I'm a full-time student at USC studying international relations and not acting -- because I wanted my life outside of acting to be, you know, a life.

Distributed by Big Picture News
http://www.suntimes.com/output/movies/sho-sunday-pants29.html
Submitted by Trisha

(2005) Still a 'Gilmore Girl,' but also a woman

By Bob Strauss
Film Writer

Rory Gilmore is growing up.

Actually, Alexis Bledel, who plays the precocious teenager on television's acclaimed "Gilmore Girls," was already an adult when the series began.
But this year, 23-year-old Bledel is following her TV mom Lauren Graham's path into attention-grabbing movies with two image-changing roles: Becky, the deceitful young hooker in the violent and stylish "Sin City"; and Lena, a timid teenage artist who comes out of her shell while visiting Greece in "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants."
"Directors think I'm more capable than they might have thought I was before, because they're seeing different sides now," says the delicately featured Bledel, whose pale blue eyes are as striking in person as they are on screen.

"I understand that; they just think of you as they've seen you. I think, in this business, it's at least 50 percent about what you look like and 50 percent what you can do," the former teenage model adds.

"Sisterhood" director Ken Kwapis was determined to show us Bledel's quieter side.
"Rory is very, very verbal," he notes. "This was an opportunity to do just the opposite, to create a character through silences and pauses and awkward physical behavior. Alexis was so excited about that."

"The show is all about the writing, it's not really about the acting," Bledel says of her day job, which starts its sixth season in the fall. "We do have to sort of fit in our performances between the words. So it's actually lovely to have an opportunity to not say everything the character is thinking and just act it."

Of course, being adept at articulate, witty dialogue isn't a bad thing. Especially when English is your second language; born in Houston to a mother who was raised in Mexico and an Argentinean father, Bledel learned to speak Spanish first.

She acknowledges that her Rory image draws intelligent movie scripts her way. As for still being asked to play characters five, six or seven years younger than she is, well, actors have worse problems than that, too.

"I'm always excited about the prospect of playing someone my own age," Bledel admits. "But I'm really not horrified by the idea of playing a teenager, either. I know that I look young, and I know that I have a lot of time to play older characters. And no matter the age of a character, hopefully, they're all having rich human experiences."

http://u.redlandsdailyfacts.com/Stories/0,1413,217~24244~2891677,00.html
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(2005) Bledel Charts New Territory

(Sunday, May 29 12:04 AM)
By Jay Bobbin

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Alexis Bledel still enjoys being a girl, or more to the television point, one of the "Gilmore Girls."

About to appear on movie screens in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," the young actress has just finished her fifth season on The WB's comedy-drama about a close mother-daughter relationship. Besides continuing in summer repeats in its traditional Tuesday slot, the series is repeating earlier episodes virtually every day on ABC Family. The first three seasons are also available on DVD.

Those chart the growth of wiser-than-her-years Rory Gilmore (Bledel), who keeps pace mentally and verbally with her single mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), but is at an emotional crossroads as the show heads toward its sixth year.

In the season finale that aired two weeks ago, the normally driven Rory was reassessing virtually all the plans she had made for herself. To a degree, her decisions involved her current beau -- privileged Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry) -- and his rather picky family, but her ultraconservative grandparents (Edward Herrmann, Kelly Bishop) also factored in. A result of it all: one very panicked Lorelai.

"Rory has been on a very specific path for most of her young life," Bledel, 23, reasons, "so last season was the year that sort of opened her eyes to the fact that there are so many other things. She realized how competitive the field she was trying to get into is, and how slim her chances actually were, and how hard she'd have to work ... when she already was working hard. We saw more about her than her academic goals, and it was fun to see where it would go."

Executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino determined, according to Bledel, that viewers had "never really seen [Rory] mess up too much. She was almost annoyingly perfect. You just never saw her do anything normal teenagers do, and Amy said when Rory messes up, it's big. That's like her affair, if you can call it that, with Dean (Rory's ex-boyfriend, with whom she became intimate while he was separated from his wife). I certainly don't want to judge Rory, but it was an interesting surprise when I got that script."

Sending Rory to Yale could have altered the show's premise by separating her from Lorelai, but frequent phone calls and visits home kept the relatives united. "I think it's been done as smoothly as possible," Bledel says. "For a while, it seemed like they were on the phone a lot, but they're so important to each other, they always go back to each other at the end of the day with whatever they've experienced."

Bledel moonlighted by playing a young prostitute in the recent highly stylized movie "Sin City," for which she worked in front of a blank "green screen" for directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

"It was unlike anything I'd ever done or seen," she reflects. "It's stunning visually, really amazing to watch. Making it was challenging but kind of fun at the same time. You basically have only your costume and the other actors to help get you into character. Working with two directors was a great experience; they were harmonious as a team, and you got double the input."

Last summer was busy for Bledel, since "Sin City" was filmed at the same time as "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," based on the Ann Brashares novel and opening nationwide Wednesday, June 1. Among those playing her best friends in the new film is Amber Tamblyn ("Joan of Arcadia"), and Bledel says "it was fun working with people my own age or close to it. We just had a blast. The director (Ken Kwapis) would be like, 'OK, girls, it's time to shoot. Girls? Hello?'"

"Gilmore Girls" frequently places Bledel opposite older actors, and she says, "I love working with people I can learn a lot from, but it's a whole new experience to co-star with people my age.

You're all on the same page in a lot of ways. Since Amber also has done a series, it was cool because we could commiserate about the long hours. That's something nobody wants to hear you complain about, but when you know someone else has been going through the same thing, you can at least complain to each other."

Most movie scripts don't demand the rapid-fire dialogue Sherman-Palladino built into "Gilmore Girls" from the start. "It's hard," says Bledel, who adds that when she gives voice to a film script, "People are like, 'Slow down. Take your time.' I'm not used to that luxury, and it's wonderful. There are so many more possibilities, and you can just slow your whole performance down and see what you can find. [Doing a 'Gilmore' scene over], it's like resetting all the buttons and basically starting from scratch."

When her lengthy stint as Rory is finally finished, Bledel admits she'd have to think long and hard about doing another series after playing someone so tailored to her.

"It's been so intense," she says. "I'd hope to work on things with shorter commitments and just ease my way through. I've actually started to give a lot of thought to when the show ends, because it's been life-changing in a way. By its nature, it's all-consuming, so a lot of my life has been built around this schedule for the last five years. It's exciting to think about the future, though."

http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,271952991,00.html
Submitted by Trisha

(2005) Q&A with Alexis Bledel

June 6 issue - Q&A: Alexis Bledel

You might not approve of Alexis Bledel's latest squeeze on "Gilmore Girls." But in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," all her relatives hate her boyfriend. She spoke to NEWSWEEK's Ramin Setoodeh.

You shot the movie in Greece—and held a fish?
It was gross. I felt bad because they had somebody from the humane society but for fish—the fish society, of some sort—in Greece. We're scrambling to get the shot in time so the fish isn't out of water for too long.

Did you kill any?
No, but I was terrified.

You rode a donkey, too.
We had a couple of donkeys. There was the temperamental donkey and there was the donkey who acted like he was high.

Do you think the handler slipped him something?
That's probably against the donkey-protection program in Greece.

There's a swimming scene in "Sisterhood" exactly like "Tuck Everlasting."
I know, how weird is that? It's not my favorite thing to strip down. But it keeps happening.

Season three of the "Gilmore Girls" just came out on DVD. Do you like doing the commentaries?
They make us. I sometimes don't want to. I watch these other TV shows from our network and I've never seen one where the actress does commentary. I feel like I'm getting duped because I have to do a commentary every couple of weeks.

How do you talk so fast on the show?
It's really hard. You have to measure your breaths. I've found a good rhythm to it—once you get into it, it doesn't feel as fast as it is.

Could you get a Vespa on "Gilmore Girls," like the one in this movie?
I wish. It's the most wonderful thing when you're on the set and they clear the street. You can just tear down. But Rory would probably get a cute Vespa with a matching helmet.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8017763/site/newsweek/
Submitted by Trisha