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 twelve episodes, which would debut mid-season 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, a historic moment forever.

Subsequent episodes included “Teacher’s Pet,” about a substitute teacher who is apparently infatuated with Xander, but is revealed to be 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.

HARRY GROENER

(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)

I auditioned for the role of the first principal [Robert Flutie] and there’s a memorial bust of him right outside the cafeteria door on set, so every time in rehearsal when we passed the bust I said, “That could have been me.”

ARMIN SHIMERMAN

Many months later, my agent called and said there is a straight offer for you for this new principal, Principal Snyder. I said to the agent, “Well, is this a recurring character?” And they said yes. I said, “Listen, you know that I have a day job. I do Star Trek on a regular basis.” And they said to me that they’re going to rotate principals on a regular basis. They’re going to kill them off and I said OK. Maybe it’ll be two or three episodes and that’s it. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was the audition that got me Snyder or it was that two-minute talk in what I later learned was the writers’ room.

My life is about that. About just turning left when I should have turned right and vice versa. It’s possible that that conversation in that room was more influential than the reading I gave. I was sorry that Kenny lost the job but I was very grateful for the role. Because they had told me that principals were going to be killed off on a regular basis, I was enormously surprised for the next three years that I was still there. When they’d come to the end of a season, I would always go to the back page first of the script and say, “Well, how do they kill me off?” And had been surprised for years that I was still there.

DAVID GREENWALT

The deal they made for me to go to Buffy was only for twelve episodes ordered and it was like, “Go help this guy Joss get his little show off the ground, and then your reward will be to go to The X-Files.” By the way, I admired the shit out of X-Files, but I could not write it to save my life. At the end of these twelve episodes, it was a big love fest with Joss and most of the actors, and there’s a picture where Joss went around with all the actors and one of the producers basically looking very pleadingly into the camera and saying, “David, please don’t go.”

I went to The X-Files while we were waiting to see if Buffy would be picked up, and I spent about a month or two there. Howard Gordon was kind of my savior there. I watched eighty-four of them in a row. I was so amazed. What a piece of work. X-Files set the bar for TV production and excellence. They reshot whatever they didn’t like before they were a big hit. They had this high level of production and Chris Carter is very good at writing this kind of stuff. That’s not me. I couldn’t get the emotional connection. It was always about, “Oh, it’s an alien, no it’s bees, it’s small pox, it’s this thing, that thing. It’s nothing.” I went running back to Buffy after about two months on The X-Files. My real reward was working with Joss all those years.

In the second season Howard Gordon briefly became a part of the Buffy staff as consulting producer, joined by his assistant, Jose Molina, who himself would eventually become a story editor on Firefly for Whedon, and went on to much success on a series of popular shows, among them The Vampire Diaries, Castle, Agent Carter, and the Amazon iteration of The Tick, and who would cohost the screenwriting podcast Children of Tendu.

That second season also saw the arrival of husband and wife writing team of David Fury and Elin Hampton (though of the two only Fury—who had previously worked on The Jackie Thomas Show, Dream On, and Life’s Work—would ultimately stay with the show, eventually rising to the rank of co–executive producer over subsequent years). Marti Noxon joined as a writer and became story editor mid-season, also rising over the years to become an executive producer and show runner for seasons six and seven. And, in season three, The Onion’s Dan Vebber joined as a staff writer, later rising to a co–executive producer on such popular series as Futurama, American Dad, and The Simpsons.

JOSE MOLINA

I was a huge X-Files fan, which is how I came to work as Howard Gordon’s assistant in the summer of 1997. I was working as a PA at Warner Brothers feature animation, which is the division that produced Space Jam and Quest for Camelot. Right as it became defunct, they produced The Iron Giant. So I worked on Iron Giant technically for a heartbeat. But when Quest came out and it didn’t do anything, they essentially curtailed the division down to the very bare essentials. So, of course, what’s the first salary that has to go? That fat PA salary has to go and they saved four hundred bucks a week by not paying me. Coincidentally, though, the head of the department, whom I really liked, was Howard Gordon’s sister. I sent out two résumés cold and got an interview with Howard. He interviewed me in his X-Files office, which was packed up at the time because he was leaving X-Files at the end of season four. I told him my story of X-Files, which included a pitch and meeting my wife, whom I’ve now been with twenty years, in an X-Files chat room. I think that endeared me to him, knowing that his show had changed someone’s life completely. One interview, one cold résumé, and I got the gig. That’s how that happened.

DAVID FURY

(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

My wife had seen Buffy on opening day. We skipped out of work and said let’s go to a matinee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because I just thought this is a great premise. I love a great horror-comedy mash-up, and I thought this was going to be a lot of fun. I didn’t love the movie. Just tonally it was wrong, it wasn’t funny enough, it wasn’t scary enough. Although I loved the premise.

When Joss talked to us about writing for the series, I told him off the bat, “I was so excited about this, but I was disappointed in the movie.” He recognized all the problems in the way his script was produced and started to explain how that was going to be fixed in the TV series. The more he talked about it, the more he talked about how the stories were allegorical and he gave the example of the invisible girl, the girl you go to school with whom nobody pays attention to and is kind of invisible to everyone else—and then she becomes literally invisible. I went, “Oh my God, that’s exactly the kind of thing I love to do.”

When we were done with the meeting, I said, “I want to work on the show.” I loved everything Joss had to say. He was funny in the meeting and so I really wanted to work for this guy. I told my agents and they said, “Are you crazy? This is six episodes on the WB which no one knows exists, and it’s a mid-season show.” The other meeting we had at the same time was a sitcom on ABC to premiere in the fall, sandwiched between Roseanne and Home Improvement, which were like the number one and number two shows on television at that time. “This is a surefire hit; you have to do this show,” and we listened to our agent and turned down Buffy and went to the sitcom.

The sitcom was eighteen episodes and out. Meanwhile, Buffy premiered mid-season and was almost off the bat a phenomenon. It was getting magazine covers. We watched it, because I really wanted to see how he pulled stuff off, and we loved it. We were kicking ourselves. We fired our agent and moved to another agency, which was the same agency that Joss was at. When they asked us what other things we were looking to do, I said I wanted to get back in at Buffy and pitch to Joss.

We got to get back in and pitch to Joss at the beginning of the second season, he bought our story, and we got to write “Go Fish.” That resulted in a job offer, but Elin, my partner, wanted to stay in sitcoms. She loved doing sitcoms, so she went to Mad About You. I wanted to go to Buffy and Joss was going to give me a script to try me out as a solo writer. That’s what kind of propelled me into hours. And then the progression of how does a comedy writer wind up there? Every successive show got more and more serious. Buffy then Angel, which was a little more serious, and then Lost, which was more serious but still [has] room for comedy. And then 24, which has no room for comedy. Once you’re in that kind of mode, that becomes how people see you, “Oh, you’re a 24 writer.” “No, I’m a comedy writer, believe it or not.”

DAN VEBBER

(staff writer, season 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

I was a huge fan of Buffy. It was my first staff writing job. I had been at The Onion previous to that. Moved out to Los Angeles so my background was really in comedy, but I had written a spec script for The Larry Sanders Show, which was my miracle script. It got me in pretty much any meeting I wanted, and then I wrote a spec script for Buffy, because it was the one show that really had the voice that I was trying to write with. My agent warned me up and down—everybody said, up and down—“Don’t ever write a spec script for the show that you want to write for.” But I’m one of the rare instances where it actually worked. My spec script got to Joss, because we were at the same agency, UTA. I went in for a meeting with Joss and we had a good meeting and he hired me this day.

Pretty much as soon as I exited the meeting I had a job offer from them—he said at the time that I was just very good at capturing these characters’ voices, which speaks more to my ability to write comedy than my ability to write drama. Mimicking character voices is easy, because that’s just an element of satire and parody which I had honed working at The Onion, and that’s how I ended up there season three.

DAVID GREENWALT

Joss has been very generous and many times he’s said that Buffy wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for me. I have no idea what I brought to it. I worked my ass off, I’d get up at five in the morning with a thesaurus, because of what he did. He invented a language for these kids in Buffy, because he felt if he went to a junior high [or] high school and just overheard stuff, it would be old in two years, right? So he invented an entire language and I did what I beg other writers to do when they work for me, which is that your job here is to not so much express yourself and your feelings and your childhood as it is to replicate what the creator of the show has done and is doing. Like I said, I’m a pretty good mimic.

I don’t suffer like him, but I would get up very early every morning with a thesaurus and write my ass off and try every different word I could think of for every piece of dialogue. You could use words like “skedaddle” and all these wonderful words that you couldn’t use in a regular show. I just stalked him every day and sometimes I would stand outside the bathroom and would push to get things done and we broke stories together and it was amazing. I have no idea what I brought.

JOSE MOLINA

I went to work for Howard Gordon in June of 1997. He was in an overall at Fox and he was developing and they asked him to consult on this show. There were a couple of shows that needed people and he chose Buffy. That was my first exposure to the show. I’d never seen the movie and I’d heard that they were making a show out of the movie. My reaction was the reaction of most of us cynics, which was, “Oh my God, they’re making a shitty show out of that shitty movie that nobody saw.” But Howard had a couple of tapes in his office and I watched them and I was like, “Holy shit, this is good!” And I went back and I watched the movie—clearly the movie is not as good as the show. Howard was consulting, which meant he got all the scripts, which also meant I got all the scripts season one. He started working at the beginning of season two, which was also Marti Noxon’s first year on the show. I was instantly addicted to the show. More so than Howard, who was working on it.

HOWARD GORDON

I don’t know if it was my experience or my temperament, but I’m also very self-critical, so I sort of recognized that I’m not singing exactly in this key, but I was experienced enough and a hard enough worker to get some serviceable material. I guess I felt lucky to have a front row seat to something that I hadn’t done.

JOSE MOLINA

I remember specifically he was writing a script, he was supposed to do the teleplay for “What’s My Line?, Part One.” He was having a really hard time with it. His voice isn’t naturally that funny, quirky, dialogue-heavy, Whedon voice, which I absolutely loved and like to think I still sort of write in a similar voice to. I asked him, “Hey, do you want me to write a couple of scenes? Maybe I can help you out and you don’t have to tell anybody, just let me show you what I can do.” I went home one weekend and wrote a few scenes in “What’s My Line?” and I brought them in and he wound up not using them, but he paid me a great compliment which was he had other scripts and other pages from people on his desk that he was trying to read and emulate the style as he was trying to figure out how he was going to write his script, and he said that he couldn’t tell the difference between my pages and their pages, which made me go, “Well use my fucking pages!” But he didn’t. He had enough pride that he wanted to do it himself.

Eventually, when it came down to how long it was taking him and how hard a time he was having, he actually wound up cowriting that script with Marti [Noxon] because Marti was writing “What’s My Line?, Part 2” and she had finished her script already in the time that Howard had done about half of his. So that was the beginning of me with Buffy.

In addition to the standing sets for the series that were built adjacent to the production offices in Santa Monica, Sunnydale High exteriors were shot at Torrance High School in Torrance, California, as were the exteriors of the Summers house a few blocks away at 1313 Cota Avenue. Angel’s residence as well as the mansion occupied by Drusilla and Spike was shot at the legendary Ennis House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Offered Joss Whedon previously, “We were very much on a tight budget. It’s really kind of sad, actually. The outside of the warehouse also doubled as the entrance to The Bronze.”

Although the initial cemetery scenes were filmed at a real graveyard in Los Angeles, a smaller, makeshift series of tombstones was constructed by production designer Carey Meyer for the second season in the parking lot of the production studios, where most of the cemetery scenes were shot. Said Whedon at the time, “It made our lives a whole lot easier, but it doesn’t give you the scope you get from a real graveyard.”

DAVID FURY

A lot of the times what happens when your show shoots in Vancouver or cross-country or wherever is that camps start to form. There’s the production camp. Then there’s the producer-writer camp. There’s kind of a lack of trust, because they’re bitching over in production about something that you don’t know they’re upset about. Whereas you can fix it immediately if you were there, but it’s difficult to do when you’re in different time zones. That’s something I sorely miss from doing Buffy, the fact that we had our own stages and a little back lot of downtown Sunnydale right outside our offices. It was three warehouses; then behind the warehouses they created a downtown outside exterior where the Bronze was, and the magic shop was there for exteriors. They would lay sod across the parking lot and put up tombstones and that would be our cemetery. It worked! On as tiny a budget as we had, it worked great.

RAYMOND STELLA

(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

We were shooting in a warehouse that was a converted lumber warehouse right on 28th and Olympic. I think the metro is going through it now. It had small ceilings. We didn’t have any [lighting] grids to work off of. We had ladders—we’d be either putting stands above the sets or tacking it with C-clamp lights to the tops of the sets. But we didn’t have any gridwork to work off of. People were falling off ladders. So it was slow in that respect. You didn’t have anyone up there on the catwalks and stuff. It made it challenging. We made it work, but we had our limitations, so it kind of tended to make it look a little low-budgety if you weren’t careful, because you are shooting in the house on the stage and the windows have to look fairly decent.

MARK HANSSON

(second assistant director, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

One funny story was when shooting in at Torrance High School, where a lot of the first season took place, we were getting ready to do a basketball scene in the gym. Alyson wanted to pull a prank on Nicholas Brendon, so in front of the whole company and a hundred plus extras, when he was jumping up for a shot, she ran up and pulled his shorts down. Well, it took everything with the shorts, so he was totally naked in front of everyone, which was funny but embarrassing. It was a rehearsal and cameras weren’t rolling at the time. Alyson was mortified, but Nick took it in good humor.

RAYMOND STELLA

I had a good gaffer and a lot of good people around me working hard and it was fun. That was a challenge. I had come off features where you shoot two or three pages a day and here we’re shooting ten a day. Seven to ten pages, which is a lot of work. So, that’s a challenge. You don’t know whether to look at your meter or your watch half the time. We waited a lot on actors, too, because after you get into four, five, six, or seven seasons, they’re, like, not going to be rushing around too much. So we’re lit and it takes them about ten seconds to get off the stage and about twenty minutes to get back once you’re ready.

The first people that the producers come to when you’re behind is the camera crew. I told them, “I can light circles around these actors, the problem is that they don’t come back. If you can keep them on the stage we could push this thing.” I wasn’t going to take the brunt of it. It took time to light here and there, but we had a good crew; we knew what we were doing.

DAN VEBBER

I remember it being pretty tense on set, but because I had so little experience working on live-action shows, I don’t know how much of that is normal and how much was unique to that show. I didn’t get the sense that a lot of rewriting was being done on set.

MARK HANSSON

Buffy was not a very happy experience for many people, even though it was a good show. They asked me to continue, but after so many people in my department got fired that first year in 1996, I elected to just do the first season. Never regretted not going back, even when the show became a hit.

JOSE MOLINA

I had no idea what I was doing, so my priority was to stay the hell out of the way on set. But I remember a conversation I had with Sarah Michelle Gellar while they were shooting one of the big fight scenes with her and Kendra. Fights take a lot of time, so there was a lot of downtime. She was very nice and was willing to talk to the consulting producer’s assistant, who was just the visitor. As I managed to do more often than not, I planted my foot firmly in my mouth.

Sarah had a movie opening that weekend; little thing called I Know What You Did Last Summer. That weekend was also the opening weekend of a much lesser known David Duchovny movie called Playing God. So I’m talking to her and she’s wondering aloud how well her movie is going to do. My response was that I thought she was going to get stiff competition from that David Duchovny movie. Thankfully she did not punch me in the face.

DAVID FURY

We all knew the Buffy actors really well, because we’re in the same space. If you have a break, you go down, you watch them shooting, you talk, you have lunch with the actors. On Angel we never saw anybody, because they were across town. Unless we had a reason to go to the set. It was a pleasure to be able to be on the set of a show I had been working on for years but only occasionally visited. Did not know the crew as well, because, again, we just didn’t have the opportunity to drive across town to go to the stages where they’re shooting Angel.

JAMES MARSTERS

(actor, Spike)

Acting, for me, is much simpler and less important than I thought. It feels like every time I learn something new about acting, it’s just about simplifying and not acting and letting the words work for you. An actor needs to know enough about structure and quality writing to be able to choose good words. But once you’ve chosen those words and signed the contract, get out of the way. Don’t bring attention to yourself, bring attention to the words and let them make the money for you. At which point it becomes brutally simple and easy to look cool. I always say that a character is defined much more by what they say than how they say it, which means that how the actor says it is important, but it’s not nearly as important as what the writer is saying. Acting then becomes the breath and life under the words.

DAVID FURY

It was helpful to talk to the cast. To know how they would feel about things. That’s something that’s very rare now in Los Angeles, because very few shows now are shot there. I was in Budapest for Tyrant and Berlin for Homeland. Nobody is shooting in L.A. What was great about doing Buffy and Angel was you’re there with each other all the time. You’re there with your collaborators. You’re part of a repertory company. You get this great experience to trust each other, because you see each other all the time.

RAYMOND STELLA

On any set, there’s so much food around and if you’re on a film that takes time lighting, you tend to wander over and graze a lot. At the end of Buffy, between all the work we’d start out at seven or eight in the morning on Monday and work our way into four or five on Friday. With twelve hours’ turnaround, because you’d work until four or five in the morning on Saturday. You’re a zombie that day and Sunday. Forget it, you’re so tired you just have to recoup. It takes its toll, so it’s a young man’s business, an episodic twenty-four-show season.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

We were literally sheltered. On Buffy we had our own soundstage, we were in Santa Monica, we worked so many hours. We barely had a life; our life was each other.

KELLY A. MANNERS

We had a crew that liked to have a good time, though the hours were torturous. Being vampires can’t go out in the daylight, that was torturous, because we were working many, many all-nighters. Through it all we kept a good sense of humor and we had fun. I’ll never forget, I was sitting in a room with the executive producers … and we’re talking about demons. I said, “I can’t believe there’s six grown men in here talking about demons.” It was wacky and it was fun. It was good storytelling.

RAYMOND STELLA

I would have probably liked it more if it was not such so much of a night shoot. Those are hard on you. [Line producer] Gareth Davies was interesting. He’d come on the set looking for me when we were behind, and I’d be hiding. I’d see him come on and I knew he was looking for me to kick my ass about something. But it was OK. It wasn’t that serious. He’d look around and he’d storm off and I’d come out of hiding.

MARK HANSSON

Unfortunately, Gareth Davies, a not very nice British producer, also known as Dr. Death, fired people left and right, so it was kind of a dreadful set.

HARRY GROENER

The worst thing about working at a real high school was all the night shoots and everyone had to be out of there before the students came to school in the morning. So to see everyone scrambling, all the technicians, to get off campus before the sun came up was very funny considering it was a vampire story.

JOSS WHEDON

I honestly believe that we had a good vibe on the set and I honestly think it made the show better. Is art worth pain? Yes it is. Is it worth me feeling pain? Yes. Is it worth me causing pain? No. It doesn’t mean that I’m nice to everybody. I try not to be a dick, but I have to get stuff done. But if everybody feels like they’re actually part of making something that they like, they give everything they have. At one point I was just so exhausted. Somebody comes over and says, “What prop should we use?” “I hate this show. God, why do we have to have props? What happened to mime? Mime is a great art.” And everybody is like, “Whoa, PMS on the Joss man.” It truly takes your life to do TV, because you always have a deadline.

David Greenwalt and the staff we had were the best writing staff. They came up with great stories. It’s never cheap, it’s never bullshit, it’s never how do we vamp until the end? It’s always, “How can we make this story better?” So when it comes down to the prop guy, we know there’s a reason, that he cares about it. It applies to us as well as everybody else. If we don’t love the stuff that we’re putting out on the screen, it ain’t worth the pace.

DAVID GREENWALT

The network was afraid of Joss. They almost never gave notes. Occasionally they’d call me and say, “Does Willow really have to be gay? Can’t you talk him out of that?” I always ran to Joss like Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen in The Godfather and would always say, “My employer is someone who likes to hear bad news fast.” I would tell Joss whatever was going on. He was right. Willow was gay before every show had a gay character.

JOSS WHEDON

They really let me get away with murder. They got what the show is, how strange it is, how it’s all over the place, how edgy it sometimes is, and so there was never really a problem. We never had a story thrown out or a real disaster. We’ve had standards and practices issues, which you have on every show, but they got what we were doing and they didn’t interfere. I’ve seen networks that do it the other way and this is the ideal.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

We were a bunch of young kids, we’d get together every week and watch the show, most of us, and we were already together all the time. It was very informal on set, to be honest. I get a little mushy thinking about it; it was a really sweet time. We worked and played together and we were going through this crazy life together and no one understood it better than us because we were doing it together. So it was special.

After work we would sometimes go to the pub or if we’d have a great guest star, we’d all go out with them. David Solomon directed a lot of episodes and we’d loved him, so we’d watch the show with him. It was a really special experience. We always celebrated together. I remember having my first New Year’s Eve party at my house and Joss came and it was so fun. We were very supportive of each other.

The first season culminates with “Prophecy Girl,” in which Buffy finally confronts the Master and is briefly killed. Filmed and completed before a single episode aired, the fate of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was uncertain as the crew went to the first-season wrap party, but one thing was clear: creatively, Buffy had lived up to the potential of what Joss Whedon had articulated for the series, and then some.

SARAH LEMELMAN

The first season shows Buffy struggling to find her identity as a Slayer, and the heroine is truly at a crossroads when Giles discovers a prophecy that describes what is to become of her fate in the final episode of the first season: “Prophecies are a bit dodgy. They’re mutable. Buffy herself has thwarted them time and time again, but this is the Codex. There is nothing in it that does not come to pass. Tomorrow night, Buffy will face the Master and she will die.” In Buffy’s moment of shock, she no longer is the plainly confident hero that the viewers have come to love. In a conversation with her mother, Joyce surprises Buffy with an expensive prom dress that Buffy has been eyeing at a store. When Buffy tells her mother that she cannot go to the dance, Joyce authoritatively states, “Says who? Is it written somewhere? You should do what you want.” In this moment, Joyce is oblivious to the fact that Buffy’s fate is indeed written, but the message is still clear. Joyce begins to plant the seed that the role Buffy is supposed to play in the prophecy, and society, does not have to be the way it ends.

Despite this message, Buffy faces the Master, and indeed dies at his hands. She is bitten and thrown into a shallow pool as he leaves his lair, free to ravage Sunnydale. Luckily, Xander and Angel show up in time and resuscitate Buffy. Buffy may have died, but she is now reborn, and a prophecy means nothing to her. She can write her own story, and this renews her strength and confidence to kill the Master.

Whedon once again stepped behind the camera for the finale, which, as far as the cast and crew knew, could be the series finale. Although he had directed the pilot presentation, this was really his first time directing a real hour of television that would actually be aired.

JOSS WHEDON

Basically, there is usually something I desperately want to say, a moment I want to capture, an idea I want to try out. I like to create. To me, the writing is the most important thing. If I’m going to take the time to direct something, to take the time out of my schedule, I usually want it to be something of my own. It would certainly be an interesting exercise to direct other people’s material.

RAYMOND STELLA

Joss’s episodes always went, like, twice as long. I loved working with him. He put a lot into it and I enjoyed every minute of it. He’s so proud of that musical, “Once More, with Feeling.” He’d take it to his alma mater and show it, which was really fun. That one went fifteen or sixteen days.

JOSS WHEDON

I was afraid at first. I didn’t study directing. And so, you know, that feeling you have that I’m a fraud and they’re going to find out. I was! I was an actual fraud. I was bullshitting. I thought there was some secret language they all knew that I didn’t and they were going to find out. But the only thing I had in my arsenal was the truth. “This will work better if it’s like this.” That’s all. And that’s all anybody wanted to hear was the truth. A nice version of the truth. And so it became very easy, very quickly—and then very exciting.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

(actor, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Joss was unlike anyone that I had ever auditioned for and still is. It’s so hard to describe, but I would later just come to understand that he is really a genius, but his level of creativity and his ability to communicate with actors is unparalleled. My last scene in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., he was able to direct me in a way that in some ways he reintroduced me as an actor to people, because he just knows how to calibrate you in a way that is so effortless. It’s so hard to describe. For me, I say a director can either inspire me to greatness or just de-inspire me by the things that they say. Joss has a way of saying something to you that just completely turns you so on that you forget about the cameras, you forget about the fact that millions of people are going to be seeing it, and you’re so invested in your character that it just translates in a new way.

CAMDEN TOY

(actor, a Gentleman)

Joss was incredibly even-keeled. He never showed any tension, but you got to know there was tension. When I did [fourth season’s] “Hush,” he had just launched Angel and was in the middle of a season of Buffy. And yet he was always the first on the set; he was always the last one to leave. He never looked tired, there was never any drama, even though I’m sure he had sleep deprivation. There was one point with this little gag we did shoot with the scalpel touching the skin and blood coming out. We ended up not using that, which I think was really wise, because, instead, everything was left to your imagination, but we did shoot it, and unfortunately that gag wasn’t working. Joss was like, “We have to move on.” Instead of him getting angry—“We can’t stop working!”—he’s like, “OK, we just have to move on.” And, because of Joss being like that, he really inspired us to work even harder. Sure enough, within minutes somebody had it working.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

I’ll never forget the one note he gave me for my final scene on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I was doing the scene very emotionally and I was crying and just feeling sorry for myself as a character. Joss just came over to me and said, “You know what, I think your character has more pride than that.” That little bit just took the scene from being average and something you would expect to just something that I’m so proud of to this day.

IAN WOOLF

(first assistant director, Angel)

I AD’d [assistant directed] on a bunch of episodes for Joss. I love working with him. He’s a character who’s got his own kind of style. I kind of equate Joss with David Lynch. I did two movies with David Lynch, Dune and Blue Velvet. The two are very similar in the way they direct and their mind-set.

RAYMOND STELLA

Joss is just one of these guys that knows what he is talking about. He’s very intelligent. I always look at writers as very intelligent people. It’s hard to write. To make something good. He knew how to direct, too, and get what he needed. He was easygoing, but when he needed to be forceful, he was, to get his point across.

CAMDEN TOY

He was incredibly even-tempered. He didn’t give us a lot of instruction, you know, 95 percent of directing is really in the casting. If you’re micromanaging the actor’s performance, you’ve probably cast the wrong actor. So he would give us little adjustments occasionally, but really let us do our thing. He was incredibly generous.

RAYMOND STELLA

I saw him gain a lot more confidence. At first, he hadn’t done a whole lot and this was big and it started steamrolling big-time for him. As you get bigger and better, you become more confident and you can see that with him. He made decisions easier. He had more clout, too, because he was on a roll. That helps.

JOSS WHEDON

When I finally directed the season finale and the first episode of the second season, every fucking grip in there was busting his ass because, I think, they were enjoying making the show.

By the end of the season, the show was already a hit, if not in the ratings, with fans. At the time of its debut, The New York Times dismissed the show, claiming, “Nobody is likely to take this oddball camp exercise seriously.” In retrospect, TV critic John O’Connor’s criticism of Sarah Michelle Gellar is particularly laughable: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teenager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.” But the show rapidly earned a small but fervent (and demographically desirable) cult following and was championed in such popular magazines as Entertainment Weekly as well as USA Today and TV Guide back when that actually meant something.

JOSE MOLINA

I had a feeling it was going to do pretty well, because this is an era where WB and UPN were just starting out. And it didn’t take a whole lot to stay on the air on one of those networks. Even from the get-go, probably because of Joss’s background as a script doctor, having worked on stuff like Speed and Waterworld, he was pretty well known. The term “script doctor” sort of became well known at around that time. So because of that I remember seeing right from the get-go articles in Entertainment Weekly about Joss himself and about Buffy.

Given the fact that a little WB show was registering with a major publication that didn’t often cover a lot of sci-fi or a lot of genre stuff at the time, I wasn’t particularly worried that it was going to go away. I didn’t realize, of course, that it was going to become the touchstone for so much genre, especially female-led genre, that came after it.

JOSS WHEDON

I can almost never experience total, naked surprise. I can never see it with perspective. I’ve said before, I always intended for this to be a cultural phenomenon. That’s how I wrote it. In the back of your mind you’re picking up your Oscar and your Saturn and everyone is playing with their Buffy dolls. You go through so much rejection and so much negativity—and believe me, I did—you sort of have to develop this shell of incredible hubris, this arrogance, where you say, “This is going to be huge.” Because if you don’t believe that, you have so many people you’re going to fail or it doesn’t work, and you sort of just crumble.

So you sort of take it for granted and when it happens, when it goes the way you hoped that it would, then you’re sort of striding along, and every now and then you’ll take a moment of total perspective where you forget about all your arrogance, you forget about everything you’ve been through, and you just see it in perspective for the first time and it’s boggling. It’s so intense. But it doesn’t happen very often. You just have to believe that it’s going to so strongly that when it does, you don’t get the fun of going, “I can’t believe it.”

BEN EDLUND

(creator/executive producer, The Tick)

I was working on something like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I was out in California and I remember watching the pilot in a hotel room and going, “That is amazing.” It was amazing to me for someone to reclaim Buffy the Vampire Slayer, since I remembered the movie and felt like, even in the movie, there was something going on, it wasn’t tracking right, but there was something going on that was intriguing in the writing. Joss was able to remount that as a TV show.

The pilot, the way it functioned so well. It was a very arresting moment, and I went, “All right, that’s a guy…” I didn’t really know about his history as such a prolific script doctor. I started to hear that he had done really well on Roseanne. That he was, to use a cultural term, big-brained. So I became aware of him.

THOMAS P. VITALE

(executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)

The morning after Buffy premiered, everyone at workplaces across America was talking about it. I was working at Syfy at the time, and the show was truly “water cooler” programming and what’s best is that the show got better. Some shows start out great and then fade. Buffy strengthened beyond its pilot.

DAVID GREENWALT

We knew we were onto something when three weeks of Buffy being out there was a Buffy question on Jeopardy. We knew we’d cut through the noise pretty good.