Slayers and Vampires
Page 53
BEN EDLUND
Best. Ending. Ever! What I love is the last shot where you get these fucked-up people, and the story, especially in a season where things got more grim, has Angel being like a pencil driven into a pencil sharpener, and the point was that shot, right? They will never stop fighting. He will never stop. He swings at the camera and it’s over. But it’s never over.
PART THREE
ACROSS
THE BUFFYVERSE
“If there is no great, glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”
BEYOND BUFFY
“You brought a date? Buffy, when I said you could slay vampires and have a social life, I didn’t mean at the same time!”
Throughout Buffy’s long seven-season run and even before Angel had left the airwaves, creator Joss Whedon was already contemplating the next chapter in the Buffyverse. Even as fans clamored for a Buffy movie to continue the adventures of their favorite slayer, Whedon had turned his attention to other offshoots of the original mother ship, using the Star Trek franchise as a template to Buffily go.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer, UnReal)
Some of it is that Joss’s energy is limitless. As the show started to function a little more smoothly and he had a little bit more time, unlike the rest of us, who would go home and take a nap, Joss goes and creates another show. Joss would say to me, “What’d you do this weekend?” and I’m, like, “Well, I went to the mall, saw my brother, worked in the morning on Saturday.” And I’ll say, “What did you do?” and he’ll reply, “I wrote a couple of songs, I did a comic book, I created this new show, and I’m working on a novel”
So some of it is that he’s got a little more time to look and focus on things, which freed him up to do these things that people encouraged him to do. The other thing is that as the characters in the universe developed, we started to see possibilities in all of them. I look at almost every character on Buffy and I think, “Wow, they could have their own show.” As you start to see the richness of that world, you realize there’s all this potential for spinoffs and stuff.
The Buffy spin-off that came closest to being realized was the Buffy animated series, which would have been produced under the aegis of show runner Jeph Loeb, now the major domo of the Marvel Television universe. But, at the time, he had a successful career as a comic book writer and was just finishing a stint on the TV series Smallville.
JOSS WHEDON
(writer/director, The Avengers: Age of Ultron)
It was an opportunity to do the things or the jokes that we only did in the writers’ room. To do things that are so silly and postmodern or free associative that we could never do it on the show. Kind of like when the fear demon turned out to be really tiny and Buffy stepped on it. That’s about as far in the direction of that humor that we ever went.
But with the animated series, we had a chance, while being cool, scary, and empowered, to be really whimsical. Like, everyone imagines what it would be like to have their driver’s license, and Xander’s imagination is that he’s got a jalopy, and Cordelia and Buffy look like Betty and Veronica because they’re in the back. It’s very simple. It would have been a return to adolescence and year one and very freeing. A completely different kind of fun than the live show or the comics.
JEPH LOEB
(executive producer, Jessica Jones)
We had put together a class A animation team. We had all thirteen stories for the first season and nine scripts that were written by all Buffy writers and myself. We were beginning production. I spent a year and a half over there running the show. It just sort of stopped; everything was put in a box, and we waited.
Buffy: The Animated Series took place in year one. She’s met Angel, but at the moment he’s just this mysterious guy. She knows he’s a vamp, but other than that she doesn’t really know anything. While there are darker aspects, the show was absolutely geared to go a little younger, not much, simply because of the nature of animation. What would be the point of doing an animated version of the live-action show that’s exactly the same? Do we really want to see cartoons have sex?
JOSS WHEDON
When the characters graduated from high school, I got all choked up and said, “But, wait, there are more stories, I have not told them all.” So that opportunity was a well to draw from forever, and the relationships can be fluid within the boundaries of the show—that is to say, Cordelia could be super-nice in one episode and completely awful in the next. Willow could find somebody else—and I think it’s safe to say that it would probably have been a boy. One of the points of the show was that even though things may look like they’re set a certain way, some days your best friend is your worst enemy, so these things are always fluid.
JEPH LOEB
On the animation side, we had Eric Radomski. He put together this extraordinary crew and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Everybody wanted to work on the show. We recorded Alyson as Willow, Nicholas as Xander, and Tony for Giles.
In the presentation reel for the proposed series, many of the familiar tropes from the show’s first season are readily apparent, beginning with Buffy staking a vampire in an alley who underestimates her resourcefulness. Afterward, she reconnoiters in the library with Giles, Willow, and Xander, cockily extolling her kill, when a dragon suddenly swoops down and swallows her and lifts her high into the sky above Sunnydale, leading into the title card.
JEPH LOEB
The show was about the grounding principles of Buffy as a metaphor for high school anxieties, high school troubles, and how they manifest themselves. Joss feels that the metaphor is never stronger than when you’re in the middle of high school and you’re trying to figure things out. So Buffy has moved to Sunnydale, she’s friends with Xander and Willow, and she has begun to accept her role as the slayer.
That’s the joy of telling the stories. We could do things that are ironic in the sense that she can say things like, “I’ll never do that,” and we know that later on she does. You can’t do that when you’re doing the live show, because Joss was building a mythology year by year. We had all of that history to be able to look at. There’s that side of it, and the other side of it is that these were stories that for one reason or another Joss always wanted to tell, but time got away. For example, Willow and Buffy going babysitting.
By the time they got around to something like that in the live show, they were too old to do that. We never saw why Buffy doesn’t have a driver’s license, and by the time the live show could have done that story, she was too old. In other words, these were stories that fall in between the stories that you know and love. Then there are just certain things that the budget of the live show would not allow that we would have been able to do. That’s the most fun. We could do “Attack of the Sixty-Foot Buffy,” not that we were going to, because on live action that would look ridiculous, but in animation it could be quite fun.
JOSS WHEDON
“Teenie Buffy” is the first script Jane Espenson turned in. We could never do “The Incredible Shrinking Buffy” on the live-action show. We referred to it as “Simpsons Beyond.” We wanted the toughness of a Batman show, really good action, strong hero, but at the same time the completely off-center humor of The Simpsons.
But we couldn’t find a home for it. Nobody seemed to want it, and it blew my mind. I feel like I’m standing here with bags of money. It’s Buffy Animated, what more do I need to explain here? People are just, like, “We’re not doing that sort of thing; we have a different agenda,” and I’m wondering, Did I miss the memo where this wasn’t a cash cow? I had the Buffy writers writing it and the Buffy actors wanting to be in it. What did I miss?
Showtime was the last one we lost. They were interested, but they wouldn’t do it without Sarah, and Sarah wasn’t involved. But it just blows my mind.
Another enticing series that had been discussed and previously developed was a spin-off featuring Faith the Vampire Slayer.
MARTI NOXON
That’s certainly one of the things we talked about, but I don’t think that’s where her career goals were. It’s too bad, because if she were interested, that’s a show I can totally see. She’s a reluctant TV star, which is a shame because she’s so good. We tried, believe me—it’s not something that hadn’t been discussed. It’s funny; she’s the fan of many Buffy folk and not the biggest Buffy fan. It doesn’t seem like she’s enough of a geek for the show to go, like, “Yes, I want to do this no matter what the cost.”
TIM MINEAR
(executive producer, American Horror Story)
I had come up with the pitch. Eliza was gracious, kind of wonderful, but just felt she wanted to try something new. There are no hard feelings there. But the show was basically going to be “Faith Meets Kung Fu.” It would have been Faith, probably on a motorcycle, crossing the Earth, trying to find her place in the world. I’m sure it would get arc-like at some point, but the idea of her rooted someplace seemed wrong to me. The idea of her constantly on the move seemed right to me. Oh, and she broke out of prison [on Angel], so there would have been people after her.
Faith wasn’t the only proposed spin-off. Another that came tantalizingly close to fruition was Ripper, which would have been a coproduction with the BBC and shot in England. It intended to fill in some of the enigmatic mythology hinted at in the relationship between Ethan Rayne and Giles and his dark past while living in Britain.
MARTI NOXON
It would have been more adult. In our discussions, we realized because of the style of the show and the fact that it was a BBC series, we wouldn’t have felt as beholden to hit every act break with a big cliffhanger. The pace can be a little bit more adult. The situations wouldn’t have necessarily have had a monster in every episode. There would always be a supernatural element, but it wouldn’t have to be quite so genre. It would feel a little more like Prime Suspect with monsters. One of the writers joked this is the show where Giles can make himself a cup of tea and think about it, and that could be a whole scene. Giles’s past is pretty dark. We were going to get to grow him up and show him in situations with women and all kinds of good stuff that he didn’t get to do on Buffy.
It’s no secret that Whedon is a huge comic book geek, having contributed scripts to some of the biggest comic book series ever published, but when he created Fray for Dark Horse, the story of Melaka Fray, the intention was always to see it one day make the jump to film or television.
JOSS WHEDON
I wrote the comic Fray, and it took place two hundred years in the future, thinking there’s no way this can ever affect the Buffy universe and so it’ll be safe. And then we ended up using a little bit; Buffy’s scythe in season seven is from the comic book. So I felt some obligation to work in that mythology, and it would be lovely to make it all tie in.
MARTI NOXON
Joss is such a huge comic book geek that the opportunity to actually be the author of Fray was too enticing. Joss’s passion for all of this is genuine; I don’t think he’d do something that he really didn’t want to do. He’s had ample opportunity to exploit Buffy in ways that he has not and ample opportunities to produce other shows he would get credit for and money for that he didn’t feel passionate about. Anything he does do is because he wants to see it.
More recently, fans were teased with the prospect of a Buffy Broadway musical, and after the success of “Once More, with Feeling,” few could not salivate at the prospect. Unfortunately, it was Joss Whedon himself who pulled the plug on the prospect of the slayer slaying the Great White Way.
DAVID FURY
(executive producer, 24)
He was getting lots of offers to do it. But the realization was that the story doesn’t work by itself. The story is a continuation of the whole series and where it was at that point. It just doesn’t make any sense, so if you do a Buffy musical, you have to rewrite a different score and story, and at that point, Why am I doing a Buffy musical? The Buffy character is owned by other people, and the studio owns it. He’d be making money for so many other people, and he just didn’t seen any point in doing it.
He had been recently working on a musical for Broadway and then he went to see Hamilton, and suddenly he couldn’t write anymore. I said, “That’s how we felt when you delivered the Buffy musical to us. We all went, ‘We can’t do this anymore.’ We’re just not worthy of being able to do this.” So, Joss had that same experience seeing Hamilton going, “I cannot do this; it’s just too brilliant.” He stopped writing the musical. I don’t know if he’s gotten the will to go back to it.
So will there ever be another Buffy TV series, a reunion film, or a reinvention? Whedon was outspoken in criticizing an attempted reboot that was announced in 2009 by Fran Rubel Kuzui, who still controls the Buffy rights. But after Whedon disparaged her efforts, no such reboot has materialized. But is it impossible that Whedon would revisit his most popular creation? Only time will tell.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
At this age it would be hard. You’d have to reboot it with new characters, and I just don’t think that the fans would want that. I know I wouldn’t want a younger, better-looking version of me. It’s me or nothing! I’d be the grandma—I still got it! You know the young kids would be looking at me like I was a grandma, because if you’re thirty-five, you’re a grandma. So old!
GIRL POWER FOREVER
“Every slayer comes with an expiration mark on the package, but I want mine to be a long time from now. Like a Cheeto . . .”
After twenty years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is as potent as ever and frequently found on most critics’ lists of the greatest television series of all time. ubiquitous in its availability on a variety of streaming platforms today (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.), it’s hard to imagine a world in which Buffy will ever go away.
For a generation of young girls, Buffy Summers has been a role model, and the show’s metaphors and allegories of growing up remain timeless. It’s a series that has not only inspired many others and changed the face of television but also encouraged strong roles for women in various mediums.
In addition, a generation of top show runners were mentored through the unofficial graduate program that was Mutant Enemy, ranging from 24’s David Fury to American Horror Story’s Tim Minear to Spartacus’s Steven S. DeKnight to UnReal’s Marti Noxon, among others—like oscar winner Drew Goddard.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer also launched Joss Whedon himself as a creative force. And Whedon has only grown more successful in the intervening decades, having written and directed two of the highest-grossing movies of all time, The Avengers and The Avengers: Age of Ultron while continuing to relentlessly follow his eclectic passions, whether elevating a Nielsen-challenged TV series like Firefly into a major motion picture or adapting Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in his backyard as a movie on a shoestring budget with a variety of familiar faces from the Buffyverse.
However, no matter what Joss Whedon does in the future, it’s unlikely he—or the audience—will ever forget their first love: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And thankfully that moment of perfect happiness won’t turn them evil in the process, either.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(director, Pacific Rim: Maelstrom)
Joss did something unique. You look at what he did when he started with Buffy. It was a different way of talking. It was a different way of the characters interacting and the way the story would turn, from emotional to funny to emotional. You see the effect it had. To start with, I think it really solidified the WB as its first legitimate hour-long hit and really propelled it into the public consciousness.
KRISTY SWANSON
(actress, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1992])
I was house hunting, and I went over to Brentwood to look a place over. I walk in, and I look on the refrigerator, and there’s a photo of Joss Whedon and his then girlfriend. I’m going, “That’s weird!” Then I’m looking around the house, and I see som
e mail sitting out, and it says Joss Whedon on it. And then I see a Buffy the Vampire Slayer script, one of the TV-show scripts, resting on a table. I go, “Oh my God, this is Joss’s house!” Obviously, this was the house he was renting and moved from, or whatever, and here I was innocently house hunting in Joss’s house. It was very strange, a real trip—I just couldn’t believe it.”
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Buffy also had the effect, the ripple effect, through the years since it was on; you can see the effect it had on the other shows, especially across the pond in England. I think Buffy had a profound effect on Dr. Who. You really saw that kind of Joss Whedon effect and that show continued on, a very strong influence. Torchwood, the same way. It’s that Joss Whedon touch. You also see it in the Marvel movies, that combination of wit and humor that’s not set-up punch lines. It’s coming from a very different place. I think it is just what he created and how he created it, from an idea that, when you first hear it, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” sounds ridiculous. He almost uses that to subversively slip in the meat and the emotion.
It just really takes you by surprise. I remember even before I was on the show, episodes of Buffy, you’d be sitting there at the end of an episode crying your eyes out, which was very unexpected. When Buffy finally gets Angel back and gets his soul back in and has to kill him. It’s like, “Oh shit, no!”
DAVID FURY
(executive producer, The Tick)
It’s definitely a couple of the most imaginative shows that have ever been on television. It was easier to do Buffy than Angel, but we tried to do it on both, which was telling story through allegory and metaphor. A lot of people don’t appreciate that or think it’s very obvious to do that. But I have to tell you, when you don’t do it, the stories don’t hold up. They don’t last in your brains. You can look at all the external stuff and remember, but people still come up to me today and say how much those shows meant to them and how much they inspired them to become writers or actors. Just the idea that the show tapped into something special. There [were] a lot of shows that tried to emulate it, but they couldn’t quite capture that magic.