Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  DAN VEBBER

  (staff writer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Joss is a terrific guy. At the beginning of the year, he was a lot less harried than he was at the end of the year. So by the end of the year, the chummy guy who’d be your buddy and was willing to talk about pop culture or whatever got replaced by the guy stalking through the hallways and completely in his own world, because he just got so freakin’ busy. But he’s definitely very confident about his voice and his vision and deservedly so. I don’t have anything negative to say about him. When he didn’t renew my contract, your ego is hurt, but the next time I saw him in public, he was very gracious and said, “Look, you’re a great writer, you’re a great comedy writer, and you’re going to land on your feet.”

  DAVID GREENWALT

  There’s certain of us that really fit in that Joss mold, in that Joss world, and certain others did not, and never the twain shall meet. Edgar Allan Poe would’ve done really well there. Thomas Smart Hughes, who was actually a happy, well-adjusted guy—he would’ve done terrible there. You had to be really vulnerable and willing to dredge up all the horrible things that have happened to you.

  DAN VEBBER

  Leaving Buffy at that time, you know, like I said, my ego was bruised and I was stressed out about it, but that ended up being right when they needed people to work on Futurama, which ended up being a show that I had a far, far better fit with. And since then it’s been those animated comedies that I’ve been working on. It doesn’t wound my ego to say that I have deficiencies in writing drama scripts, because I’m so confident in my ability to write adult primetime animated-type comedies with just jokes to make people laugh. To a certain degree, that sensibility helped me on a show like Buffy, but I think it also kind of hindered me, because I wasn’t thinking in terms of what’s going to be best for the emotional drama of the story.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  Joss was always kind and generous and one of my favorite things about him is whatever his troubles or demons may be, he didn’t take them out on other people like so many people in our business. He would be in his own world, with his blinders on, and you’d have to remind him this shoots Tuesday and we better have some words. I used to plant myself outside the bathroom. He’d come out and I’d be face-to-face with him telling what we had to do next. He would always forget his jacket or his teacup in your office. He was just so focused on what he was doing. One day we were in a big art department meeting and, for some reason, he just laid down on this table in the middle of this big serious meeting.

  JOSE MOLINA

  He’s one of those people that you hear about that needs to create. That needs to write. That’s not me. I would be perfectly happy taking long vacations and traveling the world and fucking around and spending time with my friends and my family and playing board games and video games. If I was never able to write again, I would miss it but it wouldn’t kill me. I think it would kill Joss. It’s kind of like air to him. He needs it to be able to function properly.

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  (actor, Principal Snyder)

  I had been working on Star Trek for a long time. I’d worked a lot of shows before, but I wasn’t educated to the ins and outs of set behavior and politics until I was involved in the Star Trek franchise. So when I went to work at Buffy, every day of every episode that I ever worked on, Joss Whedon was there. This was not the policy that Rick Berman had at Star Trek. Rick Berman was a very busy man, and we rarely saw him on the set of Star Trek, so I was not used to seeing the executive producer on the set. So a thought occurred to me, is he here checking on me? Is that why the executive producer is here, because I’m not used to having an executive producer around.

  After I had done five or six episodes, I actually posed the question to him. He said one of the places he liked to write was on set. And then with my asking, “When do you get time to write here?” he said, “Between takes.” He was an amazing man on Buffy. He was the executive producer, he was the head writer, he was the person that sold the show. And because the cast was relatively young, at least younger than the cast in Star Trek, I can say he was the chief babysitter as well. He was there, I came to understand, probably for lots of reasons, but one of the reasons was to make sure that if there were problems on set, he could take care of them before they grew into larger problems. That was a remarkable ability that probably nobody ever talks about. He is, of course, a phenomenal writer and a phenomenal producer and a great creative mind. But he’s an incredible babysitter, too.

  HARRY GROENER

  The very last two shows of the third season [“Graduation Day”] they sent an e-mail, because we didn’t have a script yet and we had to go to work the next day and they said, “Well, there’s a synopsis, but there aren’t any words yet. Just come to the set.” So we go to set, we get ready, we get our costumes on while we’re waiting for some words. Finally, some words come. So we say, “OK.” We get the scene, we go in and rehearse it, they light it, and while that’s happening, Joss is back over in a corner writing the next scene.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  I remember being terrified of Joss Whedon. I knew that he was the creator and head writer, so I went in with a lot of respect for him based on what I had seen on the show. I remember he came in and selected my costumes, thank goodness. The costumer had pulled a lot of glam rock, kind of clear plastic shirts and stuff. And Joss knows punk rock and he just axed all of that stuff, thank God, and got me into something that worked.

  JOSE MOLINA

  I didn’t have a lot of exposure to Joss. I’d never been on a working set. I’d visited sets, but it was one of those things where I saw an opportunity to learn something. So I spent some time on set with Marti Noxon first season and she was amazing. I’d already read a couple of her scripts and it’s the worst kept secret in town that she did an uncredited polish on the episode “Halloween.” And her voice was quickly becoming the strongest voice on the show that was closest to Joss, which ultimately led to her running the show season six and seven.

  MARTI NOXON

  One of the reasons that Joss and I work so well together, and why this partnership was so fruitful, is that much of the time what he wants is naturally—and not in ass-kissy way—what I want.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  Marti’s great. She started as a staff writer, as low as you can be, and she went to executive producer in not that many years. Joss, Marti, and I used to talk about ourselves as the evil triumvirate.

  MARTI NOXON

  I was nervous, because Buffy was actually my first staff job. My father, Nicholas Noxon, is the head of National Geographic Documentary Division and I used to hang around him all the time when I was a kid, because I always knew that I wanted to do something in the film business. But I found out that I really didn’t want to be a documentary person—I found it very frustrating watching and waiting for animals to do things. I wanted to give them direction. I went to film school at UC Santa Cruz, and when I graduated I just worked in a bunch of different jobs in the industry, mostly as an assistant to a writer and then to a writer/producer, and I just wrote a lot. I did spec scripts, both feature and television. I actually did have one produced, and that was for the show Life Goes On. After that, I got signed by one of the biggest agencies for television and talent and they passed my material to Joss at Buffy. I met with Joss and David, and I thought it had gone miserably, and I was never going to get the job. I couldn’t tell if they liked me, but much to my delight, they did.

  I think one of the reasons they liked me was because I had a real taste for the macabre. When I was writing spec scripts, most of them were ghost stories, or had some sort of supernatural element to them. One of the specs I wrote was for The X-Files. I loved that show. I have always been obsessed with ghost stories, and it seemed that David and Joss were able to pick that up. That is why Buffy was such a great fit for me.

  JOSE MOLINA

  Even as a staff writer she was a force to be reckoned with and very cool and
down to earth and approachable and accessible. You know, enough that she hung out on set with another writer’s assistant who was just there loitering.

  MARTI NOXON

  My agent at the time, there were definitely people telling me not to take Buffy. When I first got the job, my mother was, like, “Oh, that’s too bad. Something better will come next year.” She was excited for me, but thought there would be something better. The attitude, even two and a half years after the first season, is that I was slumming a little bit. It wasn’t like I was having offers coming out of the trees; it was my first season on a staff. I was just going on a gut instinct and the fact that, considering all of the stuff that I could have possibly worked on, this really resonated with me. And to see that kind of paid off—it’s so gratifying to see that people who love it really love it and really get it. I felt that way about the show. I feel that way about Joss and his work, and . . . knowing that you would be watching the show if you weren’t working on it was pretty gratifying.

  When I came in to meet with them, they sent me a bunch of tapes. My agents scrounged up as many tapes as they could find. I went and watched pretty much one through thirteen, trying to get ready for my meeting. By about episode four, I was hooked. I was watching one after the other, ordering take out. And then when the whole Angel thing started happening in the first thirteen, I was completely addicted.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  I learned a lot from Joss. So many things like what we call “first thought theater.” Many television writers want to do it too quickly and they won’t wait until the idea is correct. One thing I learned from Joss is wait a long time before you go to the whiteboard and start writing down possible beats of a possible story. Like one time, [writer/producer] Jane Espenson came in with a story idea about a student who could read minds. We said, “Oh, that has to be Buffy,” and then the story broke in twenty minutes and we never had that experience again. Most of them were laborious. They took five to ten days to break. The breaking was the hardest part and the part where the most attention had to be paid. Joss hates to rewrite, so he will wait. Once we have the story, he will wait and pace and pace and pace—he loves to walk and drink tea. Then he’ll sit down and eventually write a script that needs, you know, three line changes.

  DAN VEBBER

  Buffy was not a very collaborative show. At least not for me. It was very much Joss’s show. So that was my first experience with the idea of a show runner who pretty much will do a page one rewrite of your draft. I’m always reticent to talk about my experience on the show, because people will compliment me about the episodes that I wrote. For the most part, the things that they were so impressed with are purely, one hundred percent Joss and not me. And I don’t want to take credit for it.

  It was Joss’s show for better or for worse, and for the most part it was definitely for better. I still think it’s the best thing that Joss has done. That and more recently when The Avengers came out, which is my favorite superhero movie ever. The Joss Whedon voice works so well in certain things and Buffy was the absolute pinnacle of that. It just happened to be his first big breakthrough thing that he did.

  NICHOLAS BRENDAN

  (actor, Xander Harris)

  After a while we started thinking, “When are the great scripts going to stop coming?” But they didn’t. I felt so fortunate to be doing such good material.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  (producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  Joss is a genius. Some days Joss would walk around with a dark cloud over his head, and you can just tell he’s either really deeply thinking of something and you know to stay the hell away from him, but most of the time Joss was a fun-loving guy. He called me Meat Pie. Meat Pie was a nickname he gave a friend of his in school.

  I’ll never forget Sarah wanted to take a week off and she announced this after we were already prepping a script, and after the weekend Joss wrote a script for her where she turned into a frog. I couldn’t believe it. It was just remarkable how that man could adapt.

  DAN VEBBER

  It was very much a case of him standing at the whiteboard saying, “Here’s what our story is, here’s what the outline is, go write it.” Then you would go write it and he would rewrite it. He would take snippets of my dialogue, which was always nice because, you know, in theory, that’s why he hired me, because I got these characters. I could talk in their voices. But when you look at an episode like [third season’s] “Lovers Walk,” everyone always points to that great speech that Spike gives about the nature of love and stuff and I can’t take credit for any of that. I wrote a version of that, but the version that’s in the show is one hundred percent Joss’s doing, which he did . . . in his rewrite.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  You didn’t get scripts early with Mr. Whedon, so I got to a point on Buffy where I’d breakdown his outlines and guess the page counts to just get an idea if we should build a set, do this or that. I’ll never forget about the second time I did that. I put out a one-liner based on guessing page counts and everything else.

  Joss went and pondered it and talked to his writers and said, “Does this scene bother you as much as it bothers me?” They all said, “No, but we weren’t going to say that.” Joss came back to me the next day and said, “You’re right. I was going to reshoot it for selfish reasons. I had something else in mind.” He was an approachable guy. If you had something to say, you better know what you were talking about instead of wasting his time. He’s a genius, and, like all geniuses, he has a quirky side as well.

  JOSS WHEDON

  In the sense of dialogue, it comes down very specifically to just the musicality of a phrase and because I’m a wannabe actor, obviously I say everything as I’m writing. Also because I type very slowly. You can hear when something feels really awkward or abrupt or wrong. And sometimes it’s nice to throw something off, but when I’m being specific about it, I’m very, very attuned to how that’s going to fit in the mouth, how is this going to roll off and into the next line. In terms of meaning, and in terms of rhythm. And for a long time when I started, I would be in constant conflict with people about saying things exactly as I wrote them, because I was doing something a little different than anybody was used to.

  And then over the years two things happened. One: I chilled the fuck out. I started remembering it was a collaborative process. And two: I realized that people no longer had as much of an issue with the way I wrote; that it had sort of entered the mainstream enough that it was now something that people understood and they would come in and they’d go, “Oh, yeah, I don’t need to replace this with the generic version of it. I get it.” Which was gratifying.

  DAN VEBBER

  What surprised me is that, as a staff writer, there were days when I just had nothing to do. I would come in and sit there, but Joss was just so busy doing every aspect of the show that he wouldn’t be around. I did learn a lot about story structuring and just a lot of the basics that people who go to school for this type of thing learn in classes. Like how you construct a drama script. I had never done it before. It was like a master course from Joss Whedon, which was really cool.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  (executive producer, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena)

  What I loved about what Joss did, and I saw other show runners on other shows kind of just fumble their way through a season, was he came in and knew the beginning, middle, and end, which are the important parts as long as you have that structure. At the beginning of each season, often at the end of one season, he’d start talking about the next one. He would have an idea of, “OK, this is how it starts. This is what happens in the middle. This is what we’re building towards.” With twenty-two episodes, there’s a lot to figure out. He would always have that big-picture idea. A lot of times, he would have the idea for what the episode was about or the main thing he wanted to have in the episode.

  I remember episodes were usually assigned on a rotational basis. It’s like from the top of the pecking order to th
e bottom; the top would usually get the first episode and then it would just go in order. Then it would rotate back around. You were never quite sure which one was coming up for you. I remember I got an episode called “Seeing Red,” where Tara gets murdered. I thought, “Oh, this is a tough one.”

  JOSS WHEDON

  We’d spend a few days breaking a story, figuring out what to write. Then someone goes off and writes it and that took a couple of weeks—or a few hours, if that’s what we have. We shot in eight days; then we had two days to edit. We tried to figure out the story lines far in advance, but we also tried to be flexible. Like something’ll pop up and we’d go, “Jenny could be a gypsy.”

  DAVID FURY

  As Joss has the big ideas, he doesn’t always know exactly how they’re going to be executed and what they’re going to be. He gave us a lot of free rein, which was really wonderful and important in that he gave us the big ideas, but where we found some of the story was in things that we, being the staff, were able to create and make work. In other words, his ideas weren’t always entirely worked out. He knew where he wanted to end up, but he didn’t always know how we were going to get there. He knew some of the devices we were going to use. He knew the events he wanted to explore. But beyond that, it was up to all of us to work out and work through. He was not this guy who was dictating everything to us. He was somebody who just gave us the building blocks of what the season will be and then we got to be the ones to figure out how to get there with him. The really enjoyable part of working with him was that he was not so locked into an absolute. He was basically looking for help. “This is what I want to do, help me get there.”