Joss Whedon: The Biography (20 page)

Like his student film, the
Buffy
pilot was a twenty-five-minute tape that Joss said he’ll never officially release. Unlike
A Night Alone
, however, it would find its way onto eBay’s black market of bootlegged VHS tapes by 1999, and ten years later would be easily watchable on YouTube. While Joss’s pilot script had to be truncated to fit the abbreviated running time, the wit and compelling storytelling were already evident.

The story begins with a young couple breaking into a high school at night to make out; the girl, nervous and obviously uncomfortable, struggles with the boy’s insistence that they go further into the school. It’s a dark scene, both visually, as they’re cloaked in shadows, and in tone, as there’s a distinct predatory subtext. As he repeatedly tries to convince her that they’re alone, it’s easy to assume that she’ll soon be attacked. Upon being reassured that the school is indeed empty, the girl turns back to the boy—
she’s
the vampire. She attacks him as the scene fades out. The words
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
appear, superimposed over a bustling high school facade and backed by the punk band Rancid’s song “Salvation.”

Joss had again flipped the script—it wasn’t the girl who needed saving from the lecherous boy. It was the first of many signs that while
Buffy
was a horror series, it would take the genre to a new level that audiences hadn’t seen before.

This opening scene will seem familiar to those who have watched the series’ actual first episode, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” which would reshoot and expand on many elements of the unaired pilot. Despite the similarities, the pilot doesn’t come close to matching the quality level of “Welcome to the Hellmouth.” Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nicholas Brendon are clearly the stars—both relatable, believable, and engaging—but Riff Regan doesn’t find the right balance between making Willow shy and wanting and keeping her likeable. The sets are less than inspiring, the dialogue snappy and clever but in danger of drowning in slang that would quickly feel dated. Xander leads Buffy around the school courtyard, and in typical teen movie style points out each of the stereotypical student clusters: stoner surfers, theater club, film club—though he does mix it up a bit by pointing out the “dirty girls.” (To its credit, the pilot would sidestep the quintessential big expository speech of every cult film when Giles begins to explain the lore of the Slayer and Buffy cuts him off: “Wow, you’re going to do the speech and everything.”)

The pilot’s shortened script also doesn’t allow for the strong emotional connection to the characters that is vital in any coming-of-age
tale. Buffy’s mom, Joyce, doesn’t appear, eliminating a conversation that comes early in “Welcome to the Hellmouth” that beautifully illustrates Buffy’s underlying need to keep her actions in Sunnydale as typically teenage and Slayer-free as possible so that she and her mother can have a “normal” life. Also missing is David Boreanaz’s character—named Angel by the time the series debuted—the enigmatic stranger with cryptic messages for the Slayer. Boreanaz filmed some scenes for the pilot, but they were cut for time and storytelling reasons.

Despite all its shortcomings, the pilot still showed potential that
Buffy
could become a great series. Even with the truncated script, Joss’s limited knowledge of directing, and actors still working to fully inhabit their roles, the teen characters felt more relatable and smarter than those in any series on the air at the time. “They all just kind of fit into those parts right away, and it was just going to happen,” Solomon says. “Albeit, we never saw [it lasting for] seven years.”

When the WB execs saw the pilot presentation in May 1996, they were underwhelmed. They did not pick up the series for the fall season, opting instead for a show they had initially developed in-house that was championed by WB head Jamie Kellner:
7th Heaven
, a wholesome drama about a preacher and his family. Still,
Buffy
had made an impact at the network.

“I thought that he had captured a distinct and exciting lead character, and not a lot else,” Susanne Daniels said. “Sarah Michelle Gellar shined in his pilot presentation as Buffy, and was endearing and fascinating and someone I wanted to go on a ride with, and see what was going to happen with the character and how. And I thought he had established an intriguing world, but I also thought it was messy.”

“The pilot was not great,” said Garth Ancier, chief programmer for the network at the time. “And we had some better pilots that year. The discussion was, ‘Do we make our bet on another show from Stephen Cannell [21
Jump Street, The A-Team, The Rockford Files
]? Or do we make our bet on Joss, who we believe in as a writer, even though this pilot will have to be thoroughly trashed?’”

When the network announced its fall schedule later in May, it made no mention of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Gail Berman grew quite persistent, asking Daniels to confirm whether the series would be picked up or
whether the network would release it so 20th Century Fox and Sandollar could shop it elsewhere. The WB responded with a list of minor adjustments and one major casting change that they wanted Joss to make, and once all parties were on board,
Buffy
was officially given a twelve-episode run, to premiere in March 1997. Daniels expressed high hopes for the series: “I think
Buffy
will do for The WB what
21 Jump Street
did for Fox…. It [attracted] new teenage viewers and got critical acclaim as well.”

Despite David Solomon’s recollection, not all of the actors fit into their parts right away. Among the changes between the presentation tape and the series proper was reenvisioning the role of Willow. Per the WB’s request, Riff Regan was out—which was perhaps not a surprise to the actress. She told Joss that “part of the reason that she was not right to play Willow is that she’s very self confident [and] sexy.” Unlike the frumpy character she played in the pilot, Joss said, Regan “came into the room and blew me away. She was so in charge.” Had Regan been given the direction to portray Willow in a manner closer to her own personality, it’s possible that she would have made it through the series run.

In the end, though, a more established young actress, Alyson Hannigan, was brought on to replace Regan. Hannigan hadn’t been able to get an audition during casting for the pilot, as she was very different from the insecure, mousy girl whom Joss had originally envisioned. She got another chance when network executives called for a different take on the character.

Hannigan approached Willow with an optimistic spark. “OK, so she’s talking about how guys won’t talk to her, but I’m going to put happiness in her,” she said. “She’s not going to sulk about it…. If she’s talking about something that’s not the greatest love story, she’s still happy in the end.” And so the dowdy girl in need of rescue was reborn as a cheerful, brilliant computer hacker confident in her academic skills, though still struggling with her crush on her best friend, Xander.

Before long, Willow would join her friend Buffy as a cultural icon and role model. “Willow is a good role model,” Hannigan said, pointing to how the character did very well in school, was confident in her talents, and learned to stand up for herself. “Buffy is the girl everybody wants to be, but Willow is more like what they are.” In fact, as much as Joss
described Xander as a stand-in for himself, there is a compelling argument for Willow being yet another facet of her creator. She’s the smart kid who was invisible to the opposite sex, had problems making friends in high school, and thus worked so damn hard to get through the day while feeling alone.

But that’s the beauty of
all
the new characters Joss created to populate his
Buffy
retelling, the Slayer support network that would come to be known as the Scooby Gang (a reference to the teenage crime-fighters in the
Scooby-Doo
cartoons). Each one fell into a typical social role while pushing against it, and their varied struggles to find their own path gave audiences, Joss himself, and even the show’s actors so many ways to connect with the story. “I’m no more Buffy than I am Cordelia than I am Willow than I am Xander,” Sarah Michelle Gellar says. “I’m parts of all of them.”

“[Joss is] more of a girl’s guy than a guy’s guy, and he understands women,” Gellar adds. “There’s not a lot of male writers that have the respect for women that he does when writing them. This is still a man’s world and most of the writers are men, and the characters sometimes feel stiff, one-dimensional. That’s where his strength really lies—in creating these female characters because he respects them.”

When Joss finally got the green light for
Buffy
’s midseason run, it was time to select a staff. He had worked on a couple of TV series earlier in his career, but he had never been a showrunner, a role that would require him to oversee not only the creative direction of the show but also its day-to-day operations. He needed a co-showrunner, someone who could help him get
Buffy
off the ground and guide him through what to do afterward.

Among the contenders for the position was David Greenwalt, an experienced writer/producer who was just coming off
Profit
, a small Fox show that he had cocreated. The series, which was produced by the same Stephen Cannell whom Joss beat out for a slot on the WB programming slate, followed future
Heroes
star Adrian Pasdar as Jim Profit, an utterly amoral main character who worked at a possibly even less ethical multinational corporation.
Profit
took its storylines to very dark places, impressing Joss with its fearlessness, but in 1996, that fearlessness made audiences and Fox network affiliates uncomfortable. It lasted just eight episodes, only the first four of which were aired.

Despite its short run,
Profit
made a big splash within the industry.
Variety
proclaimed that the show had potential cult-hit status and that it “could go down as the creepiest show, with the most anti-heroic protagonist, in the history of television.” It garnered a lot of attention for Greenwalt, and a number of scripts came his way, including an opportunity to work with TV legend Steven Bochco, who had created
Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law
, and
NYPD Blue
. But the one script that got his attention was the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
pilot.

“It’s got feeling. It’s got heart. I have to meet this guy,” Greenwalt says, remembering his reaction to the script. “Joss loves to start a story
real—you just feel like you’re in real life and just when you’re about to get bored, he takes your head and slams it onto the concrete and some great thing happens.” Greenwalt loved everything about the script—actually, he considered it the best script of the year, bar none. He appreciated that it was understated, and that Joss had made up a whole language for kids to speak. “So I met him, and it was kind of love at first sight.” The feeling was mutual, and Greenwalt was offered the job.

According to Joss, his new creative partner was key to his success. “David was more responsible for what
Buffy
was than anybody really understands,” he says. “He walked me through everything, acting like a mentor without ever talking down to me, contradicting me. He was my co-showrunner, but he had all the experience.

“I look back on it, and I’m like, ‘I can’t understand why he wasn’t just like, “You idiot!”’ I remember very well that we were on a location scout and were talking about building the set for the classroom. David asked, ‘Let me ask a stupid question: do we need a translight?’ I said, ‘Let me top it! What’s a translight?’

“I have found many people who’ve been extraordinary, but at that time when I really had no idea what I was doing, having David there was so important. He was so great that I just figured this was how it would go in life, that you’d just have that guy at your side all the time.” However, their relationship already had an expiration date; Greenwalt’s contract was to help Whedon see
Buffy
through its initial episode order and then go to
The X-Files
as an executive producer.