“I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.”
BY Edward Gross
Growing up in the 1960s, I had a number of pop culture obsessions, most of which are still with me, including Superman, James Bond, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, The Odd Couple (I saw the movie when I was eight and have loved the concept ever since), and vampires.
As to the latter, I was fascinated with the classic Universal and Hammer horror movies, most notably Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee’s takes on Dracula. But that was nothing compared with my genuine obsession with Barnabas Collins, the vampire star of television’s only gothic-horror daily soap opera, Dark Shadows. From the moment I encountered that character one afternoon after school, he’d never fully gone away (a memory solidified by the fact that there was a period in the 1980s when I was hanging out with the man who played him, the late Jonathan Frid).
Strangely, the idea of Slayers—those whose chosen path was to take down my beloved vampires, among other supernatural threats—was appealing to me as well. (I don’t even want to get into the psychology of wanting to see the thing I love destroyed.) The first person I recall doing that slaying was the reporter Carl Kolchak, played by Darren McGavin, in the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, in which he discovered and took down a vamp haunting Las Vegas. A year later Kolchak returned in The Night Strangler and, a year after that, in the weekly series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. There was also Roy Thinnes in 1973’s The Norliss Tapes TV movie, Gene Roddenberry’s 1977 TV movie Spectre, 1984’s Ghostbusters, the following year’s Fright Night (which introduced audiences to Roddy McDowall’s Peter Vincent), and 1993’s The X-Files (of course).
But then there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, debuting in 1997, which was an entity all its own, capturing the imagination with horror, humor, and (shockingly) three-dimensional characters as it introduced the world (and me) to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers and the rest of her particular Scooby Gang. And in that mix came the vampire with a soul, Angel, as played by David Boreanaz.
One TV show with a vampire and a Slayer? My mind was boggled, and since I had been a journalist for a great metropolitan newspaper … sorry, that was Clark Kent … that is, for a number of magazines, I was given an inside look at the making of the series and also of the spin-off, Angel.
But even before there was a Buffy TV show, there was Joss Whedon. Back in 1995, I was an editor at Cinescape magazine, and it was announced that a fourth movie in the Alien franchise, ultimately called Alien: Resurrection, was going to be made (really big news at the time) and that someone named Joss Whedon would be writing it. Well, back then, before every bit of information about a film fell under the full and complete control of studio publicists or the talent involved was terrified of speaking out of turn, I figured there couldn’t be too many people named Joss Whedon out there, so I called 411, information. A moment later, I had a phone number and decided to give it a call. Joss answered, I introduced myself, and we stayed on the phone for about an hour or so, engaging in what would be the first of many hours of conversation over the years. Eventually, when Buffy did become a TV series, Joss continued to make himself available to me, and he even made it possible for me to speak to many of the other writer/producers of both series. As a result, next to Star Trek, I don’t think there were any other TV shows that I covered as much as I did Buffy and Angel.
This book, then, is the culmination of my lifelong obsession with both vampires and Slayers. In telling the story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, particularly in the oral history format, it was our hope that this would be the most in-depth and intimate look at two shows that, whether people realized it or not, evolved the medium. A lot.
December 31, 2016