Stan Zimmerman is the Perfect Brunch Date

Pour the mimosas and Bloody Marys! It’s time for brunch!

Comedy and entertainment writer Stan Zimmerman has teamed up with Spotlight Productions founder Kristen Carroll to host a new LGBTQ talk show, Brunch Date with Stan & Kristen. Featuring celebrity guests, witty banter, cocktails, camp, and shade for days, the limited test launch episodes are currently available on streaming channels Tello and CampTV.

Preparing for a career in Hollywood since the age of 10, Zimmerman has been nominated for awards for his work on The Golden Girls and Roseanne. He has also written and produced on Gilmore Girls, co-created the Lifetime sitcom, Rita Rocks, and penned the screenplays for The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel. Outside of the writers’ room, Zimmerman directs and produces theatre in Los Angeles, and is a mentor for aspiring actors and writers.

OFM had the opportunity to chat with Zimmerman about Brunch Date and working with some of the most famous women on television.

Let me begin by asking about your new talk show, Brunch Date with Stan & Kristen. What can we expect?
First off, I hate brunch, and I got talked into doing this show. I like my Sundays hanging at home and doing my own thing. Not necessarily getting dressed early. When you have brunch with people, you kind of have to put yourself together, somewhat. So, I was always scared of brunch. Kristen, who I met on the Golden Fantasy Cruise, I connected her with Christin Baker, and I thought they would be good business partners. She got involved in Christin Baker’s Tello Films, which is a lesbian content website, and I did two web series for them.

One was with Elizabeth Keener from The L Word called Skirtchasers, and the second one was called secs & EXECS with Sandra Bernhard and Mindy Sterling from Austin Powers. So, Kristen said, ‘I want to do this show.’ She lives in New Hampshire; I live in Los Angeles, and we would have these funny Zooms, like most of us were doing over 2020. I jokingly said, ‘Oh, we’re kind of like Kelly and Ryan,’ but she’s a little butcher than Ryan. So, I guess that makes me Kelly. When you say something to Kristen Carroll, the next day, it’s happening. Suddenly, we were off having a morning talk show.

It sounds like working with Kristen and having her as a co-host has been a blast.
We have a great time, and she is a wonderful cook. She can make a mean drink! She plied me with these different concoctions every week. Like Kelly and Ryan, we have a segment in the beginning where we talk about what’s happened that past week. Then the last segment is what’s coming up. In between, we have a celebrity guest.

We have had a lot of my old pals like Mindy Sterling, Liz Torres from Gilmore Girls, and Amanda Bearse from Married …With Children, who was one of the first out actors in Hollywood while they were on a series. People kind of forget that was a big deal back then. She was playing America’s next door neighbor sweetheart, then suddenly, people were like, what? You’re a lesbian? We also had Candis Cayne on the show, which was very exciting. We did four shows as a test run, and we are going to regroup and figure out who the next victims are to have brunch dates with.

How has the show been received?
Great! What’s so wonderful is that it has just been a cross section of people. I, obviously, have gotten to know a lot of Gilmore Girls fans. For four years, there has been a Gilmore Girls fan festival in Connecticut, and we have become this family of, mostly women, from all over the world. The cutest thing is when mothers and daughters come to the festival because they watched it when their daughters were little, and now, some of them have daughters of their own.

We have just become this tight-knit family, so they have been very supportive of me and my projects. They come to plays that I do when theatre was still a thing, and hopefully, it will be a thing again. It has been great to share this project with them, and especially when there are people that they know, like Liz Torres.

What do you hope audiences take away from Brunch Date with Stan and Kristen?
I hope they just have a good time. I have found, especially in the past year, we just got through four very difficult year, politically, and ending with a lot of tragedy. People are really scared, for many reasons, and there is a purpose to laughing. It is important to laugh, and I guess that is how I kind of look at the world. I am very sensitive, so a lot of these issues, like everything that has been happening with COVID and racism, are very difficult to watch every day. So, there are moments where you have to just laugh and have a good time.

We do get into social issues as well because I do not want to shy away from that. I am very political, and for the last four years, I spent most of my time turning on the TV and watching cable news at, like, three in the morning just to make sure our world was still existing. That the orange one wasn’t blowing it up. I have calmed down a little bit and sleep a little bit more through the night, but, like, when the verdict came out, I said to Kristen, ‘We have to talk about it. It does affect LGBTQ people, and what is our take on it?’ Every week, we think about what we want to talk about.

What have you personally gained from this show?
About 10 pounds [laughs]. I eat pretty strictly, and she’s like, try some bacon. But there’s sugar on the bacon, and I don’t eat sugar. I at least tasted it, and I did not like the sugary bacon. The next week, she made regular bacon, which is very tasty. Anything with bacon is tasty. With the show, I am just learning more about these fabulous women that we have been so lucky to have come on our show and get to go a little bit below the level of the normal interview. We are spending time with them and asking questions. We even love asking them, if you could have brunch with anybody in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?

You are known for working on several television series like The Golden Girls, Roseanne, and Gilmore Girls. Not only have they made an impact on pop culture, but why do you think they have become such staples within the LGBTQ community?
I think Golden Girls because there was a connection between older women, just as older people and the gay community of being outsiders. I think for a lot of people, they got to say things, have a life, and create this family. When I was growing up, you were going to be alone. There was no gay marriage; it wasn’t even really a concept. So, this kind of arranged family that you are going to be there for each other no matter what. At the end of the day, you have a family, you are not going to be alone. They will always have cheesecake and that little round table in the kitchen to talk about problems. I think a lot of our community just loved seeing that. They were bold. It did not matter how old they were; they were having sex; they were having lives; they were having stories—it was not the end of your life just because you got older.

Have you always wanted to work in the entertainment industry?
Since I was born. I came out reading Variety. I was obsessed. Obviously, I was not outside playing any sports, because I probably would have been hit in the head with the ball, then I would have run in with a nosebleed. So, as every gay boy does, you create your own TV network in your bedroom. I literally created a network with seven nights of programming scheduled against all the other networks. That’s pretty insane. This was when I wasn’t choreographing West Side Story in my bedroom, because I had to take time out and dance to West Side Story.

I was just obsessed with theater and creating television, so it is not that weird that I went into that world. I am lucky to have had a career in it for so long. I just loved it. Back then, we had TV guides; I would memorize every new show that came out, who the actors were, the writers, the directors, and I would pick the shows I thought my family members would want to watch. I was that specific. ‘You’ll like this one; sit down; you have got to watch this one.’ I was just fascinated with this world. My parents told my siblings and I for our 13^th birthdays, they would take us anywhere in the world. Of course, I picked Hollywood.

You will be detailing your experiences working with many of these women in an upcoming book called, The Girls: From Golden to Gilmore?
Yes! I should be writing right now, but I am happily talking with you. It has been very interesting going back. I have kept journals since college, so I am not only telling my story about all these women and how they made me a better human being, but I am also putting pieces of what I was feeling and thinking at the time, rereading everything, it is pretty fascinating to see where you were emotionally. While I was going through Golden Girls and what I was feeling, being there, and I really did appreciate that moment. There was a lot happening, and it was scary.

Then, Roseanne, my God, that was another frightening experience because we were told, don’t let her see the whites of your eyes. If she sees your eyes, she could fire you. So, every time we would come down to the set, I would find the biggest guy to hide behind. Until we wrote the lesbian kiss episode, and she was like, ‘Who the hell wrote this?’ All the writers parted and shoved us forward. It was like walking to the Wizard of Oz, all shaking. She was like, ‘This is fantastic, the best script I’ve ever read.’ Whew, so we are here for at least another week.

You are also currently mentoring aspiring writers. Can you tell us more about that?
I mentor writers who I have either found or met that I am just fascinated with. I also got talked into teaching Zoom sitcom pilot writing classes. It started over COVID, and I thought, ‘I will just put the word out.’ I taught writing classes years ago, and it is a lot of work. I also teach acting classes, which is a little more fun, but with writing, you have to read everyone’s outlines and scripts and take really detailed notes. With acting, I can just kind of say, do this and that, and you have to do it.

I ended up teaching six classes. I was only going to do one, and I just started two. They are in three sections—pitching, outlining, and Act One writing. A lot of the writers wanted to keep going, so we did Act Two and Act Three. Over the year of COVID, some people finished scripts, finished real pilots that they have been rattling around in their head. Some for over 20 years. It has been so rewarding, and I am so happy for them. It has been a wonderful experience. Because I created a Zoom writers’ room, these writers would have never had that experience of meeting all these writers of various ages from all over the world. Hearing their ideas, reading their work, and commenting on everything.

What is the best piece of advice you can offer to an aspiring writer?
Keep writing. Writing is rewriting. Structure is very important. I don’t think people should just turn on the computer and write. That is not my style. If you are writing for yourself, that’s fine, but if you are writing for television, television is very structured media. So, knowing the framework, and plot it out. We did that on Gilmore Girls. We literally had this huge whiteboard, and we wrote, ‘Rory walks in the room; she sits down.’ All the choreography, then the dialogue can come out. I learned this a lot on The Brady Bunch Movie. The director, Betty Thomas, said, ‘Every character has to have an arc.’ Everything has to have an arc. Once you have that, then you can fly, but some people just want to do blah, blah, blah. So, watch TV; observe it; learn from it; be organized, and be prepared to keep rewriting it.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?
Oh, geez, there is so much. I cannot even tell you about some stuff, but follow me, and you will see the progress of my book. It really is one of the hardest things I have ever had to deal with. That dialogue and writing paragraph after paragraph, but it is so rewarding. When I get done with certain chapters, I feel really good about it. I am looking forward to getting back into theatre, and hopefully, in September here in L.A., I will be able to premiere and direct a new play that I wrote called Have a Good One. There will be some eye candy because it takes place at an Abercrombie and Fitch-type store in 1999. There will be two male greeters without their shirts on. So, you’re welcome, but it is really about who decides what is beautiful and feeling beautiful.

Connect with Zimmerman by following him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or visit his official website.