New 'Gilmore Girls' Showrunner Was Heidi Klum's #1 Fan
The Televisionary blog was curious about David Rosenthal, the guy taking over as showrunner of Gilmore Girls from beloved series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who is leaving the series along with her writer-producer husband Daniel Palladino. (The official story: They wanted a multi-year contract, but studio Warner Bros. would only offer them one year.) As it turns out, Rosenthal is a curious choice to guide the mother-daughter story for multiple reasons, not the least of which being the time, according to a quoted LAT magazine article, he abruptly quit his gig at Spin City and divorced his wife so he could focus all his energies on writing and mounting a creepy, mysogynistic play about his obsessive desire to sleep with Heidi Klum:
Rosenthal had in fact written a play called "Love" about his quest to get supermodel Heidi Klum to have sex with him. Reviews of the play, which apparently contained so many profanities that it rated an NC-17, were not kind. The New York Times called Rosenthal's play "not only offensive but incompetent" and said that the way that Rosenthal talked about Klum—whom he had met during a guest stint on Rosenthal's show Spin City—was "as cruel and disgusting as actual stalking."
The New York Times reviewer wasn't the only one perturbed by Rosenthal's play. Rosenthal had sent copies to his then agents at Endeavor—Ari Emanuel and Richard Weitz—who promptly dropped him as a client. His rabbi father, after reading the play, had Rosenthal briefly committed at UCLA Medical Center.
Televisionary also points out that Rosenthal once described the incident on Howard Stern's radio show: His father greeted him as he got off a flight at LAX with two bodyguards, and instructed him he would be taken by force if he didn't cooperate. He managed to get out of the loony-bin with the help of his sister, but would spend the next several years in sitcom-writing exile in New York. Rosenthal's back, however, and ready to apply his acute supermodel-stalking talents to the next season of Gilmore Girls. His trademark touches should start popping up immediately, when Rory turns inexplicably feral in the premiere, terrorizing the Yale campus with what appears to be Seal's severed head on the end of a stick.