I remember Joss being on all fours, giving pony rides in the production office to Alyson and Sarah. It was hysterical to see this genius millionaire giving pony rides in the production office. - Kelly. A. Manners
It was extraordinarily unique. There was no social media at that time, but Joss was one of the very first. He told me about "The Bronze", the fan-site posting-board group. They took the name from the club in the show. Joss loved to engage the fans on the posting board with every episode. He said "you've got to go on and try this". He was excited about this feedback he could get immediately, and the fact that they treated the writers like rock stars. When we would go onto the message boards, I can only describe it as being like throwing bread into a pond. Suddenly, all the ducks came in. You'd go on and I'm talking to dozens and dozens of people who were so excited to talk to me, to talk about the writing process, and the show. It was remarkable. It was great and an exhilarating time. I know Joss told the story of when they first went to Comic-Con after the first season and it wasn't even what it is now. They went there and they were mobbed. It blew everyone's mind at the time. They didn't know anybody was watching. They didn't know anybody cared. - David Fury
The first quote really surprises me... I somehow can't imagine SMG in that context lol.
The second... does anyone know around what time the writers started to go on The Bronze? I'm really curious.
I remember Joss being on all fours, giving pony rides in the production office to Alyson and Sarah. It was hysterical to see this genius millionaire giving pony rides in the production office. - Kelly. A. Manners
Marti Noxon on season six: "So we started toying with the idea of adult responsibilities and then decided we probably have to go to nasty sex instead. We tried out a bunch of those in "Flooded" and kind of dispensed with them, because then after an episode we were kind of like, "Well, we probably don't want her worrying about the actual realities of adult life because it got boring."
Marti Noxon on season six: "So we started toying with the idea of adult responsibilities and then decided we probably have to go to nasty sex instead. We tried out a bunch of those in "Flooded" and kind of dispensed with them, because then after an episode we were kind of like, "Well, we probably don't want her worrying about the actual realities of adult life because it got boring."
Interesting. Flooded is usually considered one of the most boring and least popular episodes of the show. Maybe they reacted to the episode's reception.
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As you can probably tell, I'm onto season 3 now... 🙂
We knew that Angel was going to be leaving. Knowing we had limited time to play up both high school and the Angel-Buffy romance sort of galvanized us and made us pull out all of our stops with what we could do. We also dealt with the last great metaphor, sex. The bite in "Graduation Day, Part II" was a big deal. - Joss Whedon
They offered [my wife] Elin and me a job for season three, but Elin decided to do sitcoms so he couldn't offer me the job until he saw what I could do on my own. He allowed me to pitch stories for season three and that was a story that became "Helpless". It was about Buffy turning eighteen years old and had to do with these tests that the Watcher's Council puts Slayers through on their eighteenth birthday. My original plan was that Buffy was going to be drugged by Giles, but she was going to hallucinate and think her friends had become vampires and she comes home and her mother's a vampire. Basically, it was a way of taking away her support group- the family unit she has that's the basis of her support- and how does she respond? Is she able to? How is she able to function along those lines? I pitched that and they liked it, but I think they had just come up with the episode "The Wish", where Willow is a vampire and different people from her life are vampires, so they couldn't do that. Joss came up with the idea of taking Buffy's powers away. Here is the pitch, and this is my sitcom thinking, by the way. I said that after Buffy fails, Giles would be fired. This would be like the midpoint of the episode, and by the end Buffy does something to somehow makes amends and Giles gets rehired again. But the thing that Joss really responded to was, "Oh my god, Giles gets fired". He just wanted that. It's an episode where Giles is no longer a watcher. I was going, "I don't want to lose Giles's job. I pitched this, but I wanted him to get his job back". Somehow the idea became a permanent part of the mythology of the show. A significant event that Joss would hang on to is Giles will never be her Watcher again. He most responded to that. - David Fury
Buffy really came out of the blue for me. It had been two years since I had worked. Sarah Michelle Gellar and me had an agent and manager in common, and so I had met her probably years before. I originally went in for five shows in season three and then they kind of came up and said, "Would you be the villain this season?" and I'm going , "Yeah, that would be amazing". I knew that it would be a fun job to take on, and by that point I knew I loved working with those people. So I stayed on and just through the writers and I, we just kind of created this character that the fans really responded to. For me, it was almost like a little bit of therapy. When I first started playing Faith, I had just graduated high school. I was seventeen years old. All of a sudden I'm out of the house and I'm moving to L.A. I was actually enrolled in a university before I got Buffy and I had to withdraw. - Eliza Dushku
Eliza is Mother Nature on wheels; that's how much of a force she is, Adore her- she's still very much a live wire. She's changed a lot over the years and I forget how young she was. She's just a weird combination - she has this really strong energy and she's very powerful and forceful. It's so interesting to watch her process. - Charisma Carpenter
We had to emancipate her. She was only seventeen that first season, and she knew that this was her big break. She brought high energy and the character was fantastic. - Kelly A. Manners
It was really not as black and white as "I divorced my parents", which I knew happens a lot in this business. My mother has never been a stage mom. I lived in Boston my whole life, even like the seven or eight years that I was doing films, and she always wanted me to be in high school. When my grades weren't doing so well from on-set tutoring, she said, "Forget the movies, girl." She is a government professor at a university and she said, "I want you to come back to town, go into public school and get good grades in your junior and senior years, and just live the life of a junior and senior in high school". It really was always her just wanting the best for me, and so I graduated high school with my class, went to the prom, and enrolled at university in my mom's school. I was all set up, I went to orientation, I had my dorm all sorted out. Meanwhile, my mom was already planning to go to Romania to write a book for the year, so she was going to be out of the country. I was seventeen when I graduated, so when Buffy came up, it was really a hard choice because, originally, they only wanted me for five shows, which turned into more. But at the same time I was really, really excited about going to school. So we did the emancipation knowing that my mother was going to be out of the country and because I was ready to go out and be independent. In fact, the sole reason for the emancipation was so that I could be a legal adult for work, and especially the night shoots on Buffy, because otherwise, if you're classed as a child, you can't work past a certain hour. - Eliza Dushku
It's another example of bringing up Sarah's game and having another layer on the show, one who plays up her sexuality. Playing bad girls is better than playing good girls for an actor; there's always going to be more ripeness to it. There never seemed to be any tension between them that I ever witnessed. But certainly the characters themselves - you kind of have to raise your game. Her character was just the sexier version of what Buffy was, because Buffy is the good girl and more grounded. Buffy is beautiful and can play a great romantic scene, but to have someone with Eliza's sexuality out there, dancing, there's always that homoerotic quality that's going on between them, too. They were two sides of the same coin. - David Fury
The Mayor character becoming a daddy figure to the bad girl was great. Giles is always the father figure to Buffy. The Mayor became the father figure to Faith. It just created this great dichotomy. It's always fun to writer villains; it's fun to write bad girls, which is why we played around with Buffy in later years where she becomes a little bit of a bad girl with Spike. That's always much more of a fun place to be. - David Fury
Marti Noxon on season six: "So we started toying with the idea of adult responsibilities and then decided we probably have to go to nasty sex instead. We tried out a bunch of those in "Flooded" and kind of dispensed with them, because then after an episode we were kind of like, "Well, we probably don't want her worrying about the actual realities of adult life because it got boring."
Neat. Thank you for that. I should just whip this quote out anytime S6 defenders insist on the 'realism' of it as their reason of why it's their fave one. But it's always nice to hear from the horse's mouth when lack of talent is admitted. 'We can't write realism so lets just go to sex.'. Thanks for that Marti, and for confirming my believe that you sucked as a showrunner.
Is it weird that Joss wrote an episode for Alyson where riding people like ponies is a super obvious euphemism for non-consensual BDSM?
Why would the network be afraid of Joss? Because BtVS was doing so well?
If Joss rewrote most of the scripts, it becomes hard to claim that everything good about the shows was all despite of him.
Poor Marti. You're a great writer, but you should know better than to give free ammunition to the realism police. Flooded is a great episode, but I am fine with the saga of the faulty plumbing coming to an end.
Neat. Thank you for that. I should just whip this quote out anytime S6 defenders insist on the 'realism' of it as their reason of why it's their fave one. But it's always nice to hear from the horse's mouth when lack of talent is admitted. 'We can't write realism so lets just go to sex.'. Thanks for that Marti, and for confirming my believe that you sucked as a showrunner.
I think you're being awfully harsh on Noxon. First of all I reckon she is being at least partly tongue-in-cheek with the 'adult reponsibilities-to-nasty sex' comment. Secondly, you've got to identify what type of realism people see and find effective in the season, because you'll find there's a range of opinions. I do think there are good arguments to be made in favour of S6's emotional/psychological realism - I've said before that I believe Buffy's arc was probably the best, most consistent aspect of the season despite being tough to watch. Of course people will have different experiences of depression but I think for the most part it was portrayed rather well. I do however think they could have better integrated this with a portrayal of the more concrete realities/hardships of adult life - it didn't have to get boring.
One problem I have with the book is that there aren't any references or dates given for the quotations (from what I can tell from the preview anyway - am I right @Mylie?). It makes it hard to figure out their immediate context.
Nah. I love to attack the 'pains&chains' woman and her weird issues with sexuality and whatnot (see also 'She' on Angel).
First of all I reckon she is being at least partly tongue-in-cheek with the 'adult reponsibilities-to-nasty sex' comment. Secondly, you've got to identify what type of realism people see and find effective in the season, because you'll find there's a range of opinions. I do think there are good arguments to be made in favour of S6's emotional/psychological realism - I've said before that I believe Buffy's arc was probably the best, most consistent aspect of the season despite being tough to watch. Of course people will have different experiences of depression but I think for the most part it was portrayed rather well. I do however think they could have better integrated this with a portrayal of the more concrete realities/hardships of adult life - it didn't have to get boring.
The psychological 'realism'? On this show? Really? These are the same people who didn't get how people have to change when you change their memories (see memory change that came with Dawn) and lets not forget 'Normal Again' in S6. They just used the excuse of 'heaven' to have Buffy go 'bag girl-ish'. Everything else from the money issues to drug issues, you name it, was a bunch of BS. So I stand by my assessment.
And Marti can't do tongue-in-cheek. I've seen her in interviews, never saw her do that.
I like to give the credit for that mess of an episode to wünderkind David Greenwalt. It bears little resemblance to anything Marti wrote for BtVS, but it clearly foreshadows the Darla-story of S2.
NileQT87Tim Minear wrote the Darla arc of s2, not David Greenwalt. Minear was Mr. Dangel.
One problem I have with the book is that there aren't any references or dates given for the quotations (from what I can tell from the preview anyway - am I right @Mylie?). It makes it hard to figure out their immediate context.
Yes, you are right. And that is also the one problem I have with it. Not that I doubt the quotes are real, but It would add a great deal of credibility to it if we knew where they came from at least, and it would also put the quotes in their right context.
My other problem with the book is the very over the top idealization of Whedon (but that's probably my personal problem I guess, I don't hate the guy and I do think he's very smart and talented, but calling him a god he's a bit much. ) The introduction to the book (and to the chapters) are making me roll my eyes a lot.
My other problem with the book is the very over the top idealization of Whedon (but that's probably my personal problem I guess, I don't hate the guy and I do think he's very smart and talented, but calling him a god he's a bit much. ) The introduction to the book (and to the chapters) are making me roll my eyes a lot.
A supernatural femme fatale with mystical powers of sexual allure drives men crazy and make them lose all rational sense. Angel plays the role of white knight, but the woman is callous and borderline cruel.
To me, that resembles Angel S2 much more than I Only Have Eyes for You.
Very interesting thread.......love the Marti Noxon on S6 was not good enough to write a interesting story line so went with nasty sex and hence indirectly hasn't your own unemployment and the end of Buffy
Angel spends a pretty large part of s2 decidedly being - not - the white knight. The Trial is the exception (as is Pylea but that... just like an epilogue).
I also don't think that it's Darla's sexual allure that drives Angel crazy (sure she does rape him and that is part of the mind game she runs on him). But what really sends him over the edge is not her sexual allure but her damnation (and that relationship to his own damnation).
A supernatural femme fatale with mystical powers of sexual allure drives men crazy and make them lose all rational sense. Angel plays the role of white knight, but the woman is callous and borderline cruel.
I think to call that a foreshadowing is a stretch. Darla and Jheira's parallels don't really go beyond following the basic skeleton of the femme fatale archetype. Darla is far more complex than that - and she's not defined by her cruelty but her entire history with Angel. Besides Angel eventually worked alongside Jheira, didn't he? And as I recall although he was aroused/attracted, he didn't lose all rational sense.
I just regard 'She' as a misguided attempt at tackling FGM and which fell flat.
Oh 'She' is pure Noxon; the whole 'blunt as a spoon' metaphor has her fingerprints all over it. She tackles FGM/dis-empowerment of female sexuality the same way she tackles abusive boyfriends, drug abuse and rape- with sledge hammer subtly.
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