Slayers and Vampires
Page 10
This presentation reel featured a different actress in the role of Willow, Riff Regan, who didn’t make it to series. Cherubic and acerbic, she was completely different from Alyson Hannigan but would later nab a starring role in the popular NBC series Sisters.
The pilot presentation begins with Julie Benz’s seemingly innocent Darla sneaking into school with a boy, who appears to have malevolent intentions, when she turns into a vampire and chows down on him. The next morning Buffy arrives at Sunnydale High and is greeted warmly by Principal Flutie (played for the first and the last time by perennial character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (Groundhog Day), after which she meets Xander and the mysterious librarian, Giles, who throws a “VAMPYR” tome in front of her—at which point she flees the library. She is befriended by Willow when the Cordettes, comprised of Cordelia and Harmony, attempt to co-opt Buffy for their own clique.
Only after finding out there’s a dead body on campus and learning it is the work of vampires does she return to the library, where Giles tells her she can’t escape her destiny. But Buffy insists she’s given up vampire slaying for good. Meeting Xander at the Bronze, she learns Willow has gone off with a mysterious stranger, prompting Buffy to take up her old ways, defeating several vampires in the process. The reel ends with Xander and Willow now hip to Buffy’s secret and her throwing a stake through the heart of a handbill for an upcoming screening of Nosferatu on campus.
Watching the twenty-minute presentation, it’s easy to see why the WB saw something in the show. Most of the performances are terrific (particularly the troika of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicholas Brendan, and Charisma Carpenter), Joss’s trademark puns and wit are all in evidence, and the sales reel, despite its clear lack of budget, is original and charming. Whatever it lacks in polish, it makes up for in heart. Also, it is certainly abundantly clear that Regan was the wrong choice for the role of Willow, not just physically—it required a more wispy (not to mention willowy) actress and the playfulness and neuroses of Alyson Hannigan’s effortless portrayal.
DAVID GREENWALT
They had shot a pilot, but they replaced the character of Willow with Alyson Hannigan, who is now my good friend, as is her husband, Alexis Denisof, who appeared in Grimm for me.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
[Regan] was the opposite end of the scale. Basically, she was a very different concept of Willow. I must admit that when I first saw her, she wasn’t how I envisioned Willow. Alyson is exactly the way I envisioned the character. The girl who played her was lovely, really gorgeous, we had great fun, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the part. She just didn’t feel comfortable in the gawkiness of it, which was hard to play. It just didn’t fit right, and I think she would be the first to admit that.
The first thing we had to film was the last scene when we say, “Well done,” and pat ourselves on the back and go on to the next thing. I was playing it as I thought they wanted me to. When you’ve tested three times and each time you’re thinking, “Christ, what was it I did last time that they really liked? What was it that got me this job?” It does make you self-conscious and you are desperately searching for whatever it was that got you the gig. But in that last scene, I was appalling. Seriously appalling. And luckily, as fate would have it, my dressing room was next to the room they were using to show dailies. I heard my voice coming from next door, so I puttered in and had a look, and was appalled at what I saw myself doing. I was then able to pull back from that.
I was play-acting the man instead of being the man. So then the scene that Sarah Michelle Gellar and I had in the library was the one that made all the sense and the one that felt completely right. It was night and day. Very different. Thankfully, there were a couple of good scenes like that, and that offset this dreadful scene.
MERCEDES MCNAB
I’d seen the original movie and liked it because it was very clever and relatable. So I liked Joss’s work, but didn’t translate completely to this show. Obviously, the show was a lot different. I was a fan of that. But him personally, I just thought Joss was very creative and smart and kind of goofy and quirky, and there was just so much going on. We really didn’t have a ton of time to connect in that first pilot presentation.
Based on the presentation, the WB greenlit the series for a midseason debut in 1997. That meant Whedon and his cast and crew would be producing the first twelve episodes without any feedback from either the critics or the audience as production on the entire season would be wrapped before it even aired.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
We finished the entire first season before we went on the air, so we were able to do it in a bubble without having anybody on the outside interfering. When I was in North Carolina shooting I Know What You Did Last Summer, we didn’t get to see it, because it was on a cable channel we couldn’t get in the town we were in. I was able to avoid the craziness, although Alyson called me every week going, “You don’t understand, every time you go past a grocery store there’s a Buffy billboard.”
We sort of felt it was time for the show, because the network bought it. And they wanted to do the exact kind of show we wanted to make. And they were interested in making it with us, which is good. I sort of figured they would say, make it stupid. But they didn’t. It pretty much went the way we planned except it dug down a lot deeper. And we just didn’t know we could put so much pain up on the screen and how good it would make us feel.
JOSS WHEDON
I don’t think we would have existed anywhere else. No one else would let us do it, they wouldn’t have been there with us, they’d try to micromanage it into something they understood.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
The network wasn’t exactly sure what we were doing in the beginning. After the praying mantis episode, they said, “We’re just not sure if we’re sending the right message.” We’re, like, “What message? You have sex with her and she bites your head off.” These are situations that children can relate to. The themes throughout the show are common: loving a friend, being at an age when you’re having problems with Mom, and wanting to be an adult and wanting to be a child at the same time.
DAVID GREENWALT
We wrote episode one and two and took a lot from the pilot presentation. Everything was shot from scratch.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
All of my friends felt sorry for me, because I was on a midseason replacement show, on a network no one had heard of. People would look at me and go, “At least you got a pilot your first time out! That’s great! Next year you’ll get one that’ll go.”
BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BUFFY
“I’m reading about death all the time, and I’ve never seen a dead body before. Do they usually move?”
With the series greenlit by the WB, Joss Whedon, who had never run a show before, would have to assemble a team of writers for the first thirteen episodes, which would debut midseason on the network. one of the first writer/producers to join the series was co–executive producer David Greenwalt, who became an important consigliore for Whedon over the years, eventually leaving Buffy after the third season to cocreate and run the spin-off, Angel.
Greenwalt had recently worked on Profit, the acclaimed series starring Adrian Pasdar, which was beloved by critics but failed to find an audience despite anticipating the milestones of peak-TV shows such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
It’s an almost impossible tone to strike, and so many people have tried to do it. It’s like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: you know it when you see it or hear it. Joss created a show and a voice and found other writers to help him execute that vision that was kind of unlike anything we’d seen before.
JOSE MOLINA
(former assistant to Howard Gordon)
I was so intimidated by Joss. He was so busy, he’d never run a TV show before, so one of the reasons that 20th partnered him up with David Greenwalt was because
they wanted an experienced TV guy to hold his hand while he figured out how it worked. Joss had been a feature guy for a long time and did some TV as a staff writer or story editor. But he was never a producer on TV.
DAVID GREENWALT
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I had my choice of almost any show I would want to be on, because everybody in the industry loved Profit. It was the first show with a sociopath villain as the hero. It was before The Sopranos and all. I got a huge sack of scripts and I met with Steven Bochco [Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law] and I met with a lot of other people, and here was this Buffy the Vampire Slayer script in the pile. And I was, like, this is not only the best pilot of the year, clearly it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. Somebody has to introduce me to Joss Whedon.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
David and I worked on all the stories together. We came in and tried this and that. We knew generally where we were headed. But, beyond that, we filled in the blanks and once we figured out a story, “OK, Xander’s going to be a hyena,” we spent anywhere between a couple of days and a week, just breaking down the story and figuring out each scene and what everybody is doing. That was the hard part. The writing was a little easier, because it’s all set up for you, but it’s figuring out how to move the story, how to keep in character, not make every episode Mulder’s dead sister. We repeated ourselves, although we tried not to. David Greenwalt was incredible.
DAVID GREENWALT
I started as a movie writer with Jim Carroll in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and we had a pretty good time getting some movies made then. Then I got really bored with movies—they’re a pain in the ass to make and they take too long. I could’ve made a fine living as a script doctor, but I hated it, so I got into TV and started with The Wonder Years. By the way, my style had always been either adventure/comedy or romantic/comedy. It wasn’t really a genre. I don’t think I’d ever written anything in the genre. Then John McNamara and I did Profit for Fox and it just died a terrible quick death, but it made a big splash within the industry.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
They were a great team. Between Whedon and Greenwalt, you could always get a straight answer. If Joss was having one of his days, David was there to back him up and take over business for the day if he was in deep thought about the next script or whatever was on his mind. He was probably plotting out The Avengers back then. I can’t say enough about all the people on the show who were really great. It was a great experience.
DAVID GREENWALT
I met with Joss and we got on. He had loved Profit and supposedly he needed a show runner. He had been on Roseanne, but hadn’t done that much TV. He needed a show runner like I need another arm. He’s kind of a genius, but we worked together great. It was a love affair from the first. What I learned about genre very early on was it had so much more power than regular drama. You can take a metaphor like, “Oh, I feel invisible in high school” and literally have a girl turn invisible. So that the emotional connection is strong, but the fact that it’s fantasy or genre separates the audience enough from it that they can really get into it without having to suffer too much. We got a letter on Buffy early on from a woman who was a lawyer, and who was agoraphobic and had not left her house in a long time. She said, “That episode last night gave me enough courage to walk out the door and walk around the block once.” You never get letters like that on regular stuff, you just don’t.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, It’s About Power: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Buffy is no blond damsel in need of saving. She saves the world and those she loves. She is her own savior, and when she cannot save herself, she is willing to die for the cause, like Joan of Arc. Buffy is no meek girl, but a strong female character, and shatters the perception of masculine qualities and gender binaries, instead choosing to transcend traditional sex roles.
DAVID GREENWALT
Julie Benz, who played Darla, had this little thing in the teaser of the first episode and it made a statement about don’t trust these pretty blondes in the horror movies, because they can be badass, too, which is perfect. Then, boy we used her a lot, and she came back and back and back and, of course, had this whole thing with Angel.
Season one debuted on March 10, 1997, with the two-part “Welcome to the Hellmouth” and “The Harvest,” which set up the series premise and introduced Mark Metcalf, neither worthless or weak, as the malevolent Master, best known for his work in Animal House as the loathsome Niedermeyer. But early episodes quickly established that Buffy wasn’t just a vampire slayer: episode three, “The Witch,” was a standout, about a domineering, embittered mother who uses witchcraft to switch bodies with her daughter so she can relive her glory days as a cheerleader in high school. Freaky Friday, it’s not.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
(writer, Fangoria magazine)
Even though Buffy is about “vampires,” it also explored other types of villains, creatures, and monsters to keep the show fresh. Joss Whedon was a restless creator that shook things up all the time on the show, so the show itself could evolve. Some detours worked, others didn’t, but looking back at the series as a whole, it really was groundbreaking.
JOSS WHEDON
David [Greenwalt] had come up with the idea that a mother was jealous of her daughter’s youth and had stolen it from her. It was absolutely the essence of the show. It took the idea of “oh, there’s good guys and there’s bad guys and there’s monsters and we love these people” one level further into what people are capable of and, in particular, what David Greenwalt is capable of. That was a seminal moment for me, because it made me realize there was more to this. And he figured out the very real, very ugly twist that set the tone for the whole series.
DAVID GREENWALT
With “The Witch,” I came up with the twist that it’s really the mother has traded places with the daughter. Joss always recounts that to me as when he realized he made the right choice in hiring me and knowing this guy needed to be in my camp. Frankly, I am not the world’s greatest story breaker, but I did have that idea as we were breaking the story and said, “What if the mom traded places?” Joss always says that’s the point where he knew he could trust me, and he fell for me as a writer. That was like an historic moment forever.
Subsequent episodes included “Teacher’s Pet,” about a substitute teacher whose apparent infatuation with Xander is revealed that she’s actually a giant praying mantis who subsists on the men she seduces; while “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date” focused on Buffy finding work-life balance between slaying vampires and trying to be a student at Sunnydale High. In “The Pack,” hyenas from Africa possess the minds of students—including Xander—which was an effective parable about the insidiousness of high school cliques, while “Angel” reveals that Buffy’s mysterious and enigmatic admirer is not only a vampire, but one with a soul.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
I remember Gail Berman coming to set early on in Buffy when we were shooting “Reptile Boy” and it was me and Sarah chained to a wall and screaming. I was so wiped out and my mom was visiting that day and Gail asked, “Hey, is there anyone you’d want to work with, is there anywhere you’d want to be?” I just remember saying to Gail, “I’m exactly where I need to be, right here and right now.”
On the surface, you’re looking at damsels in distress and big bad boogeymen and a girl who fights vampires in a graveyard. If you look at it superficially, it can seem like a very silly show. But the themes and metaphors were really deep and it had really talented people saying things in a really interesting way using verbiage and cadences and sentence structure that had never been heard before. Right then, I knew where I needed to be and it was the people I was working with like Joss Whedon
. She just looked at me quizzically and said, “Interesting.”
In the first year, a Buffy tradition was born, the slaying of the high school principal. Played by Kenny Lerner (who replaced Stephen Tobolowsky from the original presentation reel), Principal Flutie met a quick and ignominious end shortly into the season in the episode, “The Pack,” surprising audiences who never anticipated his early demise.
DAVID GREENWALT
We worked and worked to break that episode and we knew we were going to eat the principal. He’s a great actor that guy. He was in my movie Secret Admirer, but we wanted to get a new principal, so we knew we were going to eat him. We were working and working and working and we suddenly said, “What if Xander becomes infected with this thing and starts really coming onto Buffy?”
That unlocked that particular episode and it was like a template for us—it’s better when it’s happening to your main characters. In his mind he might have felt like pushing her up against the soft drink machine and scaring her, but he would never do something like that except if he was infected with this thing. There were a lot of stand-alones that first year.
Lerner was quickly replaced by a moonlighting Armin Shimerman, who was already a lead actor as part of the interstellar ensemble of Paramount’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, playing Quark, a devious Ferengi, here essaying the memorable role of Principal Snyder on Buffy.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
While I was doing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I had an audition for Flutie, which was the principal before Snyder and that didn’t work out. My friend Kenny Lerner got the part. As I was leaving the room, I was walking down a hallway of various offices and I passed one room. I glanced inside and I saw that there were two cardboard cutouts. One of Major Kira / Nana Visitor, and one of Worf / Michael Dorn. As I walked past the door, I stopped and said, “Why don’t you have a standee of me in here?” And then we started to chat for about two minutes and then I walked back to my car finding out I didn’t get the role. Fine.