I was working on something like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I was out in California and I remember watching the pilot in a hotel room and going, “That is amazing.” It was amazing to me for someone to reclaim Buffy the Vampire Slayer, since I remembered the movie and felt like, even in the movie, there was something going on, it wasn’t tracking right, but there was something going on that was intriguing in the writing. Joss was able to remount that as a TV show.
The pilot, the way it functioned so well. It was a very arresting moment, and I went, “All right, that’s a guy . . .” I didn’t really know about his history as such a prolific script doctor. I started to hear that he had done really well on Roseanne. That he was, to use a cultural term, big-brained. So I became aware of him.
THOMAS P. VITALE
(executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)
The morning after Buffy premiered, everyone at workplaces across America was talking about it. I was working at Syfy at the time, and the show was truly “water cooler” programming and what’s best is that the show got better. Some shows start out great and then fade. Buffy strengthened beyond its pilot.
DAVID GREENWALT
We knew we were onto something when three weeks of Buffy being out there was a Buffy question on Jeopardy. We knew we’d cut through the noise pretty good.
SOUL MAN
“From now on we’re gonna have a little less ritual and a little more fun around here!”
If season one had proved there was quite a bit of life in the undead, season two is when the series truly came into its own. The show introduced the dynamic vampire duo of Spike (James Marsters) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau), Xander began dating Cordelia; Willow started a relationship with oz (Seth Green), who is revealed to be a werewolf; and, in the most exciting, compelling, and shocking twist, Angel, after Buffy and he consummate their relationship, loses his soul and becomes evil. Truly evil, betraying Buffy repeatedly; torturing Giles and murdering his girlfriend, Jenny Calendar; threatening to suck Earth into hell, forcing Buffy to turn Mr. Pointy on the former object of her affections.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I came on after the first season for season two. Buffy was just starting to get some notice; people had begun to sit up and notice that there was something special there. It certainly hadn’t reached its cult status. I think the newness connected with people. The emotion. Joss always minded the store in terms of emotion. These characters were real. It’s the same thing that draws anyone to a hit show is that these characters become incredibly real, incredibly vivid and have emotional lives—and it’s wildly entertaining and moving all at the same time. And funny.
DAVID FURY
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
When my wife and writing partner, Elin [Hampton], came in to pitch to Joss and to David Greenwalt at the beginning of season two, they both let us in on little things that were coming in the show. The whole idea of the Cordelia-Xander relationship was, like, “Oh my God, that’s great.” But we never really got a sense of the staff, because it was really just Joss and David we were talking to. I noticed Howard Gordon’s name on the door and I knew Howard’s work from The X-Files and I was a big fan. But I never saw him there. I never actually saw a lot of the writers. We only just saw David and Joss and they were still very clearly figuring out the show. As much as they had and were able to accomplish in that brief first season, they were still trying to find something that was going to stick.
HOWARD GORDON
I was incredibly welcomed by Joss and David Greenwalt. I had a deal at Fox and I went on to Buffy as a consultant. I was actually blown away by Joss. I don’t know if Joss’s reputation as a genius had gotten around, but I was just blown away by the show. Just how clever it all was. I was a young writer then, and Joss was younger still. He mostly had a background of working in sitcoms and script doctoring on features. Just the way he was able to mash up a rich crazy filmography and bibliography and summon them at will . . . What I admired and saw him do again and again is that some writers just write the first thing in their heads and sort of paint themselves into a corner, and Joss I noticed right away just had this architecture in his head where you could really see the wheels turning. It was always a total pleasure to see.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Season one we found out that we had a show. That people liked it. I thought people were going to laugh at the Buffy-Angel thing and say, “Well clearly he’s a vampire. This is so hokey.” But they couldn’t get enough of it. It definitely made me realize—and by “Prophecy Girl” we had incorporated it—the soap opera aspect of it; a continuing story of the romance and the people and their emotions was really what was fascinating. The monsters were all very well and good, but in the first season we were, like, “Let’s take our favorite horror movies and turn them into high school stories.” By the second season, the horror movies were gone and the horror came from the story, the high school, the emotion.
DAVID FURY
A lot of the first season was silly fun, it was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But season two is where the show really found itself.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “ ‘It’s About Power’: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television”)
The relationship of Angel and Buffy is frequently thought of as the greatest romance for Buffy, as it is her first foray into love, and clearly her most passionate. Despite the fact that Angel provides tender love for Buffy, and the two are madly and deeply under the other’s spell, the series still uses this relationship to present to viewers the anxieties of teenage girls, especially in losing one’s virginity and what it means when the partner may disappear or ignore the girl, as in the case of Buffy and Angel.
DAVID FURY
It was still early in the writing stage of the second season and we sold the story which was later “Go Fish,” which was about the swim team turning into monsters. I had just read an H. P. Lovecraft short story, “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which is a story about these townspeople who were gradually turning into these fish monsters, and it really affected me. I was also a big fan of The Creature from The Black Lagoon. They had already done a Frankenstein story and the Mummy [“Incan Mummy Girl”] and clearly they’d done Dracula, although not literally yet, but vampires, so I was trying to think of what other classic monsters they hadn’t done. That’s how that story got pitched.
They weren’t quite sure where the episode would fit in, because it was very much a stand-alone episode, and after Angel’s turn when he sleeps with Buffy is when the show became so rich and emotional. The metaphor of the first guy you sleep with becoming an asshole. As soon as you let him into your pants, he becomes a complete dick. That was a fantastic metaphor. They reached the depth they hadn’t reached before in terms of the characters. Suddenly our little fish story felt frivolous and so out of place.
DAVID GREENWALT
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I used to have soccer moms come up to me and say, “What’s going on with Buffy and Angel? Are they going to get back together?” People really got addicted to Buffy. The age of the people that watched Buffy was like seven to seventy. Grown forty-five- to fifty-year-old women were really concerned about the romance, and I knew we were onto something really good.
JOSS WHEDON
In the second season we had “Innocence” and the Angelus arc that really let the audience know that we were interested in change; we were interested in shaking things up as much as possible and interested in just making things as grown-up and complex as we could get away with. The triangle with Spike, Dru, and Angelus. Originally, we thought Spike and Dru would be fun, more hip, and they won’t be trapped in a cave like the Master, so they can actually interact. As it grew and the more we thought abou
t it, the bigger it got until it became a really complex, adult kind of show.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
It was really satisfying, because it was so obvious that Spike did not fit into the pegs of this story at all. But in a way, that’s what made it great. He was able to take the theme and put it on its head, because the theme is, How does one grow up? How does one become one’s best self? It was frustrating a lot, because I really would get just two to three pages of dialogue a script. I often felt that I was at this enormous banquet with the best food I’d ever seen in my life, but my portion wasn’t always that big and I was salivating after everyone else’s plate. But that is a glorious place to be as an actor, because what it is not is having to mumble a bunch of crap—which is death. So, both frustrating and rewarding. Actors are so greedy—we want everything.
I had been doing regional theater for ten or fifteen years. I was very happy and very poor. And then I had a son. I remember looking at his beautiful, bloody face on the bathing table and he’s being wiped off, just seconds old, and I had an epiphany. Whereas I chose to be poor—a poor artist—my son didn’t make that choice, and I was going to have to do my best to try to make some money. So I called a childhood friend, who was a casting director in town named Robert Ulrich, and asked him if he could help me get an agent. He was very gracious; he said he would. He’s been a supporter of mine since high school and we’d known each other when we were both in New York when I was at Juilliard. I told my agent that I was not coming to Hollywood for awards or to prove myself as an actor; I had done that on stage. I was here for money. I was here for diaper money. I needed health care. I needed diapers. I need formula. I needed clothes for my son. And my agent was very happy with that and started booking guest spots on cop shows, and before long I got a call that I had an audition for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I said, “Well, no, not that. Not Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I saw the movie, man. No thank you.” My agent said, “It’s Tuesday night. Why don’t you watch it and call us back to see if you might change your mind. It’s a different animal than the movie. The writer’s actually producing it and it’s got a lot of buzz around it.” I watched about fifteen minutes of it and fell in love and called my agent back in desperation saying, “Jesus Christ, yes. Holy God, it’s amazing.”
I went in and auditioned for the casting director’s assistant. They were three days away from filming at this point. They had their backs up against the wall. They’d been looking for a Spike for a while but hadn’t found someone they liked. I guess Joss had put the word out to scrape the bottom of the barrel in Hollywood . . . calling all the people that normally wouldn’t be seen. That’s how I got the audition. I remember wanting the role very badly. I didn’t realize the size of the role. I was only given sides to one scene, but it was a very good scene, the introduction of the character and Drusilla. I had no concept that it was going to be any bigger than one scene. It was a great scene, and I remember trying to psych out the other actors in the audition room by reciting Shakespeare, because I’d just come off of a successful production of Macbeth in Seattle. I thought that if I did some of those soliloquies, I could prove that I was the best actor in the room. I was new to Hollywood and I didn’t realize that Shakespeare’s meaningless down here. All I was proving was probably psychosis.
I’m someone that respects film acting deeply. But Shakespeare’s not in the toolbox. I’m sure all the stares that I was getting were just wondering who let the psychotic in the room. I was lording it over the other actors, so I went into the audition very full of myself, which worked for Spike. I think the reason I got cast was I got along with Juliet Landau. I was her boy toy for that story arc, and she was the character that was going to continue in the story arc and I was going to be killed off after about five episodes. But both Juliet and I were from theater, so we kind of connected on that level very quickly. That’s how I got the role.
DAVID GREENWALT
James Marsters was one of my favorite people, too, and a really interesting actor. Something about his acting let you know everything he’s thinking all the time. It’s very simple and direct in a way and in other ways it just bamboozles me, and, of course, Drusilla was great, too. Juliet Landau and James were so interesting.
JULIET LANDAU
(actress, Drusilla)
Joss has described Spike and Drusilla as the Sid and Nancy of the vampire set. I really like that analogy. Even their look was a cross between period, Victorian-looking, and Kate Moss cheap. But there was also a sweet, sentimental side to their relationship. That’s one of the things that made them interesting villains. It sort of balances out the evil, horrible deeds they do.
JAMES MARSTERS
Part of what I like about acting is being able to safely explore places in myself that normal life would not allow me to explore. I had just come off of a successful production of Macbeth in Seattle. To play Macbeth I had to get comfortable with the idea that I was a man who slashed people in half as a day job and had no problem with that. That a normal day for me was to take my sword out and just disembowel large groups of people. I had always grown up thinking of myself as a nice guy. That was a challenge for me, because a lot of actors when they approach Macbeth, they always play him like, “I know this guy’s evil, too” and I think that’s a mistake. I really did not want to go down that road.
So I did some research into being a soldier and I found someone saying that one of the things that soldiers can’t talk with civilians about is the fact that murder is fun. There’s a rush that happens when you take a life. There’s a sense of power to that. And one of the things that soldiers have to deal with for the rest of their lives is the guilt that they feel having felt this animal reaction. Civilians really don’t understand when you talk about it. Luckily, I had already played a role where I became comfortable and didn’t feel guilty about this rush of excitement, imagining doing that act.
DAVID FURY
The most helpful thing is you can articulate your thoughts to the actors to get the cast excited. “Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what I’d like to see you do, what do you think about this?” It was wonderful to be able to have that relationship, I loved working with James Marsters. It was great, because he relished it. Some actors don’t really want to talk about it, but James loved talking about it. I would tell him something for Spike and he would just get so excited.
JAMES MARSTERS
When I took Spike, there’s a saying in theater: it’s called a play for a reason; no one pays to watch you work. They’ll pay to watch you play really well. And so, it’s always about fun. You have to have fun in what you’re doing. It seemed . . . the way to make the [Spike] character work was just have this guy having the best time doing the most vile act and that’s just sick . . . just horrible. But if you can give yourself over to it, it can be a wild, weird ride for the audience. I was able to give myself over to that. And then once you do that, you’re just through the looking glass. You’re just in new territory. Macbeth was bloody but not sadistic, and Spike asked me to enjoy the sadism. And, you know, it’s all safe. No one got hurt. I got bruised as much as anyone else, but it was a weird ride. That was probably the most enjoyable part of it initially. The character grew way beyond that. But the first rush was that.
DAVID GREENWALT
Then Spike, who was this ballsy, dangerous, scary guy, you find out was this very fey poet to begin with and then to have the idea that Spike and Buffy would someday get together. You would never think you could pull that off.
JOSS WHEDON
I do think that the balance is necessary, that you need to go from something like Xander becomes uberpopular to Ms. Calendar gets killed. I don’t think you can have one without the other. That, to me, was our most manic-depressive moment with doing those shows back to back. I love them equally for totally different reasons. It was kind of a relief to get back to the high school from the unbelievable, world-shattering angst that is the real sor
t of mythology episodes.
DAN VEBBER
(staff writer, season 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Joss would come in and say, “Here’s the arc for the next season.” Now, for all I know, he might have worked with Marti Noxon or Dave Greenwalt before I even came into the room, so I don’t know to what degree other writers might have had a say in it. But in terms of the point when I was brought into the room to break the stories or to see the arcs of the season, it was already figured out by Joss. He knew what was going on. There was some leeway in coming up with episode ideas, but then it became about, “How does this fit into the overarching arc”?
DAVID FURY
That was the brilliance of Joss. He had these things that you just wouldn’t have expected. Especially coming off of sitcom writing. A lot of it is always the status quo remains the same. People don’t change. They’ll go through funny situations and they’ll have little moments together, but ultimately every episode you’re starting from scratch. So when he would have these dramatic turns like this Angelus thing, it was incredibly daring. He and David would run through this stuff with us. He would try to keep us abreast of what they were doing as the season went on, because of the whole process of us writing this freelance script. It went over several months so we just kept seeing a prize of new developments. I would just kind of be flabbergasted by, “Oh my God, that’s great.”
DAVID GREENWALT
This was the most brilliant twist ever in the show and this is what got all the soccer moms so involved, because the curse of Angel was that if he ever knew a moment of pure happiness, he’d turn evil, right? Of course Buffy is a virgin. He finally sleeps with her . . . they’d been waiting. We really built up to it beautifully and then he turns into an asshole. If that is not a metaphor, I don’t know what is. Every woman at some time in their lives loves a guy, they give it up for him, and he turns into an asshole.
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