![]() The notion of a group of people being callously gossiped about online by an anonymous troll certainly has resonance in our current climate, in which celebrities (as well as politicians and public figures) are often blogged about with a blithe and biting disregard. But the premise of the series-an anonymous blogger, who goes by “Gossip Girl,” monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers-predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture. ![]() The show premiered before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today. If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl-which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this September-would be that show for anyone who was a teenager or twentysomething (or, in many cases, older than that!) when it first aired. When I asked Lively if that arrangement ended up working out (even though I already knew the answer), she responded, laughing: “This is advice to anyone: when they say, ‘We promise, but we can’t put it in writing,’ there’s a reason they can’t put it in writing.” She added, “But no, the show didn’t slow down. And it was even more difficult for us, because we were going after a younger, more finicky audience.” You have to really hit something that’s in the zeitgeist, or really going to matter to people in a way that becomes an emotional connection. “You have to sort of catch the wind at your back. “We knew we needed the defining show,” Ostroff (currently president of Condé Nast Entertainment) said. Formed by the union of the WB and UPN, the new network-led by then President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff-was searching for an identity. Meanwhile, a new television network, the CW, was simultaneously in the midst of a delicate birthing process. “We learned a lot of lessons and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward, and we were really excited about doing something in New York,” Schwartz said over lunch in Los Angeles this past winter. As soon as they finished reading the first book, the duo knew this was it. They had been sent Cecily von Ziegesar’s popular Gossip Girl book series, centered on a group of affluent, conniving New York private-school students. But The O.C.’s creators and show-runners, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, already had the beaches of Newport in their rearview mirror, with their sights on a next project. The show had arrived on the scene with a tidal wave of buzz, its actors almost immediately splashed on magazine covers and pushed out onto red carpets but after burning through plot at a rapid pace ( its leading lady, Mischa Barton, saw her character get killed off somewhat unceremoniously in the third season), the show sputtered to a close, ending with a truncated final season. ![]() ![]() It was at about this time, in 2007, that The O.C., a prime-time soap opera about beautiful, articulate, sun-kissed teenagers living in Orange County, was wrapping up its four-year run. “People will go see your movie based on your standing and all of that, and it didn’t make sense to me because I was 18 and being an artist.” She decided, having deferred from college a year earlier, that she would jump off the Hollywood carousel and enroll in school. Eighteen years old at the time, she had just appeared in a small independent film and come to a crushing conclusion: “I realized that was a business as much as a craft,” she told me more than a decade after the fact, while on the West Coast, where her husband, Ryan Reynolds, was about to start shooting Deadpool 2. The blonde Tarzana, California, native-who, one imagines, leaves a trail of sunflower emojis and the scent of cupcake icing in her wake wherever she goes-had had enough.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |