DAVID SIMKINS
So David wrote the outline for episode three, which got approved. Then he wrote the script and delivered it. It was the first script coming in under my tenure, so I was very nervous about it and was already predisposed to be very hypercritical of the draft. I’d never worked with David before, I didn’t know his writing process, and I just wasn’t sure about it, so I gave the draft to a couple of veteran Angel writers on the sly to read and to come to me. I just needed somebody to give me some kind of barometer. The reading I got from them was not positive. It concerned me to the point where I went to Tim and said, “I’m not sure about this. What should I do?” Tim and Joss were up to their eyeballs with Firefly and I felt terrible about bringing them into this question, because it wasn’t your job to do that. It was my job to make that decision, but I thought out of deference to David I needed to go a little higher up the food chain and get an opinion. And the opinion I got was that the script was fine. That’s what I needed to know.
The next day at the office, I got a call from my agent and was told that I was being let go. It was shocking. I was not prepared for that. Joss called me later in the day when he had the time to tell me he was sorry, and he apologized for the situation, but added, “I just don’t have time to teach you how the show works.” I was, like, “OK.” I hung up the phone, packed up my stuff, and left.
DAVID GREENWALT
(consulting producer / cocreator)
I happen to know Simkins before and after that. A great guy and good writer, but not a Joss fit. Or not an Angel fit. I remember he had a few issues with something we were breaking, and he goes to talk to Joss about his issues. Next day, he’s gone. I left and it fell to Jeff Bell’s very capable shoulders. For Simkins, it was an impossible situation. There are just certain people who fit in that Joss mold, in that Joss world, and certain others did not, and never the twain shall meet. Edgar Allan Poe would’ve done really well there. But it was not his fault in any way, shape, or form; they should’ve given it to Jeff in the first place anyway. I don’t know if they went for Simkins because he had more experience running a show or something.
JOSS WHEDON
(executive producer / cocreator, Angel)
David Simkins had a deal with the network. He’s a smart guy, and I thought I’d give him a shot.
DAVID SIMKINS
I honestly think it would have been tough for anyone to come in there and try to figure out how the show worked. I didn’t think it’s about the show mechanics itself; it was about the personalities involved. Those guys were working together for so long [that] they all understood each other, and I just don’t think there was any time. Especially for them. They had a lot going on. It was just easier for them to go on. And once they brought me in out of deference to the studio, then it was OK if they let me go. They tried, right? They were going to do it the way they wanted to. I get that, but I wish I’d listened to my inner warning system at the very beginning. I wished Joss well, hoped the season would be fantastic, and went off and did something else.
ELIZABETH CRAFT
(staff writer, Angel)
Part of the problem, in David Simkins’s defense, is Joss was so busy at the time. It’s not like he had a lot of time to spend with David, you know? You needed someone who could literally know what Joss would like and what he wouldn’t. And coming from the outside, that’s very difficult. Jeff Bell had been there, so it just was so much easier for Jeff to know what kind of things Joss responds to. And from our staff-writer perspective, it was terrifying. We were, like, “Oh my God, we’re going to be swept out.” But in the midst of all this, Joss came in hours after the David Simkins situation went down. He was, like, “Just so you know, everything is fine.” [laughs]
SARA FEIN
(staff writer, Angel)
“You’re not going to be out of here, so you can just relax.” It was actually really thoughtful of him.
JOSS WHEDON
Honestly, who’s going to walk into David Greenwalt’s job and just be able to do it? It’s a nearly impossible task. We’d hoped there would be a fit somewhere, but there wasn’t and we sort of took care of it sooner rather than later, just because we needed to get the process working with the people who do it. It seemed abrupt and I felt bad that I put him in that position. It’s a one-in-fifty chance that there was going to be a match there, like a marrow donor, and it didn’t work.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
With season four, I felt that the Three Stooges—the main men who ran our shows and made it great—all left. David Greenwalt left to do Miracles, and I missed him terribly. My character missed him. Tim Minear wrote great stuff for Cordelia, but then he left to work on Firefly. And Joss had already been busy with other things for a while, although I knew he always had his hand in things, overseeing story lines and deciding what happens when, and the others would make it happen. Those decisions were obviously his and very important and key and brilliant, but without those three, how could the show possibly be the same? How could it not suffer?
TIM MINEAR
(consulting producer, Angel)
I had a hand in breaking stories, pretty consistently through episode seven or eight. Then after I finished working on Firefly, I came back from episode fifteen, which was the last episode with Faith. I wrote that story with Mere Smith, and then did the season finale. When David Greenwalt left, there was much involvement on my part, and then Firefly eventually completely took over and I sort of abandoned them. That was actually a word that was bandied about.
Embracing the show for the first time was actor turned director Sean Astin (The Goonies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy), who helmed season four’s “Soulless,” an Angelus-centric episode.
SEAN ASTIN
(director, “Soulless”)
I played in a friendly card game with a couple of writers—doesn’t that sound like the start of an action movie? I was the actor in the writer card game, so they were really happy to take my money all the time. I was back from New Zealand and shooting Lord of the Rings and was reacclimating to American life with things like this card game. I really wanted to roll my sleeves up and get in the hour-drama directing chair. Basically, I draped myself over David Greenwalt, who would act nice even though he’d taken most of my money, and refused to let him leave our friend’s house until he had promised me something. Anything. And he said, “Well, you can come and shadow Tim Minear, because we don’t just hand out episodes like Chiclets. You have to be part of the show.” So I followed Tim around learning what I needed to.
Angel was in its sweet spot. It was season four. The characters were well established; the way it was photographed had a very distinct look; the actors knew their thing. Basically the show was a well-oiled machine. Or a train going down the tracks and basically for a guest director to step in, it’s, like, “Oh, hey, can you be a conductor for a little bit,” and your job is to not crash the train. Just let the train keep going in the direction it’s going. There are little ways in which you can put your own stamp on it, but you know, you’re not going to come in and reenvision. What I like about television compared to features is the pace. It moves a little faster.
My episode was a bottle show. There was one day out on location, to a house in downtown L.A. where there is a big mass murder. We also did a couple of vamp fights, which I loved. I love shooting the vampire fight sequences and I pretty quickly grasped how the visual effects guys were doing the dusting, when they “poof” a vampire. They hit them with the thing and they just dissolve or whatever. So just working with the stunt guys and working with the visual effects guys, I found that really fun. The rest of the time we were down in the basement of the hotel, with Angelus in a cell. David Boreanaz was great for the first two days, and then at the end of the third day of being in a four-by-four cell, he had this look in his eyes, like, “OK, we need to not be doing this anymore.”
Even with personnel in place, season four was a challe
nge in more ways than just an occasionally bored vampire. Season three had ended on a cliffhanger, with Angel sunk to the bottom of the ocean and Cordelia having ascended to a higher plane, though the rest of Team Angel—with the exception of the lying and duplicitous Connor—have no idea where either of them are. Angel’s disappearance is resolved when Wesley, with a coerced Justine, puts clues together, locates the container, and rescues Angel and returns him to the hotel.
Eventually Cordelia, who had been helplessly watching matters unfold, also finds herself returned to the hotel, but with no memory of anyone. And that is just the start in a season that goes pretty far out there: an apocalypse is rising because of the birth of Connor—who never should have been brought into existence in the first place; the “Beast” for a time blots out the sun (thus giving full rein to vampires and demons); when the world seems to be ending, Cordelia, trying to give Connor something real to believe in, decides to sleep with him, which Angel witnesses; Angel’s soul is taken through mystical means, and he becomes Angelus, in the belief the team can get some clues about the Beast; Angelus escapes; Faith is recruited by Wesley to break out of prison to help capture Angelus (which she does after what can best be described as an acid trip); Cordelia is pregnant, apparently with Connor’s child, and the child’s gestation is happening extremely quickly; Cordelia is manipulating Connor against his father; Willow uses magic to restore Angel’s soul; the Beast is beaten, the sun begins to shine again, and Cordelia gives birth to a goddess named Jasmine (Gina Torres), before slipping into a coma; Jasmine seemingly brings peace and tranquility to everyone, though she hides her true nature (and the fact that she has to eat people to survive). All told, a simply insane year of storytelling, much of it triggered by the fact that in real life actress Charisma Carpenter had become pregnant, and the writers—who had intended on making Cordelia the Big Bad—were put into a corner so that, in essence, both Cordelia and Charisma gave birth to Jasmine.
Probably the most grounded relationship came from the romance between Fred and Gunn that heats up until the episode “Supersymmetry,” where Fred wants revenge against her former professor, who purposely sent her to Pylea. Ultimately, she changes her mind, but Gunn steps in for her. That murder creates an unmovable wedge between them. Gradually, a relationship starts between Fred and Wesley.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
(actor, Charles Gunn)
That change, I thought, was fantastic. I thought it was heartbreaking and fun. The killing of the professor character was probably the hardest scene I shot my entire time on Angel, because it was nearly impossible. There was so much that was not there that was happening. There was so much that had to be created. We had to talk loud even though it was quiet. That’s just something I remember being very difficult.
Every season on Angel I remember specifically there being one day a year that I was afraid to go to work, because I was being asked to do something I didn’t know if I knew how to do. One season I had to juggle in a scene. They offered to get me a stuntman, but up until that point I had done most of my own stunts, and I didn’t want to stop there. I had a week to learn how to juggle and I did and it went great. In season five I had to do a scene with myself, and that was in the White Room with Joss directing.
Again, talking about great notes, he was giving me notes that I don’t know if anybody else would understand, but he and I had a shorthand, I guess, or at least were on the same planet, because I know what he means. We do the scene a couple of times where I was with myself in the White Room, and the last take he said, “Now this time give me a little Laurence Fishburne and a little southern preacher.” I knew what he meant and we did it, and it was great. A lot of the work I’m most proud of is stuff that he’s directed me in.
JOSS WHEDON
What was exciting about season three was that for once we weren’t going to wrap everything up with a bow, which led to something very exciting to me, because I’d never really done cliffhanger endings. And the beginning of every season is always the hardest part of the season, because you really have to gear up and get people involved. Having solved the problems the season before, you have to introduce new ones. On Buffy, every year something is happening in school, but, still, we’re always trying to find our footing. On Angel, season four we came in swinging, because we had already had all of this unresolved, exciting stuff.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I enjoyed the hell out of season four, and I even have some fond memories that aren’t up on screen. Like the first episode where they dredge Angel out of the box at the bottom of the ocean. Originally he was supposed to have a beard he had grown, because he was down there for so long. We did makeup tests of David in the beard and raggedy clothes . . . I really wish I had a copy of this. My first reaction was he looked like the guy from Monty Python’s Flying Circus who’s on screen right before the music starts. And something I’d written in that episode was a whole bit we couldn’t afford where Angel breaks out of the box at the bottom of the sea, and, after struggling through most of the episode, he swims to the top and breaks the water, but it’s daylight and he gets incinerated. Then he realizes he’s still in the box. I always regretted not being to shoot that bit.
JOSS WHEDON
What I came to at the start of season four was, “So that’s why people always do cliffhangers. It makes everything much easier.” As a result, with season four we just went to the mattresses. It was a twisted as you could imagine, and everything about it just excited me.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
It’s weird, my stomach totally turns when I think about the relationship between Connor and Cordelia. I liked him as a person and everything, and I liked working with Vincent, but I didn’t like my character being with him. It’s icky to kiss someone else when you’re pregnant. It’s got to be icky for him, too. But if Angel and Cordelia had gotten together, that would have been a big snore fest, so what else were the writers going to do? . . . But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that whole season was rough. Like I said, I was pregnant, and we were doing these continuous episodes and my belly is growing and I was in the same costume—and it was wow! That was tough.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
The relationship between Angel and Connor was pretty volatile. Surprisingly, Vince and I, we always kind of laughed and said we’d like to do more scenes together where we’re kind of more together, a father-son relationship, and build on that. But then he had to go off and screw my girlfriend. That was all wrong as far as Angel was concerned; that was just kind of weird.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Angel)
What’s interesting is that in season four Charisma was going to become the evil character. Joss had broken the story arc, but about a month before we started, Charisma walked in and goes, “Oh, by the way, I’m pregnant.” Joss almost tripped over. That’s how Gina Torres came to be on the show as Jasmine. That threw a big wrench into Joss’s plans. I thought he was going to cry, because it had to change his whole vision for that season. I know Joss loved having Gina; I think she brought quite a bit to the show. Like I said, she was a life vest because Joss’s vision got fucked up. I think in a way she saved that season.
DAVID FURY
Charisma felt that everyone got angry at her over her pregnancy, and she’s not wrong. I’m not going to say that I had a particular problem with her pregnancy, but the thing with Charisma is she led her life as she wanted to without considering ramifications on her role on the shows. For instance, she wound up getting a bunch of tattoos and one of them was a cross that was on her wrist. And I’m going, “You got a tattoo of a cross on your wrist when you’re on a vampire show, and crosses have an effect on them? We have to hide that now.” It’s little things like that. These seem like little things. By all means she has the right to have a child, and I have no idea what the circumstances were, but it wasn’t timed well. It wasn’t timed to help us with production and allow us to write around it.
CHARISMA CARPE
NTER
My pregnancy in season four, that was a fucking mess. That whole season I wish I could undo or redo; that was kind of when the wheels went off. They didn’t know I was pregnant; for whatever reason, over the summer I wasn’t able to reach Joss to tell him. Then finally my agent told Kelly Manners and I got a call from Joss. The plan for the character was to go a different way, and then with the pregnancy news it was such a wrench that it changed everything. He said, “I have to change the entire season!” Now I don’t know how much of that was just him being pissed off, disappointment, or if it genuinely was, “Oh, fuck,” because there are lots of times where you just work with someone being pregnant or around it—you stand behind a desk or whatever. Maybe for my character, who was kind of sexy and was never behind a counter, and wearing midriffs and tank tops, maybe that just didn’t work.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred)
That wasn’t my favorite story line, but there are a lot of pieces in that I really like, like when Gina was on. You know, that was when Charisma was not sure if she was coming back, so I think the story kind of came with them figuring out what she was going to do. She was pregnant, so that was kind of a surprise, trying to work in this whole thing. That probably wasn’t the original master plan for the show. It was sort of determined by circumstances. They made it work.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I honestly have compassion, because I can’t imagine being a storyteller and having a vision and working so hard on that idea and then, you know, the actor is throwing you for a loop and you have to adjust accordingly. I didn’t really show for the first six months, but I was definitely working a lot of hours and having some side effects, so it became a concern, but, like I said, I have compassion for them and compassion for myself as well. I was in my thirties and had been with my partner for a really long time, had gotten pregnant, so that is my life and a forever thing. Acting is what I did for a living, so for me I was really torn. Not on whether or not to keep the baby, of course, but the fact that it was not greeted as good news. That the people I’d spent seven years with were left feeling like they were in a bind. And I’m such a people pleaser and spent so much time trying to do my best, because I’m not the smartest on set and it’s very difficult for me to memorize lines and I had to work twice as hard as everyone else. So with that need to please, and the fact that nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, it was unfortunate that it was seen in that way. And for it to have ultimately felt like a choice or sacrifice for anyone, that the truth is you can’t have it all, was disappointing and a really big life lesson. And also it was difficult to be in the moment of being pregnant and to enjoy that process, because for the first six months I worked. And in the last trimester we had to make concessions for the schedule. Well, it is what it is, and I really think it affected my relationships with those people in a way. Of course, my son is worth it, but there’s a sadness there as well that I’ll probably always carry about that time.
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