Slayers and Vampires
Page 11
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
I auditioned for the role of the first principal [Robert Flutie] and there’s a memorial bust of him right outside the cafeteria door on set, so every time in rehearsal when we passed the bust I said, “That could have been me.”
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
Many months later, my agent called and said there is a straight offer for you for this new principal, Principal Snyder. I said to the agent, “Well, is this a recurring character?” And they said yes. I said, “Listen, you know that I have a day job. I do Star Trek on a regular basis.” And they said to me that they’re going to rotate principals on a regular basis. They’re going to kill them off and I said OK. Maybe it’ll be two or three episodes and that’s it. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was the audition that got me Snyder or it was that two-minute talk in what I later learned was the writers’ room.
My life is about that. About just turning left when I should have turned right and vice versa. It’s possible that that conversation in that room was more influential than the reading I gave. I was sorry that Kenny lost the job but I was very grateful for the role. Because they had told me that principals were going to be killed off on a regular basis, I was enormously surprised for the next three years that I was still there. When they’d come to the end of a season, I would always go to the back page first of the script and say, “Well, how do they kill me off?” And had been surprised for years that I was still there.
DAVID GREENWALT
The deal they made for me to go to Buffy was only for thirteen episodes ordered and it was, like, “Go help this guy Joss get his little show off the ground, and then your reward will be to go to The X-Files.” By the way I admired the shit out of X-Files, but I could not write it to save my life. At the end of these twelve episodes, it was a big love fest with Joss and most of the actors, and there’s a picture where Joss went around with all the actors and one of the producers basically looking very pleadingly into the camera and saying, “David, please don’t go.”
I went to The X-Files while we were waiting to see if Buffy would be picked up, and I spent about a month or two there. Howard Gordon was kind of my savior there. I watched eighty-four of them in a row. I was so amazed. What a piece of work. X-Files set the bar for TV production and excellence. They reshot whatever they didn’t like before they were a big hit. They had this high level of production and Chris Carter is very good at writing this kind of stuff. That’s not me. I couldn’t get the emotional connection. It was always about, “Oh, it’s an alien, no it’s bees, it’s small pox, it’s this thing, that thing. It’s nothing.” I went running back to Buffy after about two months on The X-Files. My real reward was working with Joss all those years.
In the second season Howard Gordon briefly became a part of the Buffy staff as consulting producer, joined by his assistant, Jose Molina, who himself would eventually become a story editor on Firefly for Whedon, and go on to much success on a series of popular shows, among them The Vampire Diaries, Castle, Agent Carter, the Amazon iteration of The Tick, and who would cohost the screenwriting podcast Children of Tendu.
That second season also saw the arrival of husband and wife writing team of David Fury and Elin Hampton (though of the two only Fury—who had previously worked on The Jackie Thomas Show, Dream On, and Life’s Work—would ultimately stay with the show, eventually rising to the rank of co–executive producer over subsequent years). Marti Noxon joined as a writer and became story editor midseason, also rising over the years to become an executive producer and show runner for seasons six and seven. And, in season three, The Onion’s Dan Vebber joined as a staff writer, later rising to a co–executive producer on such popular series as Futurama, American Dad, and The Simpsons.
JOSE MOLINA
I was a huge X-Files fan, which is how I came to work as Howard Gordon’s assistant in summer of 1997. I was working as a PA at Warner Brothers feature animation, which is the division that produced Space Jam and Quest for Camelot. Right as it became defunct, they produced The Iron Giant. So I worked on Iron Giant technically for a heartbeat. But when Quest came out and it didn’t do anything, they essentially curtailed the division down to the very bare essentials. So, of course, what’s the first salary that has to go? That fat PA salary has to go and they saved four hundred bucks a week by not paying me. Coincidentally, though, the head of the department, whom I really liked, was Howard Gordon’s sister. I sent out two résumés cold and got an interview with Howard. He interviewed me in his X-Files office, which was packed up at the time because he was leaving X-Files at the end of season four. I told him my story of X-Files, which included a pitch and meeting my wife, whom I’ve now been with twenty years, in an X-Files chat room. I think that endeared me to him, knowing that his show had changed someone’s life completely. One interview, one cold résumé, and I got the gig. That’s how that happened.
DAVID FURY
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
My wife had seen Buffy on opening day. We skipped out of work and said let’s go to a matinee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because I just thought this is a great premise. I love a great horror-comedy mash-up, and I thought this was going to be a lot of fun. I didn’t love the movie. Just tonally it was wrong, it wasn’t funny enough, it wasn’t scary enough. Although I loved the premise.
When Joss talked to us about writing for the series, I told him off the bat, “I was so excited about this, but I was disappointed in the movie.” He recognized all the problems in the way his script was produced and started to explain how that was going to be fixed in the TV series. The more he talked about it, the more he talked about how the stories were allegorical and he gave the example of the invisible girl, the girl you go to school with whom nobody pays attention to and is kind of invisible to everyone else—and then she becomes literally invisible. I went, “Oh my God, that’s exactly the kind of thing I love to do.”
When we were done with the meeting, I said, “I want to work on the show.” I loved everything Joss had to say. He was funny in the meeting and so I really wanted to work for this guy. I told my agents and they said, “Are you crazy? This is six episodes on the WB which no one knows exists, and it’s a midseason show.” The other meeting we had at the same time was a sitcom on ABC to premiere in the fall, sandwiched between Roseanne and Home Improvement, which were like the number one and number two shows on television at that time. “This is a surefire hit; you have to do this show,” and we listened to our agent and turned down Buffy and went to the sitcom.
The sitcom was eighteen episodes and out. Meanwhile, Buffy premiered midseason and was almost off the bat a phenomenon. It was getting magazine covers. We watched it, because I really wanted to see how he pulled stuff off, and we loved it. We were kicking ourselves. We fired our agent and moved to another agency, which was the same agency that Joss was at. When they asked us what other things we were looking to do, I said I wanted to get back in at Buffy and pitch to Joss.
We got to get back in and pitch to Joss at the beginning of the second season, he bought our story, and we got to write “Go Fish.” That resulted in a job offer, but Elin, my partner, wanted to stay in sitcoms. She loved doing sitcoms, so she went to Mad About You. I wanted to go to Buffy and Joss was going to give me a script to try me out as a solo writer. That’s what kind of propelled me into hours. And then the progression of how does a comedy writer wind up there? Every successive show got more and more serious. Buffy then Angel, which was a little more serious, and then Lost, which was more serious but still [has] room for comedy. And then 24, which has no room for comedy. Once you’re in that kind of mode, that becomes how people see you, “Oh, you’re a 24 writer.” “No, I’m a comedy writer, believe it or not.”
DAN VEBBER
(staff writer, season 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I was a huge fan of Buffy. It was my first staff writing job. I had been at The Onion previous to that. Moved out
to Los Angeles so my background was really in comedy, but I had written a spec script for The Larry Sanders Show, which was my miracle script. It got me in pretty much any meeting I wanted, and then I wrote a spec script for Buffy, because it was the one show that really had the voice that I was trying to write with. My agent warned me up and down—everybody said, up and down—“Don’t ever write a spec script for the show that you want to write for.” But I’m one of the rare instances where it actually worked. My spec script got to Joss, because we were at the same agency, UTA. I went in for a meeting with Joss and we had a good meeting and he hired me this day.
Pretty much as soon as I exited the meeting I had a job offer from them—he said at the time that I was just very good at capturing these characters’ voices, which speaks more to my ability to write comedy than my ability to write drama. Mimicking character voices is easy, because that’s just an element of satire and parody which I had honed working at The Onion, and that’s how I ended up there season three.
DAVID GREENWALT
Joss has been very generous and many times he’s said that Buffy wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for me. I have no idea what I brought to it. I worked my ass off, I’d get up at five in the morning with a thesaurus, because of what he did. He invented a language for these kids in Buffy, because he felt if he went to a junior high [or] high school and just overheard stuff, it would be old in two years, right? So he invented an entire language and I did what I beg other writers to do when they work for me, which is that your job here is to not so much express yourself and your feelings and your childhood as it is to replicate what the creator of the show has done and is doing. Like I said, I’m a pretty good mimic.
I don’t suffer like him, but I would get up very early every morning with a thesaurus and write my ass off and try every different word I could think of for every piece of dialogue. You could use words like “skedaddle” and all these wonderful words that you couldn’t use in a regular show. I just stalked him every day and sometimes I would stand outside the bathroom and would push to get things done and we broke stories together and it was amazing. I have no idea what I brought.
JOSE MOLINA
I went to work for Howard Gordon in June of 1997. He was in an overall at Fox and he was developing and they asked him to consult on this show. There were a couple of shows that needed people and he chose Buffy. That was my first exposure to the show. I’d never seen the movie and I’d heard that they were making a show out of the movie. My reaction was the reaction of most of us cynics, which was, “Oh my God, they’re making a shitty show out of that shitty movie that nobody saw.” But Howard had a couple of tapes in his office and I watched them and I was, like, “Holy shit, this is good!” And I went back and I watched the movie—clearly the movie is not as good as the show. Howard was consulting, which meant he got all the scripts, which also meant I got all the scripts season one. He started working at the beginning of season two, which was also Marti Noxon’s first year on the show. I was instantly addicted to the show. More so than Howard, who was working on it.
HOWARD GORDON
I don’t know if it was my experience or my temperament, but I’m also very self-critical, so I sort of recognized that I’m not singing exactly in this key, but I was experienced enough and a hard enough worker to get some serviceable material. I guess I felt lucky to have a front row seat to something that I hadn’t done.
JOSE MOLINA
I remember specifically he was writing a script, he was supposed to do the teleplay for “What’s My Line?, Part One.” He was having a really hard time with it. His voice isn’t naturally that funny, quirky, dialogue-heavy, Whedon voice, which I absolutely loved and like to think I still sort of write in a similar voice. I asked him, “Hey, do you want me to write a couple of scenes. Maybe I can help you out and you don’t have to tell anybody, just let me show you what I can do.” I went home one weekend and wrote a few scenes in “What’s My Line?” and I brought them in and he wound up not using them, but he paid me a great compliment which was he had other scripts and other pages from people on his desk that he was trying to read and emulate the style as he was trying to figure out how he was going to write his script, and he said that he couldn’t tell the difference between my pages and their pages, which made me go, “Well use my fucking pages!” But he didn’t. He had enough pride that he wanted to do it himself.
Eventually, when it came down to how long it was taking him and how hard a time he was having, he actually wound up co-writing that script with Marti [Noxon] because Marti was writing “What’s My Line?, Part 2” and she had finished her script already in the time that Howard had done about half of his. So that was the beginning of me with Buffy.
In addition to the standing sets for the series that were built adjacent to the production offices in Santa Monica, Sunnydale High exteriors were shot at Torrance High School in Torrance, California, as were the exteriors of the Summers house a few blocks away at 1313 Cota Avenue. Angel’s residence as well as the mansion occupied by Drusilla and Spike was shot at the legendary Ennis House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Offered Joss Whedon previously, “We were very much on a tight budget. It’s really kind of sad, actually. The outside of the warehouse also doubled as the entrance to The Bronze.”
Although the initial cemetery scenes were filmed at a real graveyard in Los Angeles, a smaller, makeshift series of tombstones was constructed by production designer Carey Meyer for the second season in the parking lot of the production studios, where most of the cemetery scenes were shot. Said Whedon at the time, “It made our lives a whole lot easier, but it doesn’t give you the scope you get from a real graveyard.”
DAVID FURY
A lot of the times what happens when your show shoots in Vancouver or cross-country or wherever is that camps start to form. There’s the production camp. Then there’s the producer-writer camp. There’s kind of a lack of trust, because they’re bitching over in production about something that you don’t know they’re upset about. Whereas you can fix it immediately if you were there, but it’s difficult to do when you’re in different time zones. That’s something I sorely miss from doing Buffy, the fact that we had our own stages and a little back lot of downtown Sunnydale right outside our offices. It was three warehouses; then behind the warehouses they created a downtown outside exterior where the Bronze was, and the magic shop was there for exteriors. They would lay sod across the parking lot and put up tombstones and that would be our cemetery. It worked! On as tiny a budget as we had, it worked great.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
We were shooting in a warehouse that was a converted lumber warehouse right on 28th and Olympic. I think the metro is going through it now. It had small ceilings. We didn’t have any [lighting] grids to work off of. We had ladders—we’d be either putting stands above the sets or tacking it with C-clamp lights to the tops of the sets. But we didn’t have any grid work to work off of. People were falling off ladders. So it was slow in that respect. You didn’t have anyone up there on the catwalks and stuff. It made it challenging. We made it work, but we had our limitations, so it kind of tended to make it look a little low-budgety if you weren’t careful, because you are shooting in the house on the stage and the windows have to look fairly decent.
MARK HANSSON
(second assistant director, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
One funny story was when shooting in at Torrance High School, where a lot of the first season took place, we were getting ready to do a basketball scene in the gym. Alyson wanted to pull a prank on Nicholas Brendan, so in front of the whole company and a hundred plus extras, when he was jumping up for a shot, she ran up and pulled his shorts down. Well, it took everything with the shorts, so he was totally naked in front of everyone, which was funny but embarrassing. It was a rehearsal and cameras weren’t rolling at the time. Alyson was mortified, but Nick took it in good humor.
RAYMOND STELLA
I had a good gaffer and a lot of good people around me working hard and it was fun. That was a challenge. I had come off features where you shoot two or three pages a day and here we’re shooting ten a day. Seven to ten pages, which is a lot of work. So, that’s a challenge. You don’t know whether to look at your meter or your watch half the time. We waited a lot on actors, too, because after you get into four, five, six, or seven seasons, they’re, like, not going to be rushing around too much. So we’re lit and it takes them about ten seconds to get off the stage and about twenty minutes to get back once you’re ready.
The first people that the producers come to when you’re behind is the camera crew. I told them, “I can light circles around these actors, the problem is that they don’t come back. If you can keep them on the stage we could push this thing.” I wasn’t going to take the brunt of it. It took time to light here and there, but we had a good crew; we knew what we were doing.
DAN VEBBER
I remember it being pretty tense on set, but because I had so little experience working on live-action shows, I don’t know how much of that is normal and how much was unique to that show. I didn’t get the sense that a lot of rewriting was being done on set.
MARK HANSSON
Buffy was not a very happy experience for many people, even though it was a good show. They asked me to continue, but after so many people in my department got fired that first year in 1996, I elected to just do the first season. Never regretted not going back, even when the show became a hit.