Slayers and Vampires
Page 34
DAVID FURY
We had to scramble and I had to work with Marti Noxon on another story, which became “Lonely Heart.” It did include Kate Lockley, but it was very different. So we turned out another version of the second episode and Marti was a huge help on it. She graciously allowed me to take solo credit. The shutdown for the darkness of the script needed to go lighter and the show did veer a little more into Buffy territory. It lightened up a bit, but it always remained a darker version of Buffy. We had to earn it, I guess. The second episode was most scary to them because it was so dark, but the show went to some very dark places later.
TIM MINEAR
At the time, the Internet ran rampant with rumors that the WB had shut down the show for retooling. You can’t really call it a shutdown, because we hadn’t really started. We just pushed back the shoot date for the first episode a week or two. It’s not like alarms went off and we had to pull the plug on everything. I read where people were saying the network freaked and they told us to shut down, and that’s not true at all. We were still creating what the idea of the show was going to be, and basically we decided to rethink the first episode. The other thing people didn’t realize is that a lot of the other episodes we’d done that first year were written earlier and did not change significantly. It was really that first episode where we went back, rethought it, and were lucky we had the luxury to do that.
DAVID FURY
This is obviously true of a lot of shows, but I think it’s true of Joss organically that these shows have to grow into themselves. A lot of shows aren’t allowed to. So he had that wonderful benefit from the WB at the time that the shows were able to find themselves; they weren’t quick to just say, “You know what? It’s not gelling, so we’re going to take it off the air.” Because it’s not like either show lit up the ratings. It never did. It was more of a cult phenomenon. It was just highly regarded by critics. Of course, it had some attractive people who got to be on the covers of magazines, but both series took some time to find themselves.
KELLY A. MANNERS
It was just a retooling of the show. I don’t think it was just the network that shut us down. I think Joss Whedon thought, “You know what? This isn’t the way I really want to take this show,” so I think Joss went to the network and said, “Hey, let me have a couple of weeks to really figure out which direction I want to take this in.” They rebuilt the story arc and it was much better than what we had for the first thirteen, yet we could use the material we had previously shot, so it wasn’t going to be cost prohibitive. It was just the cost of carrying a few people. It was a really important time for the show.
DAVID FURY
Early on, there was always a frustration of, “I don’t know what this show is. I don’t know what I’m doing. How do we come up with a story?” Whereas Buffy was, like, “We had so many avenues to pull from,” but what’s the universal truth in Angel? There was no truth of a private detective in L.A. everyone can relate to. It was a harder show to write. That could be frustrating.
JOSS WHEDON
The shutdown really didn’t mean anything except that we took a little time to rewrite the second story, because the second episode is really pretty important in terms of a mission statement. It tells you where the thing is really going, because you throw everything you can into a pilot and that’s fine. Hopefully it tells you what the show is, but with the second one you get a sense of where the show’s really going; these are the elements they took from the pilot and will be continuing with. It wasn’t, like, “Oh my God, it’s the end of the world.” It was the network telling us that we needed to make an adjustment, and David Greenwalt and I saying, “Gee, we wished we disagreed with you.” In truth, it helped us a lot. I’ll always take a note if it’s a good one.
When any series is gestating, it falls to the show runner to bring together the writing staff capable of bringing the vision to life. In its earliest conceptual stages, it was believed that the staff of Buffy would be able to handle all the script writing for Angel, but this proved untenable, and it proved necessary to bring on additional writers for the spin-off. (Whedon attempted the same thing with Firefly, initially planning to use the writers from Buffy and Angel to write all the episodes until realizing this, too, was untenable.)
In the first year, the writing staff included, from Buffy, Jane Espenson, Douglas Petrie, David Fury, and Marti Noxon, in addition to Whedon and Greenwalt. New to Mutant Enemy was producer Tracey Stern, staff writer Jeannine Renshaw, and consulting producer Howard Gordon (who had served in a similar position during Buffy’s second season). One of those new hires, and in hindsight the greatest strength Whedon and Greenwalt could have found, was writer Tim Minear, who in many ways came to define the voice of Angel.
Born in New York City on October 29, 1963, Minear, before joining the staff of Angel, wrote for Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, The X-Files, and Strange World. He worked on Firefly alongside Joss Whedon, and subsequent to Angel his writer/producer credits include Wonderfalls, The Inside, Drive, Dollhouse, Terriers, The Chicago Code, and American Horror Story.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Angel)
If I can take credit for anything, it’s introducing Tim Minear to Joss. I knew Tim and I knew right away that he would be able to speak Joss’s vernacular. It was almost like setting two people on a date; you just had a feeling. This was Tim’s idiom, his voice. Or he would be able to complement Joss’s voice.
TIM MINEAR
I was at The X-Files and I was very unhappy. It was kind of be careful what you wish for sort of thing. I had written an X-Files spec, and that’s what got me on that show. I was there for a year, and it wasn’t great. The people were great, just not the experience. I used to hang out with Kim Metcalf, who was an assistant to Ken Horton at Millennium. I was sort of whining about feeling underused or whatever, and at some point Kim says, “I want to show you something,” and she took me into the conference room of Millennium and put in a videotape. It was the Buffy episode “Surprise.” I didn’t really know what it was. What she said to me was, “You shouldn’t be here. You should be working with Joss Whedon.” That was probably two years before I ever ended up at Mutant Enemy. That was literally my first exposure to Buffy, from somebody who was telling me that I should be working with Joss, whom I didn’t know. She was weirdly prescient about that. Then everybody knows the tale that I was working with Howard Gordon on Strange World after I left The X-Files. I was called by my agent that I had a meeting with David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon and that I should go in and pitch some Buffy ideas.
I hadn’t really watched any Buffy, save for the brief moment in Kim’s office. I borrowed a bunch of videotapes of episodes and kind of crammed on them. I think I came up with four or six pretty-well-worked-out pitches, at least three of them were really well worked out. I pitched close-ended episodes, like Xander loses his virginity because Druids are coming to Sunnydale and they’re looking for a virgin sacrifice. Literally, if he doesn’t lose his virginity, it’s a matter of life and death. That seemed like what it feels like when you’re a boy in high school, and so it seemed to me that it was taking a metaphor of what he was doing with horror and making it about the stages of growing up. I think that’s what he responded to in terms of, “Boy, this guy gets it. It’s too bad he’s so angry that I can’t be around him.”
See, when I had met with Joss and David and pitched them these ideas, Joss subsequently said they were the best pitches he had ever heard but that he found me to be the angriest man he’d ever met and didn’t think he’d ever be able to be in a room with me.
DAVID GREENWALT
Tim Minear came to Angel, and Tim is one of the best writers I’ve ever worked with. Also a very funny, sarcastic guy. To be insulted by him is a pleasure, you know? As a matter of fact, the first year of Angel he’s sitting around the table of all the writers and he wasn’t very friendly. They were saying, “Why aren’t you more friendly? Why don’t you get
to be friends with us and go out with us?” He says, “Well, none of you will be here next year. Why would I do that?”
TIM MINEAR
I probably seemed angry because I was coming off of a not great year at The X-Files. I think they maybe asked me how it went and I may have told them. Joss just didn’t know how to take me. Later, when Angel got spun off, Greenwalt, who I guess had been sufficiently impressed with me in the room, went back to Joss and said, “Can I hire him for Angel?” Joss was, like, “Well, it’s your show. You’re the one running it, so it’s up to you, but I can’t be in a room with him.” So that was my start at Mutant Enemy.
David Greenwalt contacted Minear’s agent to see about hiring him for the show, but Minear turned him down. Five times.
TIM MINEAR
I was pretty young at the time. You have to understand, I went from Lois and Clark, which was my first real job, to The X-Files. I was there for a year and they were actually going to pick up my option and bring me back for another year. I think I was the first person in the history of The X-Files to say, “Nah, I don’t want to.” It’s not like I was being offered something else; I just knew that I wasn’t happy and that I could probably do better someplace else. I had no fear that I would end up not getting work, which was probably naive of me at the time. So I took a vacation, then worked with Howard Gordon on Strange World. At the time, there was actually a possibility of doing a Tim Burton syndicated show, Lost in Oz, and I was supposed to meet with him in London.
Howard Gordon actually said to me, “Your problem is that you’re usually the smartest person in the room. You need to be in a place where you’re not. You need to be with Joss, because he’s smarter than you and you can actually learn something.” So my agent and Howard were telling me to take Angel. This was a show that was going to go for sure, and it was a spin-off of not just a good show—Buffy—but an important show that was kind of right in the zeitgeist of what was going on. So I said yes.
By that time, I’d started becoming more familiar with Buffy. Angel had already turned evil. I think all of that stuff was around the time that television critics were writing about the most subversive television is being made on this kids’ network, the WB. It talked about Buffy and how people thought this was some campy horror thing. They thought of Scooby-Doo, literally. They were completely missing the subversive nature of this, as Joss was saying, in that format. It wasn’t camp. In fact, it was drama. It was, in fact, great drama.
HOWARD GORDON
I said to him, “Tim, I promise you that this is going to be a long-term and incredibly productive relationship.” I sort of threw myself under the bus and said, “It probably won’t be for me, but I know your voice and you’re going to learn stuff here and become”—I may have used the phrase—“Crown Prince.” I just felt it was going to be a good match, so I encouraged him. I said he would thrive there, and he did.
JOSE MOLINA
Because of his difficulties with the voice, Howard was a little hesitant to do it, but he was friends with David Greenwalt, who was running Angel, so the stars kind of aligned for him to go over there as part of his deal at 20th. From day one, before the pilot was even shot, when it was just a script, he went on board as consultant on Angel and I went with him. I desperately wanted the staff writer job on that first season, and one of the things that I still give Howard shit about is that he never submitted me for that job. Like, “C’mon, man, you said you couldn’t tell my voice apart from theirs—let me have that gig.”
DAVID GREENWALT
At the time, Joss was really running two shows. I certainly was running Angel and didn’t do all that much at Buffy, but I was always fascinated by what was going on there and what was happening to Buffy. But people like Marti Noxon, David Fury, and Doug Petrie were pretty involved with Angel, particularly in the early year or two.
JOSE MOLINA
I think Joss knew the show was still finding itself. The first half of the first season was pretty uneven; toward the end, Tim Minear was writing a little bit more and Tim would become the voice of the show. Joss let it grow, but the staff that they had on season one was a very small staff. Joss wanted to have the Buffy writers write Angel’s scripts, which is something that he would try again later when Firefly started. He didn’t want to hire a staff; he wanted the Buffy and Angel writers to write all those. Needless to say, he was wrong. But because the Angel staff was so small and because he was split between two shows, nobody quite had a handle on what made the show work.
TIM MINEAR
I have to say that the first several months of working on Angel were horrible. Buffy was going into its third or fourth year, writers were brought in on Angel, and yet they did the easiest thing they could: they had the Buffy staff write the first batch of episodes. It made sense, but we felt like we were the red-headed stepchildren at Angel. We were completely shut out. They had already started working on stories for the show and scripts with some of the Buffy writers, which in truth made perfect sense. This was a group of writers that Joss and David had taken years to cast, to find out who worked and who didn’t. By the time Angel started up, you had the varsity version of the Buffy writers’ room. They felt, David and Joss, more comfortable, I think, working with those people that they’d been working with for years and that they knew as opposed to this new group.
DAVID GREENWALT
I know the writers were very pissed off. We used to go to Joss’s house and watch Buffy occasionally live and you couldn’t speak during the show, which I wish people would follow now. He invited all these people to the Angel premiere, but he didn’t invite any of the Angel writers. He didn’t do it on purpose, but people were insulted they weren’t invited.
TIM MINEAR
The new group started being worked in a little bit. We would meet, we would talk about stories, and we would pitch ideas. I pitched something . . . actually, maybe Joss and David pitched the idea of a vampire that Angel made coming back to haunt him. That was the first thing I wrote, which was “Somnambulist.” The idea was originally called “The Killer I Created.” I took the idea, wrote an outline, then wrote a script, and Joss really liked it. Now what was interesting is [that] even though each of the new writers is working on a script, those were not the priority scripts. In fact, I think “Somnambulist” was like episode nine or ten of the first season, but it was the very first thing I wrote. It’s not the first thing even with my name on it. We wrote these scripts and put them in the bank. By the time we got around to shooting those scripts, the show had sort of found its identity and they had to be revised.
An important moment in Minear’s career on the show occurred when a script came in that simply didn’t work and he was asked to rewrite it. After that, he started getting more responsibility, including being asked to write the script for “Hero” with Howard Gordon and turn it around in twenty-four hours. In the script, Angel’s colleague and friend, the half demon Doyle, dies. The script nearly severed Minear’s relationship with Mutant Enemy because Greenwalt expressed his opinion that half the script was “pretty good” and the other half suitable for “wip[ing] his ass with.”
TIM MINEAR
I was pretty clear with my response: “When you wipe your ass with it, keep the brads in.” And then I went to my office and started to pack up my stuff, which wasn’t much. I wasn’t going to be talked to that way, particularly when I hadn’t slept in two days because of that script. I simply decided that I wasn’t going to stay for a second in a place where I wasn’t appreciated, not that I expected to be treated with kid gloves.
DAVID GREENWALT
Tim and Howard Gordon wrote a very early script together, and I insulted the script. It needed some work. Howard had the same experience on Angel that I did on X-Files in that it wasn’t really in his wheelhouse, so we kind of helped each other on each other’s shows. Anyway, I insulted this script and I was a little more insulting in those days. I’m back in my office, and my assistant comes in and he says, “You might wan
t to talk to Tim Minear.” I said, “Why would I talk to him?” He says, “Because he’s packing up his office and he’s leaving.” I went and actually begged him not to go.
TIM MINEAR
That night I really thought about what had happened and pretty much had a panic attack. I thought, “I really said some things to my boss today and he’s probably stewing right now and is going to fire me tomorrow.” But that’s not what happened. The next day he was incredibly nice to me. He said, “Some of the things you said to me were great. Do you know who my best writer is here?” I said, “Yeah, it’s goddamned me! You don’t treat me that way, which is why I’m leaving.” He said, “Don’t.” Then he added, “They were going to pick up your option on The X-Files, which is a very high-profile show.” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t care.” “There’s a lot of money to be made there.” “The two things I don’t care about is the prestige and the money.” He said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.” After that we were the best of friends, and I think Joss really respected that, too. When people see that you’re not afraid to leave, they don’t want you to.
DAVID GREENWALT
Tim and I became fast friends. Tim would turn in scripts that were just so beautiful. I’d tell him, “This is a really good script,” and he says, “It better be, because it’s all I have.” He would stay up writing night after night after night. Another really hard worker—and I have tried to work with him ever since, but the son of a bitch has belonged to Fox all these years. Every show I’ve ever done since, I couldn’t get him.