Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  DAVID GREENWALT

  I love Christian. I actually wanted to build a show around him, an entirely other show. Also, Christian can sing, as you know. I actually wrote a couple of songs he sang in the show, which was part of the fun in working with Joss—we could do stuff like that. I really dug him and his character. We had that nightclub where you could sing to reveal yourself, and one of my favorite things was Angel listening to Christian and saying, “He’s not that good,” as Cordy is taken by his singing. A great guy. I was very intrigued by the fact that he was a pretty self-taught actor. He would stay home from school, watch TV, and just practice acting while watching movies.

  JOSS WHEDON

  Season one was definitely figuring out what the heck the show was going to be. Actually, all of the seasons have been about that, but in season one we really came in with a mission statement of what we referred to as “Touched by an Equalizer.” We used a lot of guest stars and a lot of stand-alone stories, but really figured out about halfway through the season that we couldn’t care less about those things. We were more interested in the characters—when Angel turned into Angelus and Faith turned up in the next episode, those were really the best shows of the season, and they were the first ones that absolutely concentrated only on our characters. We realized that that was the paradigm.

  The show would be coming from emotion and from the evolution of the characters we had not been getting from the monster of the week. That discovery about the show also led to the decision that we had to increase our ensemble—that this was not going to be a stand-alone show or a Wiseguy-like show with only three characters. We were gong to have to mix things up a bit, so we got J. August Richards as Charles Gunn and we did something we’d never done before: we put him in for a little arc to see if he could stand as a regular in season two, and, of course, he did.

  MARTI NOXON

  Comparing the two series, one of them, Buffy, was definitely coming from a young woman’s perspective, and the other was definitely a more masculine point of view and a more masculine tone. The Angel show, especially in the beginning, had more of a noir flavor, a bit of the private eye genre, which we were twisting a little bit. We were still trying to draw the same kind of metaphors: the way that, on Buffy, we would use moments to kind of metaphorize—that’s a Marti word, by the way—the situation that teenagers and young people encounter. Certainly on Angel the monsters were metaphors, too, but for a slightly older audience.

  DAVID BOREANAZ

  Getting the show off the ground was a lot of hard work, and a lot of frustration and a lot of great energy and a lot of crazy stuff happening in my life. I was just really bombarded with tons of stuff and didn’t know what was going to happen. You were kind of on the pulse of anxious anxiety and that energy of kind of grasping it and letting it slip away. It was really kind of intriguing and fresh.

  JOSS WHEDON

  At the end of season one, we realized that there were still so much that these people could go through—so many life experiences. And because we had the added benefit of being a fantasy show, we were in arenas where it didn’t feel like there was any sort of sameness or fear of repetition of ideas.

  In the season finale, the office building housing Angel Investigations was destroyed, which was precipitated on camera by Wolfram and Hart and behind the scenes by the show’s unhappy crew.

  TIM MINEAR

  The destruction of the Angel Investigations office was done for a very pragmatic reason: the set was incredibly hard to shoot in. It looked cool, but it was hard to move the camera around. It was hard to stage scenes on that set, so that’s why we blew it up.

  STUART BLATT

  It was limiting, especially as the cast was growing in size. There was very little room to move around, so it was great looking, but it had worn out its welcome at the end of the season. So we built a whole episode around the building exploding and them having to flee, which felt like a fitting end to it.

  TIM MINEAR

  We just got tired of it, which is why we went to the hotel in season two, because we wanted something that was big and expansive and would be easy to shoot in. We went from little cavernous rooms with that middle elevator, that sort of storefront feel, to something that was grand.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  It was the last night of shooting and David Greenwalt’s directing. The front of Angel Investigations was actually a wall, stage fifteen, I believe. We had done everything with the studio and cleared what we were doing.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  We were going to blow up the exterior of Angel Investigations. First off, it’s our first year, which was on the Paramount lot with an exterior set. It wasn’t on a sound stage. Well, we blew the hell out of that thing, which was fun, because it was a good ending, too. Not that everything went smoothly.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  Everybody signed off on it. As you can recall, that was a pretty massive explosion. I see the parked cars; they have planks under them. I go up to my effects man, who I don’t realize is dripping wet, and I go, “Don’t tell me you put rubber cement on these fucking cars.” I’m madder than hell. He goes, “Kelly, in a minute you’re not going to care,” and when we blew that, it blew a water main and flooded the set of another Fox show. Well, he was right. I didn’t care about the rubber cement on the cars after that.

  OUT OF THE PAST

  “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do . . .”

  By the time Angel had gone into its second season and Buffy the Vampire Slayer into its fifth, the secret was out and the Whedonverse had become a darling of the critics and certainly the audience. Both shows were considered to represent a new wave in the television medium—despite appearing on the relatively low-rated WB network—where the show runners were becoming almost as famous as their creations, and where storytelling was becoming bolder, riskier.

  For season two of Angel, David Greenwalt remained primary show runner, though Joss Whedon was executive producer as well; Marti Noxon was consulting producer, with some scripts written by Buffy’s Jane Espenson, Douglas Petrie, and David Fury. Tim Minear became co–executive producer midseason, Mere Smith moved from script coordinator to staff writer, Jim Kouf became a consulting producer, and Shawn Ryan joined the staff.

  The season kicked off with an episode called “Judgment,” in which Angel kills the wrong demon—a protector in its own right—and finds himself having to protect the demon’s charge. For the series, it was deemed an important installment. The same could be said for “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” which was born out of the fact that the decision was made to change the home base for Angel Investigations in season two from an office setting to a hotel. The latter was first seen, in dilapidated condition, in “Judgment” and followed up by this episode in which Angel, despite his first impulse to ignore the situation, comes to the aid of a young woman in the 1950s and ends up being “murdered” for his troubles by a McCarthyesque mob of people being manipulated by the paranoia demon Thesulac. In the present, after freeing the one person who still lived there—the now elderly woman he had tried to help, whose guilt kept her a prisoner for all those years—and dispatching the demon, Angel decides to buy the hotel and turn it into his new base of operations.

  TIM MINEAR

  (co–executive producer, Angel)

  First episodes back are always difficult; it’s more or less a mission statement. You want an audience to start the show off fresh and get what the show is. It had all of the elements that were required. It introduced everybody again, and it demonstrated that this is an action show with really, in many ways, a traditional action hero lead and what his relationship was to the people around him. It also dropped some hints as to the coming, continuing story. I thought it worked. I liked that Angel screwed up. We also felt that ending the first season with the “Pinocchio’s going to be a real boy some day” prophecy was something we had to complicate. Which is really the idea behind the episode in terms of the series. On
ce there’s a prophecy that everything is going to work out, it sort of takes the tension out of the story that you’re telling. So what Angel learned in that episode is that it was not about the prophecy, it’s not about the end of the tunnel, it’s about the tunnel and the journey through it. Nothing is assured, which is another thing we kept trying to hit in the stories we told over season two. Something that appears to be good news could turn out to be terrible news. Something that appeared to be bad news could be something good.

  In season two, we also really wanted to delve in to Angel’s mythology. It was a bit of a trick to create the mythology for this show, and what I would always do is go back to Buffy episodes where there had been a little bit of his back story and always try to do the math so that it would make sense. You may not have suspected that he lived in a hotel in the 1950s in Los Angeles, because the first time you saw him on Buffy he was in the ‘90s when he showed up at her high school with Whistler. So I was telling the story from before he was a vampire to after he got reinsouled by the gypsy curse, to his trying to get back together with Darla when he had a soul, to his kind of wandering the Earth. You know, he’s not always going to be living on the street. Sometimes he’s going to be living in a hotel. The episode in the hotel—“Are You Now or Have You Ever Been”—was to say there was a part of him that tried to be a hero, who tried to help, and when it went wrong and he was disappointed by the people one more time, that sort of sent him down a darker path until he found his mission fifty years later.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  (executive producer / cocreator, Angel)

  There’s no denying that Angel grew out of Buffy, but when we spun the show off originally, our notion was this will be a really dark, gritty urban show, and then we got really bored with that, because the sets were ugly and brown and stuff. That’s why we had to blow that office up the first year. So it was always clearly, to me, its own show.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  (producer, Angel)

  I don’t think Joss was ever happy with the first set we put up, Angel Investigations, so he thought it would be much more interesting to have more space to roam around in and spend time in, and that was the purpose of the hotel set. And it was a gorgeous set. The exterior played on a condo in West L.A. I don’t remember what street it’s on. No matter where you pointed the camera, there was a great look. That’s my memory of that set. In season five when we changed the location to a law firm, I really shit.

  STUART BLATT

  (production designer, Angel)

  I remember a lot of sets over those five years, but the hotel was a biggie and a joy. One of the great things with Joss and David Greenwalt is that they gave me and us pretty much carte blanche once they signed off on something. “OK, I see where you’re headed with this,” and they let us take the reins and run with it. One of the great things about the hotel is that for the exterior we used the Los Altos Apartments on Wilshire Boulevard, with the garden in front of that, and then we elaborated. We built a beautiful lobby and beautiful garden outside and the upstairs stairwell. We had elevators in there that didn’t work, but then we built a whole series of upstairs hallways, literally very reminiscent of Barton Fink. We were motivated by the spookiness of that, and how the walls would come alive with the old wallpaper and carpeting.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  The hotel was actually more appropriate than the first year’s thing, which was meant to be more like a private eye, film noir kind of L.A. thing to make it look different than Buffy. Angel is more Raymond Chandler than Buffy. Also, for me, I grew up in the small-hotel business, so I naturally took to that. And it just made more sense; you could have a lot more people and it still functioned kind of as an office for people to come to and look for him and get cases and stuff. It just looked a lot cooler to me.

  IAN WOOLF

  (first assistant director, Angel)

  Changing to the hotel was certainly a learning curve for all of us, because it was a completely new lighting rig—everything was new so everybody had to relearn. People get sort of comfortable in a standing set. You have to learn how to light it. Once you do that, you can light it fast, because you’re there all the time. Then when you start to build a whole new permanent set like that, again, it’s a bit of a learning curve for everybody, from the cameraman on down. Just how do you get into the set? Where do you stage everybody and what’s going to be safe for picture and all that?

  DAVID FURY

  (writer, Angel)

  We found the original office was just kind of dull and dark and difficult to shoot in the way it was designed. The openness and idea of living in a hotel seemed more appealing, much more cavernous, more depth. From filmmaking points of view, the directors didn’t love the old space, so getting a little bit more grandeur in the hotel provided the opportunity for all sorts of rooms, ballrooms, or individual hotel rooms, or office. They just made the decision that they wanted something more inviting for the audience. And for the network, the literal darkness of the show was always an issue, and this was designed to help with that. We had to keep explaining to them it’s a vampire show; they only go out at night. I know we’re also dealing with demons, but when you’re dealing with Angel and your hero is a vampire, you can only operate at night. It’s going to be dark. But we wanted to get some light, and that’s where the hotel came from.

  STUART BLATT

  The episode “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been” was one of the most fun episodes, because we got to really explore the hotel, and we built a fantastically huge basement for it.

  TIM MINEAR

  We wanted something that had some scope to it, that was different. Actually it was Rebecca Rand Kirshner, a writer on Buffy, who suggested an abandoned old Hollywood hotel, and that just clicked with us. And at the end of “Have You Been,” Wesley says, “You know better than anyone that this is a house of evil,” and Angel says, “Not anymore,” because he’s exorcised the demon from this place. I think the hotel represents Angel himself. If you take the scene at the end of the episode and apply the conversation that Wesley is having with Angel, I think the metaphor is pretty clear. This is a place that has seen the worst side of demonic influence as well as the worst side of human action, and Angel is saying that that has changed. So the hotel represents him, and the idea of coming into a place that was once a house of evil and making it a force for good is a metaphor for Angel on the show. And also just a really cool place to shoot.

  In the season one episode “War Zone,” J. August Richards was introduced as Charles Gunn, leader of a street gang that spends its evenings hunting vampires. In the end, Gunn and Angel form an uneasy alliance, which leads to the character becoming a series regular in season two and, gradually, a part of Team Angel. More recently, the actor, born August 28, 1973, has starred on such series as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (he played Deathlok) and Notorious.

  J. AUGUST RICHARDS

  (actor, Charles Gunn)

  My uncle from the time I was a little boy always was amazed by me, because he didn’t understand how I was born knowing what I wanted to do. Probably before I knew what an actor was, I knew that I wanted to be inside the television. I thought that you literally could open up the back and get in it. It wasn’t something I had to figure out I wanted to do. It’s just who I am.

  I was really supported by my parents to explore anything that I wanted to, and encouraged by them as well. That was ninety percent of it. I think also, not to sound arrogant or anything, but I was born with a certain ingenuity. My first big job was on The Cosby Show. The way I did that was I noticed on every TV show that I was watching at that time that they had these lists at the beginning and end of the show, and I gathered that those were the people who helped put it together. I kept noticing something called a casting director, and assumed that meant that person was in charge of putting people on the show, so I wrote down his name because I felt like I belonged on The Cosby Show. I called his office and [I told] the person that answered the phone . . . that
I wanted to be on the show, and she said, “You and everybody else,” and hung up on me. Then I called back and asked for the casting director by name. I told her my name, and he picked up the phone. I explained that I wanted to be on The Cosby Show. He was, like, “Do you have an agent?” “What’s that?” “That’s who would get you on The Cosby Show. Get an agent.” “How do I get an agent?” He was kind and patient enough to talk me through the process.”

  That same casting director was a speaker at a New York acting camp that Richards attended, where he caught his attention, which eventually led to that role on The Cosby Show.

  J. AUGUST RICHARDS

  Obviously, I’ve done a lot of this genre, and I do honestly enjoy it. I feel like my theater training comes in extremely handy in this world, because when I was in theater school we’d have to find a way to personalize the experience of people who lived way in the past, whether that was Chekhov or Shakespeare or Gibson. We’d have to find a way to learn about what was going on in the world at that time and find a way to personalize it and make it mean something to ourselves. I’m very drawn to that, and in this world you have to do the same thing. Also as an actor, I have a lot more of a fighting chance in this world, because it’s not easy to make the circumstances of these characters personal. I know that the genre is something I love to do, so I feel like when it comes down to the auditioning process, I have a fighting chance, because oftentimes you have to do scenes with a green screen or you have to be looking at a dot and imagine that it is a massive outer space being, and that work is what I love to do.

  TIM MINEAR

  The idea behind Gunn is that Gary Campbell, a freelancer, came in and pitched the idea of these street kids battling vampires that nobody notices. That was sort of the genesis of that idea. I know that Joss wanted to introduce another guy who would be very different from Wesley and also very different from Angel. Gunn is a character that shoots from the hip. He’s a little bit hardened by his experience, and he doesn’t have any sympathy for people who act like victims.