Even before submitting the script for the pilot, Dunham was asked to write four episodes along with it. In September, the studio decided to make the pilot, and the shoot was scheduled for November. This, Dunham writes, “gave us two months to cast, hire crew, scout locations, build sets, and a million other things that hadn’t yet occurred to me since I’d never made anything outside my own house.” She was ready to let the process take over her life (“There was nowhere else I needed to be”) and eager to make the series: “If I loved making movies, then making TV, I figured, must be like a movie that never ends. And what could be better than that?” The be-careful-what-you-wish-for part came quickly. The production was set up at Silvercup Studios, in Queens. Dunham had an office there and, at times, she felt lost: “Often, when I closed the door, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I would sit there alone, wondering how a person with a sign like that on their door used their time.” She had entered a machine that was running on its own, assembled by people who assembled such machines for a living, and she had to find a way to fit her ideas and herself into it.
The cast of “Girls” included such thrilling actors as Allison Williams, Adam Driver, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Andrew Rannells. (The cast may be the show’s most enduring contribution to cinema.) Dunham assumed that the lead role would be played by an experienced actor and was surprised to learn that “everyone”—from Judd Apatow, who’d come on as an executive producer, to Konner to “the brass at HBO”—expected her to star, as she’d done in “Tiny Furniture.” Dunham’s first shock, after filming the pilot, was a complaint from Konner about her appearance: she was thinner than she was in “Tiny Furniture” and, Dunham writes, Konner told her “it’s not funny if you’re too thin.” What Dunham heard was a supervisor expressing her authority, with the threat that goes with it. So, Dunham writes, “For the rest of that summer, I ate like my job depended on it. . . . I must have gained fifteen pounds in a month.” She understood that, for the hierarchy above her, she was both an employee and disposable, even as she was on the upswing of seemingly overnight success.
The show’s entire first season went quickly into production. Yet, during the shoot, she faced a crisis of creative authority, one that made itself felt in the texture and substance of “Girls”: she and the show’s cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, had worked together on “Tiny Furniture,” and their plans for the TV series were similarly ambitious. “We committed to holding on to our cinematic aesthetic no matter what was thrown at us, to making the show look more like Cassavetes than Friends.” But during the shoot, she observed “a tug-of-war between Jody . . . and Jenni and Judd, who were trying to help me bridge the gap between my very specific aesthetic and the medium of television, which, even in its most elevated form, still needs to feel accessible and, on some level, populist.” The result was that, by the end of the shoot of that first season, Lipes was no longer talking to her; their communications took place through intermediaries. Another result, which she doesn’t cite, is that the show lost some of the tone and texture that had defined her feature film—especially in the many episodes that Dunham didn’t direct.
The acclaim for “Girls” was overwhelming, the publicity engine roared, and Dunham became famous. She had written the pilot never expecting that the show would be made; while making the first season, she assumed that there wouldn’t be a second. With the third, she writes, “it seemed like Girls would just be my life from now on.” Indeed, she and her fellow cast members were contractually committed to a seven-year run. Even as Dunham began suffering a series of health crises—many of which she correlates with especially stressful, fatiguing, or demanding times on the series—making and promoting “Girls” took up all of her time, leaving her “overstimulated by the intensity of my new public life yet under-stimulated when it came to doing typical things that might make a twentysomething feel whole.” She offers a brief list of the ordinary things that people in their twenties do and that she didn’t. She was thus, as she puts it, “all out of ideas.” This strikes me as the core of the making of “Girls”: for Dunham, a personal filmmaker of such a candidly self-scrutinizing sort, the demands of the TV machine had the effect of blanking her out, depriving her both of the material for movies and of the time and energy to make them.
