by Amy Pascale
In another deviation from the movie, in which Buffy primarily fought vampires alone (as had all Slayers until her time), she quickly connects with two new friends, Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris, who will become her confidants and evil-slaying cohorts. Willow is a shy girl, unsure and a bit awkward but full of confidence and excitement when it comes to book learning and computer hacking. She has been in love with her best friend, Xander, since kindergarten. Witty, geeky, and uncomfortable in his skin, especially around girls, Xander is basically Joss in high school.
Buffy also meets her new Watcher, Rupert Giles, who will guide Buffy’s development as well as serve as a father figure for all three teens. Rounding out the cast of characters is self-involved cheerleader Cordelia Chase, a walking, talking callback to the girl Buffy had been before the Slayer business came along. This odd band of characters—the shy girl, the boy whose strongest weapon is his ready wit, the snarky popular girl, and the repressed Brit, all following the most powerful girl in the world, who desperately wants to be anything but—would become the template for the chosen families so often found in Joss’s later works.
The WB was impressed enough by Joss’s script to give the go-ahead to film a pilot. As soon as the team got the green light, casting began.
Joss has said again and again that he created Buffy to be a cultural icon. “Buffy was always intended to be a role model,” he insisted in a 1998 video press kit. “It was very important to me that Buffy be the kind of girl that girls could look up to and relate to, and show not only a hero but how difficult it is to be a hero.” With such high expectations to fulfill, it took some time for Joss to find the small-screen version of his titular hero. Several teen actresses including Katie Holmes and Selma Blair were considered for the role but didn’t work out.
In early 1996, 20th Century Fox approached a young soap opera star to audition for the series. Sarah Michelle Gellar was just seventeen years old but already a veteran of several TV movies and guest appearances, and a Daytime Emmy winner for her role as Kendall Hart on the soap opera All My Children. “They said to me, there’s this [role] coming up you’d be really right for,” Gellar recalls. The pitch went on to highlight Joss’s work. “Joss Whedon: He’s great. He wrote Toy Story—it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar.”
Although she was intrigued by the idea, they couldn’t work out the scheduling before she left for Australia for filming a TV movie and a holiday. “I finally got back and read the script, and I loved it,” she says.
Gellar went in to the audition for the role of Cordelia. Casting agents were swayed by her long dark hair and pale skin, convinced that she’d be an excellent fit for the queen bitch of Buffy’s high school—a role very similar to her Emmy-winning turn as Kendall Hart. She nailed the audition, and tested for the studio and the network as well. She got a call confirming that the role was hers—and asking if she had any interest in reading for Buffy.
“I thought: Buffy? Well, that’s not really me.” And her manager cautioned that sometimes an actor could lose the role she initially had by chasing after another one in the same project. But Gellar decided to take a chance and went back to read with Joss and casting director Marcia Shulman.
Before the Buffy audition, Gellar screened the 1992 film as a model for her version of the character, not knowing how much Joss hated that interpretation of his hero. But Joss was impressed when, at the end of the audition, she announced that she was a brown belt in tae kwon do. Still, it wasn’t an easy process—she had to audition twice more, watching many other girls try for the role and getting more notes from Joss each time she was brought back. In all, she had to go through five separate meetings and five screen tests. After all that, she was shocked when Joss told her he always knew she was Buffy. “If he knew I was Buffy, why did I have to go through that?” Gellar asks. “I never quite got the straight answer.”
Charisma Carpenter, fresh off a starring role on Aaron Spelling’s short-lived Malibu Shores, had also gone out for Buffy, but her network audition made it clear that she was a perfect fit for Cordelia. She’d been running late and her agent sent her a number of urgent messages during her frantic race through a rainy Los Angeles rush hour. Once she was able to get off the freeway and to a pay phone, Carpenter called her agent, who informed her that everyone running the screen test was ready to leave. “You tell them not to leave, you tell them to order a pizza, you tell them something but tell them to wait,” she responded.
For the role of Buffy’s Watcher, Giles, Joss was leaning toward casting a foreigner. In his notes, he wrote that the character could be British, Scottish, or West Indian, with a preference toward a “loud, abusive Scot.” He also considered casting a Wallace Shawn type, someone who resembled the nebbishy character actor known for My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, and his role as the Joss-created character Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story. “What he is not,” Joss wrote, “Is contemporary. What he’s not, to belabor the point, is Buffy.”
Anthony Stewart Head, an established British actor primarily known in the United States for a quirky series of commercials for coffee, came in to read. “I’d read the scripts in a restaurant a couple nights before, and I’d laughed out loud,” Head says, adding that he later told a friend, “I want this gig. This is the first gig that I’ve read since I’ve been in the States that knows how to talk like an Englishman, and it’s funny, and it’s exciting.”
He was cautious, but he went into the room and pitched Joss on his idea of Giles falling somewhere between Alan Rickman in Sense and Sensibility and Prince Charles. Joss told him to go for it. “I was looking for a guy whose life is only halfway through,” the writer recalls, “who’s still on a path himself, because I wanted to be in his perspective too.” But most of the actors auditioning came in with an “I’m the craggy mentor” approach to the role. “Tony Head came in, and I think every single person in the room had made a note that was just a drawing of a heart.”
As far as Joss was concerned, Head had picked up the part, put it in his pocket, and walked away with it. His casting wasn’t set in stone, however. First, Head had to get the sign-off from Fox. In order to do that, his agent told him, he should acquaint himself with the Buffy movie. Head watched the film and was surprised. “This is completely different from anything that I got from the script,” he remembers thinking. “This is a different feel and a different vibe and a different humor.” The next day when testing for Fox, he told Joss that he had seen the movie. Joss’s face fell and he quickly told Head, “It has nothing to do with that! Forget you saw it!”
As with Giles, Joss felt that Willow was a character defined as distinctively not-Buffy. In a quick character sketch, he explained that she was “shy, clumsy, sensible and sort of plain.” But to him they were meant to be best friends—“They’re both outsiders, however they might strive not to be…. They both have a sense of right.” Early on, he knew that Willow would be the “brains of the operation.” And so he wanted an actress who felt real, who had her “own sort of shy quirkiness” instead of the “ ‘supermodel in horn-rims’ that you usually see on a television show.” He fought the network to cast Riff Regan, whose frumpy take on the character fit into his image of a socially awkward nerd uncomfortable in her skin.
The cast was rounded out with newcomer Nicholas Brendon as Xander, the “charming, decent looking romantic” who was “funny and ascerbic … totally unsufferable and just useless with girls.” The role was first offered to future Blade-universe vampire killer and Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds, who passed because he’d just finished high school, where he’d been bullied, and had no interest in living that time of his life all over again.
Added at the last minute was David Boreanaz as a yet-unnamed mysterious stranger. Future Whedon stalwart Nathan Fillion had also auditioned for the man of mystery but didn’t get the role. The following year, Fillion would join Reynolds on the new series Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.
With the cast in place, shooting on the pilo
t could begin. Unfortunately, Joss immediately ran into some obstacles. First, he wouldn’t be able to shoot his full pilot script; because the WB had a smaller overall development budget than the larger networks, it usually only commissioned a twenty-minute “pilot presentation” tape instead of a full-length pilot. Second, the network wanted to bring in a more experienced director to oversee the pilot.
Joss was willing to pare down his script, but he balked at the network’s other stipulation, because he was looking forward to directing the pilot himself. Not only was this his chance to tell Buffy’s story the way he wanted it told, but he would also be able to guide the actors speaking his words to say them the way he wanted them to be said. The ability to direct episodes of the series had been a major factor in Joss’s decision to work on the project. Buffy was his chance to launch a show, hire himself, and pay himself a good wage. He saw it as an opportunity to finally get the sort of practical, hands-on experience behind the camera that his heavily theoretical studies at Wesleyan hadn’t provided. Chris Harbert insisted in a “friendly but pointed” conversation that Joss would direct alone or he would walk away entirely. The WB agreed.
Once on set, however, the eager director was saddled with a crew who didn’t want to be there. The assistant director wasn’t happy with Joss, and the director of photography didn’t like him at all. There was a lot of weird tension on the set. “They had absolutely no time for him,” Anthony Stewart Head recalls. “A writer cutting his teeth on his own show? Who cares?” Joss declared his first outing in directing for television a “nightmare, [with] the worst crew imaginable.”
Even so, he never doubted the strength of the project. On one of the first days of filming, Head asked Joss if he thought the show would be picked up. He’d been hopeful that his first American series, the Fox sci-fi show VR.5 (1995), would get a long run, but it failed to pull in a large audience and was canceled after ten episodes. He was surprised and comforted by Joss’s reaction. “Definitely,” Head recalls Joss saying. “But the suits don’t get it. The studio doesn’t get it, and the network certainly doesn’t get it. But this will be word of mouth. There’s going to be a huge fan base that’s going to get this, and it’s going to be picked up worldwide.” Some might call that pompous. But to know Joss is to know that he’s just, well, certain. “He’s certain of his beliefs. He sticks to them. He doesn’t waver,” Head explains.
Next, the footage had to be edited together—which at first seemed to go about as well as the shooting had. David Solomon was brought in as editor; though he was primarily a producer at that point, he was approached because he was known to be good with first-time directors. He and Joss met to discuss the editing process, and Joss asked how he handled notes from directors. Solomon replied that he didn’t read the notes until after he finished his initial edit, explaining that “it would be like if somebody came to you as a writer and said, ‘Don’t write anything that has the word claustrophobic in it, and try not to describe anything that might end up being red, and don’t use anything with jealousy because I don’t like that.’”
All Joss heard was, “I don’t read the notes.” The meeting ended shortly thereafter.
Solomon got a call from the head of production at 20th Century Fox—his declaration that he didn’t read notes had transformed into Joss “hating him.” He was asked to go back and apologize to Joss, which he eventually did, begrudgingly—once again explaining that he needed to have the freedom to work without a strict list of initial demands. Fortunately, Joss understood the need for personal creativity and saw that this wasn’t another situation like the crew on the shoot. Solomon was there to help him, not fight and demean him.
The pilot presentation was cut on the Avid editing system at Solomon’s house, with Joss and Gail Berman. Despite the rocky beginning, Joss and his editor developed a creative flow and worked well together. After the final cut was delivered, postproduction moved to an audio house, where Joss and Solomon continued to collaborate on the sound mix for the show. One day, Joss ran out to the parking lot as Solomon was driving off and said, “Hey, if this thing goes to series, I want you to come on it.” Solomon agreed, thinking he would never hear from him again.
Like his student film, the Buffy pilot was a twenty-five-minute tape that Joss said he’ll never officially release. Unlike A Night Alone, however, it would find its way onto eBay’s black market of bootlegged VHS tapes by 1999, and ten years later would be easily watchable on YouTube. While Joss’s pilot script had to be truncated to fit the abbreviated running time, the wit and compelling storytelling were already evident.
The story begins with a young couple breaking into a high school at night to make out; the girl, nervous and obviously uncomfortable, struggles with the boy’s insistence that they go further into the school. It’s a dark scene, both visually, as they’re cloaked in shadows, and in tone, as there’s a distinct predatory subtext. As he repeatedly tries to convince her that they’re alone, it’s easy to assume that she’ll soon be attacked. Upon being reassured that the school is indeed empty, the girl turns back to the boy—she’s the vampire. She attacks him as the scene fades out. The words Buffy the Vampire Slayer appear, superimposed over a bustling high school facade and backed by the punk band Rancid’s song “Salvation.”
Joss had again flipped the script—it wasn’t the girl who needed saving from the lecherous boy. It was the first of many signs that while Buffy was a horror series, it would take the genre to a new level that audiences hadn’t seen before.
This opening scene will seem familiar to those who have watched the series’ actual first episode, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” which would reshoot and expand on many elements of the unaired pilot. Despite the similarities, the pilot doesn’t come close to matching the quality level of “Welcome to the Hellmouth.” Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nicholas Brendon are clearly the stars—both relatable, believable, and engaging—but Riff Regan doesn’t find the right balance between making Willow shy and wanting and keeping her likeable. The sets are less than inspiring, the dialogue snappy and clever but in danger of drowning in slang that would quickly feel dated. Xander leads Buffy around the school courtyard, and in typical teen movie style points out each of the stereotypical student clusters: stoner surfers, theater club, film club—though he does mix it up a bit by pointing out the “dirty girls.” (To its credit, the pilot would sidestep the quintessential big expository speech of every cult film when Giles begins to explain the lore of the Slayer and Buffy cuts him off: “Wow, you’re going to do the speech and everything.”)
The pilot’s shortened script also doesn’t allow for the strong emotional connection to the characters that is vital in any coming-of-age tale. Buffy’s mom, Joyce, doesn’t appear, eliminating a conversation that comes early in “Welcome to the Hellmouth” that beautifully illustrates Buffy’s underlying need to keep her actions in Sunnydale as typically teenage and Slayer-free as possible so that she and her mother can have a “normal” life. Also missing is David Boreanaz’s character—named Angel by the time the series debuted—the enigmatic stranger with cryptic messages for the Slayer. Boreanaz filmed some scenes for the pilot, but they were cut for time and storytelling reasons.
Despite all its shortcomings, the pilot still showed potential that Buffy could become a great series. Even with the truncated script, Joss’s limited knowledge of directing, and actors still working to fully inhabit their roles, the teen characters felt more relatable and smarter than those in any series on the air at the time. “They all just kind of fit into those parts right away, and it was just going to happen,” Solomon says. “Albeit, we never saw [it lasting for] seven years.”
When the WB execs saw the pilot presentation in May 1996, they were underwhelmed. They did not pick up the series for the fall season, opting instead for a show they had initially developed in-house that was championed by WB head Jamie Kellner: 7th Heaven, a wholesome drama about a preacher and his family. Still, Buffy had made an impact at the network.
“I thought that he had captured a distinct and exciting lead character, and not a lot else,” Susanne Daniels said. “Sarah Michelle Gellar shined in his pilot presentation as Buffy, and was endearing and fascinating and someone I wanted to go on a ride with, and see what was going to happen with the character and how. And I thought he had established an intriguing world, but I also thought it was messy.”
“The pilot was not great,” said Garth Ancier, chief programmer for the network at the time. “And we had some better pilots that year. The discussion was, ‘Do we make our bet on another show from Stephen Cannell [21 Jump Street, The A-Team, The Rockford Files]? Or do we make our bet on Joss, who we believe in as a writer, even though this pilot will have to be thoroughly trashed?’”
When the network announced its fall schedule later in May, it made no mention of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Gail Berman grew quite persistent, asking Daniels to confirm whether the series would be picked up or whether the network would release it so 20th Century Fox and Sandollar could shop it elsewhere. The WB responded with a list of minor adjustments and one major casting change that they wanted Joss to make, and once all parties were on board, Buffy was officially given a twelve-episode run, to premiere in March 1997. Daniels expressed high hopes for the series: “I think Buffy will do for The WB what 21 Jump Street did for Fox…. It [attracted] new teenage viewers and got critical acclaim as well.”
Despite David Solomon’s recollection, not all of the actors fit into their parts right away. Among the changes between the presentation tape and the series proper was reenvisioning the role of Willow. Per the WB’s request, Riff Regan was out—which was perhaps not a surprise to the actress. She told Joss that “part of the reason that she was not right to play Willow is that she’s very self confident [and] sexy.” Unlike the frumpy character she played in the pilot, Joss said, Regan “came into the room and blew me away. She was so in charge.” Had Regan been given the direction to portray Willow in a manner closer to her own personality, it’s possible that she would have made it through the series run.