The Girl's Got Bite: The Original Unauthorized Guide to Buffy's World

by Kathleen Tracy

  “It was a kid’s movie that Fox wanted made quickly so they could release it on the crest of interest in screen vampires,” Kuzui explained. “However, it isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.” Actually, as conceived by Whedon, it was supposed to be a vampire movie as well as a comedy—but by this time, the film had in many ways became completely different from the one Joss had written.

  In order to handle the movie’s physical demands, prior to filming Swanson had ten days of intensive martial-arts instruction from expert James Lew (Big Trouble in Little China) and Pat Johnson, who had worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While filming, Swanson would be coached by the movie’s leading stunt coordinator and second unit director, Terry Leonard, whose credits include Romancing the Stone and Apocalypse Now. “They never asked me if I was a fighter but I did have a dance background,” Swanson said. “At the end of the film, I had a lot of bruises and sore bones.”

  Fran Kuzui takes credit for the martial-arts aspect of the film. “I wanted to find some way for Buffy to slay vampires that had nothing to do with killing, since I was not interested in making a violent film. I am a great fan of Chinese martial-arts films which are, for the most part, pretty bloodless affairs. Since Buffy is a vampire Slayer, not a killer, I had the idea that she would rely on the martial arts as much as possible to get the job done.”

  Filming began on February 20, 1992—almost four years after Whedon had originally sold the script. The production filmed on location around Los Angeles, including Marshall High School, and on a soundstage built in a converted warehouse located in Santa Monica. What made the nine-week filming schedule particularly difficult was night shooting, which hit twenty-nine consecutive days at one stretch. “The biggest challenge in making this movie was to make it through the night shooting,” Swanson said.

  “You become a vampire when you shoot a vampire movie,” Perry joked.

  Perry and Swanson got along so well together that they were rumored to be romantically involved. In turn, Kuzui openly enjoyed her younger stars Perry and Swanson, even giving Swanson a silver Celtic cross on a chain with the inscription To My Favorite Slayer, but Kuzui’s relationship wasn’t as warm with some of the other performers. According to Kaz Kuzui, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer were not amused at the tone the film was taking. “They were very difficult,” he says directly. “They thought the movie was very serious and became insecure. They tried to make their roles more complex, more emotional”—in other words, the way Joss had originally written the characters. “Rutger tried to be the vampire Lestat from Interview with the Vampire,” Kaz continued. “He’s very good but he depends on a lot of acting gimmicks.”

  Hauer acknowledged that it wasn’t the easiest of work situations. “It is very difficult for me to come into something like this, because it’s a supporting role—supporting a lot of young actors.” Swanson also admitted to having some problems with her film foe. “Our relationship was hot and cold. He was really trying to screw with me, to get some sort of rise out of me, I guess. He likes to mess with everyone. He’d stare at me with his Rutger Hauer look and it frustrated him because I’d just laugh and say, ‘You’re not scaring me.’ He’d ask me a million questions, like, ‘Kristy, what does Lothos mean to you?’ Finally I said, ‘Look, does it matter? You take care of your character, I’ll take care of mine, and we’ll just leave it at that.’”

  There was also an uncomfortable moment during a dream sequence in which Swanson and Hauer end up in bed together, which Rutger wanted to play nude. After Kristy asked, though, he complied with her request that he wear pants. Sutherland, on the other hand, was a Swanson favorite: “Donald was unbelievable,” she said. “I was blown away by how supportive and sweet he is.”

  After the production wrapped, Rubel immediately set to work on post-production, having only four months to edit the film before its scheduled release date in late summer. That small amount of time was reduced even further because the studio was so confident the film would be a box office winner, they moved up Buffy’s release date to July.

  “We really have our summer kind of scheduled around Buffy,” said Fox’s domestic marketing president, Andrea Jaffe. “This is a concept movie and we’re going to sell the concept. It’s what we have to do.” Jaffe wanted to follow the lead of what Disney had done with one of their smaller-budgeted films, Encino Man, starring Pauly Shore and then-newcomer Brendan Fraser. Disney had given the film extensive sneak previews which had created a strong word-of-mouth that translated into a healthy box-office performance, making it one of the summer’s surprise hits. But Jaffe claimed that, by rescheduling the release date, the film wasn’t done in time to do as much screening as she would have liked.

  For a small-budget film, Fox gave Buffy a relatively large promotional blitz, including an extensive billboard marketing campaign. Actually, the film had more than one campaign. Initially, ads and billboards for the movie showed a cheerleader from the waist down, holding a pompom in one hand and a wooden stake in the other, with the tag line “She knows a sucker when she sees one.” Later newspaper ads showed Swanson holding a stake with Perry peering over her shoulder, with the banner: “Pert. Wholesome. Way Lethal.” Time would tell whether Jaffe’s marketing plan would work.

  Although the earlier release date meant going up against stronger competition, Kuzui seemed unconcerned about the switch. “There’s probably not really a good time to open a movie. But by August, everybody is just interested in having a good time and I think that’s what this movie will provide.”

  In press interviews promoting the film, Swanson was equally optimistic. “The guys are gonna go, ‘Damn!’ They’re going to think it’s cool. I think the girls are going to think it’s really cool—‘I can kill vampires and get the guy in the end.’” However, in less-spun moments, she was more ambivalent: “For all I know, it could be really hilarious, or it could really suck.”

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer opened on July 31, 1992, and died. Even the relatively unsuccessful Meryl Streep–Bruce Willis black comedy Death Becomes Her took in more money. The executives at Fox had thought teens would be lining up in droves to buy tickets for Buffy, if just to see Luke Perry—but they didn’t. Trying to explain why, then-chairman of 20th Century Fox Film Corp., Joe Roth, pointed the finger at the marketing. “We thought we had a campaign that really worked—and obviously we didn’t … I took my son and his ten-year-old friend to see it,” Roth recalled. “On our way out of the theater, the ten-year-old said to me, ‘This is a movie for adults, but there’s no way they would know that.’ I offered him a job.”

  Beyond that, the movie was generally skewered by the more important film critics. Time magazine offered this assessment: “By now you are perhaps dreaming that the summer’s most pressing need—for a funny sleeper—has been fulfilled. Wrong. Or as Buffy says, ‘Does the word “duh” mean anything to you?’ It does to director Fran Rubel Kuzui, whose frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total.”

  Newsweek’s Charles Leerhsen noted, “The film’s basic problem is that it fails to create what might be called the vanilla fudge effect—the delicious swirling of the scary and the funny that marked, say, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

  Many critics, such as the Washington Post’s, sounded disappointed that such a promising premise hadn’t lived up to its potential. “Its comic creativity is patchy; that final match with Hauer is a distinct letdown. Buffy is amusing for a time but its destiny is to die in a disappointingly long-winded conclusion.”

  Michael Price of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram was more pointed: “If it were not for the saving grace of Paul Reubens’s show-stopping vampire act, a script too witty for director Kuzui’s dreary handling and Kristy Swanson’s energetic title portrayal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be unwatchable.” That pretty much summed up Joss Whedon’s sentiments as well, who now says bluntly of the film, “The director ruined it.”

  Although Buffy’s disap
pointing reception did not adversely affect Whedon’s career, it was a setback for both Swanson and Perry. Kristy, however, continued her film career, appearing in 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag opposite David Spade and Joe Pesci, and in Adam’s Sandler’s Big Daddy.

  Perhaps the person with the most on the line was Luke Perry, at least as far as his film career was concerned. “I learned I’m not bankable at the box office,” he admitted. “I’m no one’s first choice for a part. I’m behind fifteen other guys—if I’m thought of at all.” Luke Perry would eventually leave Beverly Hills 90210 to pursue, among other things, a film career that never came to fruition. Although he had enjoyed minor success with the 1994 film 8 seconds, based on the life of rodeo champion Lane Frost, Perry’s other movies, such as The Heist, The Enemy, and Luxury of Love, have failed to leave a lasting impression. He has fared better on the small screen, appearing most recently in the Showtime series Jeremiah.

  Fran Rubel Kuzui has yet to direct another film, although she and her husband’s Kuzui Enterprises have produced two other films—the 1997 release Telling Lies in America, a coming-of-age story starring Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro; and a 1995 gem called Orgazmo, in which a young Mormon actor/preacher becomes the star of a porno film. One of the lead actors in the film, Trey Parker, would later go on to find fame and fortune as the co-creator of the Comedy Channel’s animated series South Park. Although the Kuzuis are listed as executive producers on the Buffy series, they have no creative input at all.

  When the final figures were tallied, Buffy the Vampire Slayer grossed a little over $16 million in domestic box office, but because the budget had been ultramodest to begin with, the studio managed to turn a small profit. However, nothing could compensate Whedon for his profound disappointment over how his vision of the script had been so thoroughly compromised. But three years later Whedon would unexpectedly get a second chance to do Buffy the way he’d originally intended, and he was determined to take full advantage of the opportunity.

  Turning Buffy into a Television Series

  Despite its seemingly quiet, small-town appearance, Sunnydale is actually a hotbed of mystical happenings and a magnet for evil creatures of all types, not just vampires. Why? Because it sits on what is vividly called a Hellmouth: think of it as a Club Med for the demon set.

  Unlike the movie, in which tongue-in-cheekiness was substituted for any sense of menace, in this incarnation the sense of lurking danger is palpable. “In the movie, the director took an action/horror/comedy script and went only with the comedy,” explains Joss Whedon, who is executive producer as well as creator of the series. “In the television show, we’re keeping to the original formula. We take our horror genre seriously. We are not doing a spoof. It’s larger than life, but we are very much involved with these characters. This is not Clueless or Party Girl. The description I like best is ‘My So-called Life meets The X-Files.’”

  Welcome to the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, television style.

  The idea for resurrecting the film into a series began in 1995 when Gail Berman, an executive at Sandollar, the production company that originally optioned Joss’s screenplay back in 1988, approached Whedon with the suggestion of making the 1992 film into a television series.

  “What’s ironic is that when I first read Joss’s screenplay for the movie years ago, I thought then it would make a great television show,” says Berman. “But when the movie came out and didn’t do that well, the idea of a series sort of went away.” But like the vampires she fights, Buffy wouldn’t die, becoming a surprising video hit, and Berman exhumed her series idea from the development graveyard.

  “I thought about it for a while then decided that I was interested because it would be very different from the movie,” explains Joss, who would have creative control—something he did not have with the film. “I thought there was an idea in the ‘high school horror show’ that would sustain a television show and keep it going for years.

  “If you look at movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, you’ll see this combination of teen angst and horror has been going on for a long time. So it was a very appealing idea to me for a show, but one I honestly hadn’t thought of until they brought it to me.”

  Not everyone was thrilled with Whedon’s decision to go forward with the idea for a series, however: “My agent begged me not to do it,” Whedon laughs. But Joss ignored the advice because he was being given a chance to do something few screenwriters get to do—get it right the second time and be the man in charge.

  “I really hated what they had done to my original script,” Whedon says bluntly. “To me, making a movie is like buying a lotto ticket—the writer is just not that important. Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is not all it’s cracked up to be. People blow their noses on you. When I went on the set of Alien [Resurrection], people are nice enough but I’m standing in a corner. On Buffy, I’m telling these stories. Not only am I telling them, I’m telling them every eight days,” he says, referring to how long it takes to film each episode.

  “The movies I write, if they even get made, take several thousand years. But television is a writer’s medium so there’s a better chance things will come out the way you originally envisioned them. With television, it’s like getting to make an independent movie every week. Besides,” he says smiling, “it was a way to get back at everyone I went to school with.”

  Whedon says they worked on the show for about a year before they actually started filming. During that time he ironed out the show’s concept and solidified the characters. In the film, Buffy’s original Watcher—Merrick—dies. But for the series, Whedon wanted a Watcher who was slightly less strange, though no less confounded by his charge. He also wanted this Watcher to be ever so slightly less surefooted and more human.

  The Buffy character was also adjusted. In the film Buffy was a senior, but Whedon made the TV Buffy a high school sophomore. Gone is her preoccupation with clothes and her insider status peopled with a vacuous circle of friends—most of those traits were incorporated into Cordelia, who served as an example of the kind of person Buffy might have grown into had she not been the Slayer—and in their place is a deep sense of angst, and friends who are anything but “in.” Also, although she might not be a straight-A student, Gellar’s Buffy exhibits far more intelligence than Swanson’s. In the film Buffy barely dealt with complex emotional conflicts, but in the series, she would deal with them on a daily basis.

  Buffy’s mother would be much more than the fleeting joke presence she was in the film. Whedon sought to make Joyce Summers a parent much more grounded in the reality of having to deal with a daughter who seems compelled to do unexplainable things, like burn down the gym and constantly get into fights.

  It was also vitally important to set the right tone from the very first scene. Despite the horror premise, Whedon believed that playing it straight would lessen the suspension of disbelief. “We set up the premise that the town is located on a Hellmouth, so it would be understood that our characters know what is going on, know that Buffy is a vampire-Slayer, and would understand that mystical and strange things will happen in Sunnydale.”

  In March 1996, the WB put the series into development for the 1996–97 season and began the drawn-out casting process. Sarah Michelle Gellar recounts how she first learned of the series: “My manager spoke to the WB and they mentioned they had this Buffy show and he thought it would be a great opportunity for me to use my Tae Kwon Do, which I had studied for four years.”

  The producers had already approached Charisma Carpenter, who was just coming off Aaron Spelling’s Malibu Shores, for the part of Buffy. But Gellar, who had been set to audition for Cordelia instead, was determined to play Buffy and badgered the producers into letting her read for the lead. “I probably had eleven auditions and four screen tests,” Gellar says of the nerve-wracking process. “It was the most awful experience of my life but I was so driven to get this part.

  “I had read the script and had heard about how wonderful Joss Whedon
was, and I went to audition the week he had been nominated for an Oscar for his Toy Story screenplay. I thought, ‘I’m going to have this role.’ Later, Joss told me I nailed it—but I still went through eleven auditions.”

  “There was no second place,” says Whedon. “We read tons of people and several were staggeringly untalented. Buffy is a tough part; it is a character actress in the body of a leading lady. She’s an eccentric. This girl has to look the part of a blonde bimbo who dies in reel two but turns out to be anything but that. You don’t find those qualities very often in young actresses who also happen to be beautiful, but Sarah gave us a perfect reading. And then she says, ‘By the way, I’m also a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do. Is that good?’”

  After hiring Sarah, Whedon offered Carpenter the role of Cordelia instead. The cast, which also included Anthony Stewart Head as Giles and Nicholas Brendon as Xander, was coming together.

  Then the series hit a snag. Instead of putting the show on in September, the network decided to hold it for the midseason. Although the delay was disappointing at the time, Gellar says it actually worked out for the best. “The show wasn’t ready, so it was a blessing to wait. The extra time really gave us a chance to fully develop and flesh out the show and we’re stronger because of it.” When they were finally ready to film, a last-minute decision was made to recast the roles of Angel and Willow. Alyson Hannigan replaced Riff Regan and David Boreanaz was cast the night before he was scheduled to show up for filming. The more minor role of Principal Flutie was also recast. The original actor, Stephen Tobolowsky—who has appeared in many movies, including Groundhog Day and Memento—was replaced by Ken Lerner, brother of Oscar nominee Michael Lerner.