On the precipice of what promised to be great fame, Texas native Crawford and Westwick, a young Brit in America on a work visa, decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea together. (Schwartz and Savage said they were adamant about casting Westwick, who had initially auditioned to play Nate; when the network asked them to prep a backup in case his visa situation did not work out, the duo refused.) Before the show had even aired, but after casting had been announced, Westwick and Crawford were already getting swarmed when they ventured out in the wild. Crawford recalled attending an Arctic Monkeys show with Westwick, where they got a sense of what their future might hold. “We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: ‘Oh, we love the books.’ [Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, sh*t, man.”
The CW moved ahead with the series after seeing the pilot, and Ostroff now says the show was essentially to the CW what House of Cards is seen as for Netflix—the singular series that came to represent an entire network.While Schwartz and Savage were able to develop an audience over the fall, it was the spring of 2008 that the show really hit its stride, in part thanks to the timing of the writer’s strike. “The CW, because they couldn’t just run repeats or game shows, [Gossip Girlis] all they had,” Schwartz said. “They kept re-running the show during the strike so more and more people were watching.” The show’s return was preceded by a controversial “OMFG” marketing campaign, featuring stills of the cast in states of undress, with pull quotes saucily warning that the show was, “Every parent’s nightmare” and “Mind-blowingly inappropriate.” (Again, what better way to make sure teenagers did whatever it took to watch?) When the writers returned to craft the new batch of episodes post-strike, “people knew what the show was,” executive producer Joshua Safran said.
It was not long before packs of paparazzi were stalking the set, not dissimilar from the way in which “Gossip Girl” and “her” sources snapped Serena and Blair on the show itself—and it was impossible for the cast to so much as walk to set without getting swarmed. Hairstylist Jennifer Johnson said, “I had a little S.U.V. at the time and I had it parked out front of our location at the school. There were just so many fans everywhere, and when we wrapped at the end of the day, there were handprints all over my car. It was like the Beatles were inside.” Sam Robards, who played Nate’s father, laughed as he remembered what it was like to shoot scenes with Crawford: “It was a Friday night around midnight, and we were up on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, and I looked across the street and there were, like, 200 kids with cell phones, and I said to Chace, ‘Hey buddy, there are 200 kids on a Friday night in the city [here] . . . and they ain’t taking my picture.’”Michelle Trachtenberg, who played impeccably dressed menace Georgina Sparks, said she remembers fans trying to “pet [her] hair” as she made her way through the set: “I opened up my trailer door to see, literally, on my first day, I think 40 paparazzi. That’s when I was like, ‘O.K., I need my own bodyguard.’”
Crawford said while he didn’t necessarily mind the frenzy at the time, he reflects on it now somewhat differently. “I think I used to feel like I was fine with it, but looking back on it from a different perspective now, I never really got used to it. . . . I’m a private person and I don’t like being the center of attention.” Meester was somewhat flippant about the initial fan attention: “I think they were mostly there for the guys.”
WhileSex and the Cityhad blazed the trail for a New York-based show that enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the worlds of fashion and commerce,Gossip Girlset trends for the coveted 18 to 34 demographic in a particularly emphatic way. “It was very clear from the beginning that we wanted to editorialize television and give it this high-fashion, international flair,” costume designer Eric Daman explained. Savage said, “We talked about how the show, on the one hand, is telling this fictional story about these characters, but it’s also kind of working as a lifestyle magazine.”
Johnson, who remains close friends with Lively, said she was amazed to see how much interest there was in how Lively’s hair was styled, comparing it to Jennifer Aniston’s iconic haircut onFriends: “A lot of magazines would call and want to do interviews on how you get the ‘Serena look.’ . . . It was like ‘the Rachel look.’” A 2008New York Times story noted, “Merchants, designers, and trend consultants say thatGossip Girl. . . is one of the biggest influences on how young women spend,” with a Bloomingdale’s fashion director explaining that the show had had a “profound influence on retail.” Daman said, “When we came back with Season 2, so many designers were lining up and wanting to be a part of it—they wanted their stuff on either Blake or Leighton.”
Daman said the bold looks Westwick’s Chuck Bass, ostensibly the show’s romantic male lead, wore on the show—which involved purple suits, patterned handkerchiefs, and bowler hats—had a profound impact on the marketplace, as well.“I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one,” Daman said. “He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means. Menswear, at that point, was still veryJersey Shore. . . . I’m very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, ‘No, it’s O.K. to dress up. You’re not gonna look like some big pansy because you’re in a f*cking suit, dude. Suck it up, put on the bow tie.’”
While men may have taken fashion cues from the show, they perhaps gleaned other recreational benefits from it as well. Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Blair’s housekeeper (a fan-favorite character), said she remembers “a guy coming up to me who had a suit and a briefcase, this total Wall Street Guy, and he was all like, ‘Oh my god, Dorota!’ He told me, and a couple of other guys have told me this, too, that they used to watch the show because it was a great way in with the ladies.”
While the tabloids may have desperately hoped for some Lively-Meester on-set friction, this, by all first-hand accounts from those involved with the show, was not the case—though, god knows, that did not stop the tabloids from conjuring such tales. “It’s funny,” Trachtenberg said, “Because when we were filming, there was, ‘Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, everyone hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,’ and blah, blah, blah. It really wasn’t. We were all chill. It was cool.” Makeup artist Amy Tagliamonti explained, “I have to say there was too much work to do for things to be that dramatic behind the scenes. It’s not like [the actors] were trying to get followers for Instagram; nobody was trying to do all the things that I feel like people do now, like, ‘Let’s get attention.’ Everyone was just doing their thing.”
Safran—who was Savage and Schwartz’s second-in-command and who wrote nearly every premiere and finale of the series—had this to say about the two leading ladies:“Blake is very much in the moment. Blake knows what’s happening. She knowsthis movie’s coming out, this band is happening. You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, ‘I’m doing this thing tonight. Have you been to this restaurant?’ Leighton was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage. I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners.” But even though they may have had different demeanors, the two got along just fine on set: “Blake and Leighton were not friends. They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair. Yet the second they’d be on set together, it’s as if they were.”
Lively’s life ended up mirroring and then eclipsing that of Serena, the character she was playing. “It was funny,” Schwartz said, “When we first started talking to Blake, it was like, in order for this show to work and for you to be the ultimate New Yorker, you’re going to have to host Saturday Night Live and be in a Woody Allen movie.” “And be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” Savage added. (Lively has by now checked all three of these achievements off her list.) When Lively first appeared on the cover of Vogue, Schwartz remembers thinking, “Oh my god, this is . . . Blair’s nightmare. It really felt like life imitating art.” Costume designer Daman noted, recalling Lively “running around on Christian Louboutin’s moped” when they filmed a few episodes of the series in Paris: “I feel like Serena and Blake definitely had a symbiotic relationship: in their lives and in the show.”
For the first few seasons of the show, Lively was dating Badgley—their characters dated on the show, as well—but the two were careful to keep the relationship largely hidden from the public eye. “The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” Safran said. “They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”
