Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  I had ideas for both of them. It was a couple of weeks of struggling. Do I write the NYPD Blue? Do I write the Buffy? Finally, I thought, “Well, I’ll write the Buffy.” I wrote a spec called “Xander the Slayer” in which the whole story revolves around Buffy’s powers are transferred to Xander. It was exploring why men can’t be the slayer.

  He becomes very aggressive and non-Xander-like. I wrote this and finished it. Unfortunately, I finished it right in the middle of staffing season, so no agency really wanted to look at it because they were busy with their clients. I had one friend who was repped at UTA. She graciously passed along my script. They read it and said, “Well, we like it, but not enough to rep it.” I’m, like, “Oh, shit. Well, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll give it to my current agent.” She was in features. I think she knew like three people in TV. She read it and liked it and passed it along to her TV contacts. I went in to meet about working on the animated series they were developing. They said, “Joss has to read your script first and, quite frankly, he’s very harsh on Buffy specs.” They sent it to Joss, and I think it was like six weeks or something that I hear nothing. I’m just chewing my nails. I finally got a call, “Yeah, can you come over tomorrow? Joss would like to sit down with you.”

  It’s half luck and half having the right material at the right time. I went over and met with him at the Buffy office. The Buffy/Angel offices were at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. That’s also where the Buffy stages were. We talked about comics and movies for about a half hour. At the end, he said, “Look, I know you were talking about the animated show, but do you want to come do an episode of the live-action show?” I said, “Fuck yeah!” They hired me to do a freelance episode and that was “Blood Ties,” where Dawn finds out she’s not human. That she’s the Key. I know a lot of people were thrown by Dawn and confused, even though there’s that great scene where there’s a room that’s obviously used for storage. Then suddenly there’s a sister in it, which was obviously a tip-off something odd was going on. For me, I loved that season. Of course, it was my first season, so I had a very strong reaction to it.

  JOSS WHEDON

  The Dawn thing was off the charts. Michelle was just incredible. The only weakness I would say is that I don’t think we had enough time for some of the other characters.

  MARTI NOXON

  For me, not being a comic book fan, apparently this is not uncommon in comic books: that fantasy characters suddenly arrive. It happens. And it’s happened in other stories, but I’d never seen it before. I love comic books, but I mostly read the really twisted ones, the ones about death or suicides. I didn’t know there was a precedent. We were, like, “How is this going to work?” People were really flipping out, but once we got into the idea that we were just going to leave people sort of disturbed for a while, it was kind of fun. I’d never done anything like that before. I think everybody was concerned that the audience wouldn’t go on that journey with us, but Joss just had just confidence and that the payoff was going to be worth it. He knew what his role was in the whole season, too. He was just really sure of it, that it might throw people off for a while but it would keep them intrigued as well. My experience is that if he’s sure, we should be sure.

  JOSS WHEDON

  When I started doing comic book movies, people actually had to point out to me that Buffy was the X-Men and that I’d been making comic book movies since I started doing television. That everything had been designed for that sort of thing. I studied comic books as much as I studied anything else. And by studied I mean read, and tried to convince my parents that somehow this was going to pay off later so they wouldn’t tear them up. Every time you turn the page is an opportunity to go, “Oh shit!” Every time. And so you always want something wonderful to happen; instead of just having it be good, you want to be up all the time; you want constantly to have those page-turn moments.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  (consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  I liked Batman v Superman. Comic books weren’t a big thing to me, like it was to a lot of people I met on Buffy and Angel who have been real comic book geeks all their lives.

  MARTI NOXON

  At first she seemed like a traditional annoying kid sister, almost stepping out of another TV show, but that was part of the intention. “What is this?” because clearly she isn’t that. She has conflict with her sister, she has real life stuff, but there’s obviously more to her than this little pesky younger sister. So it was fun to introduce this character you’ve sort of seen before, but realizing there’s something really off about her. That was so inherent in who she was, because she had just appeared, so we could play her a little more traditional and let her emerge as a more layered character. Michelle was just an amazing actress.

  DAVID FURY

  I thought it was kind of brilliant, actually, because I knew that the initial reaction would be that we were trying to repopulate the show with younger actors. That’s the thing networks tend to do after a certain amount of years and just go, “Our teenage characters are getting too old; we need to refresh the show.” But that’s not what it really was at all. It was just a clever idea about how to introduce a new character in the show and change the history and memories of all the characters, and then not explain it for five episodes, which was just fantastic. I loved it when Joss pitched it. He pitched it toward the end of the prior season, because he had alluded to her in the earlier episodes, including “Restless.” There were all these clues written about Dawn’s appearance, which was a lot of fun.

  I did get to name Dawn. We had a little brainstorming session where we’re like what do we call Buffy’s sister? We were all coming up with different names and at some point I just hit on Dawn. I was just thinking it seemed like a great name for Summers, Dawn Summers and how the dawn is the thing that chases vampires away. I didn’t know it was also the name of Joss’s sister-in-law, whom I’d never heard of or met.

  The fifth season improbably opened with the introduction of the most famous vampire of all time making his first (and last) appearance in the Buffy universe: Count Vladimir Dracula himself. It was an episode that was challenging for the writers and, ultimately, satisfied few fans as well.

  DAVID FURY

  I can go with a modern Dracula. But it was just the fact that he was somebody else’s creation invading Joss’s creation. I thought it sort of diminished our rules, our universe. It’s, like, “All right, let’s have Batman come in now and face Buffy.” It’s the kind of thing you’d go, “No, you can’t do that, because Batman is another character from another thing.”

  MARTI NOXON

  The only thing remarkable about that episode is that it’s one of the few that we’ve worked on that just wouldn’t break. We had the hardest time breaking that story. Even after it was shot, we had to go back in and reshoot a couple of things. I love the actor who played Dracula and he brought a lot to it, and I thought in many ways it worked, but I still look at it and feel like we didn’t quite hit it.

  DAVID FURY

  I was actually very bothered by that episode. I know that it delighted Joss. It delighted Marti, too, this idea of Buffy facing Dracula. I thought it flew in the face of the mythology of our vampires. It doesn’t play in the Dracula playground. The kind of logic I would apply to it is the thing Joss would say, “Who cares?” Well, I do. I care. We’ve created these rules and I don’t want to break our rules. And Dracula totally broke the rules. We just said, Dracula is some weird anomaly of a vampire, and seeing Xander become Renfield was all fun, but it was an episode I had difficulty embracing. I thought it sort of commented on how Buffy’s universe is kind of fictional.

  When you start introducing another famous fictional character into our world, to me it bursts the bubble of this universe that Joss created and we created with him. Some people enjoyed it very much. I’m just not one of them.

  MARTI NOXON

  It’s hard to bring a character who’s that iconic into your universe; it le
nt itself to camp. At the same time, we were actually trying to do something deeper than that. We were trying to make it emotional and make it have some resonance. But it was a campy situation, and tone wise we weren’t always sure where we were. Also, that character deserves maybe a longer arc. We tried to do a lot with him in one episode and then got rid of him. So we struggled for tone and we were tired coming out of season four.

  STEVE S. DEKNIGHT

  Things seemed to go well. I seemed to mesh OK with the team. The team, they had written some of my favorite stuff. It’s Doug Petrie, Jane Espenson, David Fury, Marti Noxon, and Joss, of course, and Rebecca Rand Kirshner were the writers at the time. I had loved all their stuff that I’d seen so far.

  They invited me to come to the production meeting. Then afterward, Marti Noxon said, “Hey, can you stick around for a few minutes?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I’m just sitting there all by myself thinking it’s going to be they want some kind of rewrite or some scene isn’t working. After about ten minutes, a PA [production assistant] pops up and says, “Hey, Joss and Marti want to see you down on the set.” I go, “Oh, OK. Great.” I go down and it was the Magic Box set, and the heavens opened, the angels sang, and I became part of the show.

  To me, that time I spent on Buffy and Angel was such a defining moment in my career. Not just to start the climb up the ladder, but to get the opportunity to work with Joss and Marti and such a phenomenal group of people. I can’t tell you how much I learned. The great thing about Joss is that he really wanted to train show runners. He had you on set, in editing, in casting, in all the meetings. He really wanted you to know, from the ground up, how to build a show, which a lot of show runners don’t do.

  It was also fantastic because this was the early 2000s. We were shooting here in L.A., both series. That’s another thing I feel very lucky about, is that both of the one-hour dramas that I started out on, we shot Buffy in Santa Monica and we shot Angel on the Paramount lot. To have that, to have it be here, was just such an invaluable experience. It was just absolutely amazing.

  Directing her first episode was Marti Noxon, joining the ranks of writers who stepped behind the camera throughout the series’ run. “Into the Woods” would be the first of two episodes she would direct that season, the second being “Forever,” before her new show-runner duties in the sixth would prevent her from directing additional episodes.

  MARTI NOXON

  It was really a thrill. It was something I’d often dreamt about doing, and, of course, when you go down to set and you think, “Well that wasn’t the way I saw it. It’s good, but it’s not how I saw it.” You know, it’s that little voice in your head that says, “I want to rule the world.” Joss may have talked about doing it. That year I spent quite a bit of time on, oh, getting married. And before that, I was working on a feature that took a bunch of my time. I kept putting it off, but finally the decks were cleared. It was a really amazing, very overwhelming, and exciting experience. In some ways easier than I thought it was going to be, and in some ways much harder. It was also more collaborative. There’s a part of it where you really have to know where you want to go and steer that ship, but on the other hand you also have to be really open and flexible.

  Once I realized that there was always someone there you could turn to, and ask a question to or get help from, it stopped being quite so terrifying. It was still terrifying, because the pace is so fast. It’s like a two-million-dollar school play; there’s no stopping it. We had goals we had to meet every day, and some days it got away from me, but every day I felt like I learned a lot. I also learned what a great crew we had and how wonderful the people we worked with were. It’s different when you come down and see people maybe twice a day, or twice a week, than when you’re with them 24-7 for eight days. I just learned how lucky we were to have the people we did to work with. And the actors were awesome. It was beyond my wildest dreams. I feel like the episode turned out really well. I was also training at the hand of a master; I think Joss has turned out to be a world-class director, and he can teach me everything I need to know to make a movie some day.

  I also wrote the episode. It’s pretty Buffy-Riley-arc heavy. It falls into line with a lot of the shows that I’ve written, which is that it definitely revolves more [around] relationships.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  (author, It’s About Power: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)

  Another reason Buffy fans and scholars were so rabidly drawn to the show is the fact that it was one of the first shows ever to normalize a lesbian relationship, as well as to depict a lesbian sex scene on network television. An important aspect of this relationship that the show stresses in the relationship between Willow and Tara is that Tara is a person, and it is about love between two characters, just like any other relationship on the show, instead of the fact that she is a girl, and that it is a same-sex relationship. This emphasis on love between two people, who both happen to be females, was unprecedented.

  DAVID FURY

  It turned out to be so significant to the fan base that we were presenting this healthy gay relationship for Willow. It’s one of the greatest legacies of the show. I don’t think we thought about it being that. I don’t think we thought we were making some huge statement. I’m not sure Joss was making a huge statement. The fact of the matter is we all had lesbian friends, we knew lesbian couples. It didn’t seem that extreme. It seemed sort of appropriate for Willow at the time. Especially as we saw her in “The Wish” and the whole Wicca, female-empowerment kind of thing, it all seemed to fall in nicely having her falling in love with another woman.

  ANTHONY C. FERRANTE

  (writer, Fangoria magazine)

  It was a very daring thing. And also, keep in mind, Willow was a witch, not a vampire, so her sexual orientation never had a “vampire” sexuality to it, except when they did the alternate-reality-timeline episode. Joss Whedon opened a lot of doors and broke a lot of taboos with how he handled that story line. He really made it feel organic and not a stunt. And in its wake, you’ve seen a much stronger, more organic way of integrating LGBTQ characters in mainstream TV shows, both dramatic and genre.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  Before the series ended, Whedon was able to actually show a sex scene between Willow and Kennedy, which was the first of its kind on network television. Throughout the entire show, all the other heterosexual couples are seen as having sex, and in some, very explicit scenes—Buffy and Riley and then Buffy and Spike—while Willow and Tara’s relationship was forced to be largely subtextual and perceived as innocent. Nevertheless, by the series end, and with the help of UPN, Whedon was able to truly break barriers by his normalization of the relationships between Willow/Tara and Willow/Kennedy, giving fans, scholars, and the gay community another reason to appreciate and study the show.

  JOSS WHEDON

  The network actually called me and said, “You know, we have a lot of gay this year. We’re kind of gayed out. Dawson’s and this other show . . .” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t watch those shows. We’re going to do this thing. It’s what we’re going to do.” And then they were totally fine. They were, like, “Do you have to have the kiss [in “The Body”]?” I was, like, “OK, I’m packing up my office.” I never pulled that out except that one time. I’m, like, “I’m packing up the office” and they were, like, “Nope, it’s cool.”

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  It is tricky, especially because it was very groundbreaking, that relationship. I remember Joss had a lot of battles about letting them kiss with the network and the studio. I completely understand about how that would really hurt the viewers who were emotionally invested. Joss always strongly felt that the story comes first. You’ve got to tell the story that you feel like you want to tell. That was the story he wanted to tell, and I think it was the right story.

  DAVID FURY

  The greatest controversy was us killing Tara in season six. That was a much bi
gger controversy than presenting their relationship. That was interesting. And that was the one where we went, “Really, we’re killing her?” People’s reaction to it was so strong. But the actual relationship was very sweet and romantic. We were all down with it.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  It’s worth mentioning that Joss may have always wanted there to be a gay character on the show. This goes with the theme of Joss supporting the “outcasts” in society, because he’s said before that he felt like one during high school and wanted to create a show that would resonate with those who also feel like outcasts/misfits in high school. I think Willow is a perfect character to experiment with, because she really doesn’t know what she wants or who she is. In high school, she wants to please others, but it feels like she forgets about herself sometimes. She takes orders from others and forgets to assert herself.

  In season four, we have a change, where Willow begins to become independent, and with this independence she understands her sexuality. This all coincides with her becoming a more powerful witch, which is the epitome of feminism and a rejection of the patriarchy. I think Willow’s self-discovery really resonated with the audience, especially the LGBTQ community, because it reflects the struggle of introspection that some people in that community have faced. Willow is an especially important character for this community, because it came at a time when America really was not supportive of the community.

  AMBER BENSON

  (actress, Tara Maclay)

  Joss kept Willow as a lesbian, rather than saying, “OK, now she’s done.” I’m really pleased with how that continued on, that she had somebody else, that she continued to be who she was; she stuck by her guns. She wasn’t just a flip-flopper, you know what I mean? I don’t think anyone realized how intense the reaction to [Tara’s] passing away was going to be. I’m just really pleased that we got to do it. That we got to have that relationship and whether it goes on or it doesn’t go on or it ends up in a comic book somewhere and ends up on a porn video somewhere.