Long rambling Buffy entry ahead!

[frelling_tralk]

I recently finished reading Slayers and Vampires: The Complete Uncensored, Unauthorised, Oral History of Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel

The reviews for it seem in the low side, and I suppose the way it’s put together with just assorted bits from various interviews is a bit haphazard, but I really enjoyed it anyway. Even as a longtime Buffy fan, it had quite a bit of new info in there for me.

I found out a lot about Charisma Carpenter especially which I hadn’t been aware of before, she goes into a lot of detail about her anxiety and how hard it made her to learn lines. Apparently even when she was performing in talent shows when she was younger, she would have the routines memorised, but then her mind would just freeze up on the day and she would forget what she was meant to be doing. It was the same with learning lines, she said that people on the set were actually really great about it because they knew that it wasn’t just a case of being unprepared, that she really was trying. I read the authors elsewhere talking about how Sarah *did* give Charisma a hard time for constantly forgetting her lines, and so she was always worrying about being fired, but in the book at least she says that everyone in the cast was very understanding, it was more that she kept worrying about how sick of her they must be. She notes feeling very inadequate when the lead actress was 4 or 5 years younger than her and always knew all her lines without any problems, while Charisma kept struggling over her same few lines, and that it’s a really big deal when you’re costing a production money by not being able to get your lines in one or two takes. She was having meetings with the producers, her agents were being called, and she felt awful about it. She ended up taking anti-anxiety medication, she went to a psychiatrist, and the producers hired an acting coach for her after asking her what else they could do to help. She also struggled a lot with hitting her mark because she was so inexperienced, and one cameraman in particular would make her feel stupid for not getting it.

James Marsters notes that Sarah was great if you knew all your lines, hit your marks, and were prepared, but it was very hard for her because they were regularly filming up to 16/17/18 hours a day, it would often go up to 20 hours even and they would rarely see the sun. The show was known as Buffy The Weekend Slayer in the industry as they were filming for such unusually long hours, and it was especially draining on Sarah as she had to carry so much of the show.


Armin Shimerman (Principal Synder) talked about kind of rolling his eyes when he heard that the lead of Buffy was a 19 year former soap actress, but then he was so impressed at how good she was, and how she not only knew all her own lines, but everyone else’s as well. He knocked on her trailer a few days after starting there, and he apologised to Sarah and explained how he prejudged her. He states that she’s one of the best actresses she’s ever worked with, and they ended up becoming very close

Gareth Davies was a not very nice British producer who apparently made the atmosphere very unpleasant during the first season, he was firing people left and right, and the crew would hide when he came to set. He was nicknamed Doctor Death.

Britney Spears was a big fan of the show, and her reps contacted them to say she would love to guest-star on Buffy, so they had the idea to cast her as a sex slave robot as that’s how they felt she was presenting herself at her shows at the time. Britney balked and didn’t want to do that, she’d been more interested in doing something with the Scooby gang

David Fury comments that Go Fish ended up feeling frivolous and out of place because it was apparently a spec script from the very beginning of season 2, and they based it on what the show was doing in the first season with using classic monsters to reflect high school terrors, they didn’t know anything about the Angelus arc and how dark everything was going to get at the time they were scripting that. He acknowledges that it didn’t really work to air when it did and that it ended up being hated by the fans, although he thinks it would have been better appreciated if it wasn’t placed where it was

Oh and apparently most of Halloween was rewritten by Marti Noxon which I never realised before?

Marti and David Fury were both unhappy with Buffy Vs Dracula. David Fury thought it messed with the mythology of their world to bring in a famous fictional character from another universe, while Marti felt that the episode just ended up campy. They had been aiming for something more emotional and resonate than that, but they struggled with the tone. She thinks the character really deserved a longer arc

All the hair and make-up people would do a synchronised hand movement from above their head to ther waist, saying in unison, “She, who must be obeyed,” whenever Sarah’s name was mentioned. The director of photography (Raymond Stella) says that Sarah was always brilliant on set and acted very old for her age. He remembers that once she got really angry with the director of DoubleMeatPalace when he wanted to go in really close to her face in a shoot where she was coming out of a dumpster. Apparently she got Raymond Stella in a corner and laid it all out about the camera being too close and too wide, and he apologised and said he wasn’t thinking, he won’t let the director do it. That director never came back to the show.

Camden Toy played one of the Gentlemen, as well as the Ubervamp in season 7, and he said that him and Sarah would have long talks on set during season 7, and one day she commented that she had never seen him out of costume and had no idea what he really looked like heh. He said that she was very sweet and she was always worrying over whether people were comfortable like a Jewish mother, he was touched one day when she insisted on taking him over to craft services and serving food to him after he explained that he was waiting until he was out of costume to eat, and she said no no it will all be gone by then, so she helped him pick out the food and then hid the plates so that he would have something to eat later on when he was out of costume

James Marsters says they hated filming with the potentials in season 7, just because all the coverage needed when they had so many people in one room made the shoots a lot longer. He notes that they were there to set up a possible spin-off, which David Fury immediately follows up with,’No offence, but James doesn’t know what he’s talking about’ lol. David Fury says that absolutely the only spin-off that was ever discussed was one with Faith. He notes that nothing against Michelle as an actress, but Dawn never quite landed as a character in the way they hoped, and so they never considered her for a spin-off either, it was always Faith or nothing. Interestingly Marti Noxan came off as a little bit bitter about that to me? She talked about how Eliza was more into movies than tv (not really true as she passed on the Faith spin-off to do Tru Calling), and she made a comment about how it was interesting that Faith was a fan favourite, yet Eliza didn’t seem as into the fans

Oh and there were a few different comments on how well Sarah and Eliza got on, even though Faith was brought in as a rival for Buffy, the actresses themselves really liked one another and there was never any competition there. Eliza notes that a lot of Faith was based on her own personality, and she had build up this persona of being this tough Boston chick after having a hard time in school. Charisma comments on what a whirlwind Eliza was on set



Charisma talks about being very surprised and touched when Joss and David Greenwalt made her the offer to be the leading lady on Angel, and that was a nice vote of confidence for her after all her struggles with lines holding up production on Buffy. And then of course it gets into the problems with season 4 of Angel, she comments that she really hated that season and it felt very icky having to kiss Vincent’s character when she was pregnant.

David Fury comments that he likes Charisma as a person, but that she did tend to live her life fairly obliviously without ever considering the ramifications on her role on the show. They would get very frustrated when she would change her hairstyle in the middle of an episode, or when she got a bunch of tattoos including a cross on her wrist that they had to keep covering up because it was a vampire show. And with her pregnancy it was felt that again it wasn’t timed well to help with production and for them to write around it, she just walked in and said by the way I’m pregnant right at the beginning of the season. They had spend weeks arcing out the season with Cordelia playing an active role as the main villain, and instead they ended up having to scramble and do another pregnancy related storyline after they had just done a pregnancy arc with Darla. It was then planned for Cordelia to be the one to put her fist through Jasmine at the end, but they ended up changing that to Connor after Charisma couldn’t work a lot of hours, and so they had her in the coma instead for the end of the season

Charisma comments that she didn’t think her pregnancy would be that big a deal because other shows would have a character stand behind a desk, but instead she feels like her pregnancy was seen as being the last straw. She did try and contact Joss over the summer to tell him earlier, but she couldn’t get hold of him. And I always thought it was supposed to be Joss who asked her to come back for an episode, then revealed that Cordelia was being killed, but in the book she says it was David Fury? She states that she really didn’t want to come back at first, but she eventually decided too for the fans. Her two requests to David Fury were for a certain amount of money, and for Cordelia to not die. It was only after she signed the contract that David decided to tell her that they were killing Cordelia and she was really upset, but he asked her to hear out his script which changed everything for her. She also notes that Joss left her a bouquet of flowers in her trailer, and a really nice note which she had framed where he thanked her for coming back

David Greenwalt said that Glen was constantly screwing around on the Angel set and laughing about forgetting his lines, as well as often being hungover, so one day he really told him off and Glen ended up crying, but ultimately nothing changed. Glen and David Boreneaz really bonded and could get very rowdy together, David Greenwalt said some people felt that Glen was having a negative impact on David Boreneaz, but he personally never saw any problems with David, and he would joke with him that if you misbehave I’m calling your Mom and Dad

James Marsters used to be very jealous of David because his girlfriend had a crush on him, even though David was actually always very nice and supportive. On his first Angel episode James was secretly wearing lifts in his boots, they made it a lot harder when he was doing stunts as it was kind of like walking in high heels. When he came on as a regular for season 5 he thought it would be too pathetic to wear lifts all the time around David, and so by then he needed to just accept that he was shorter than David (aww anyone else get the feeling that James overshares!)

David Greenwalt ended up leaving after the third season of Angel purely because of a contract dispute, he was very insulted that Fox wanted to cut his money, he kept asking Joss to call someone, but Joss was very involved in Firefly at that time and not really present

Christian Kane seemed oddly obsessed with not wanting to be ‘beat up by chicks’, saying that’s why he originally wanted to leave the show. He was also very upset that Lindsay was killed ‘by a flunky’, and thought that he should have been there at the end as he and David were the only original characters still left on the show. He comes off as a bit of a jerk to me to be honest!

Steven S. Deknight said a lot of people were very pissed off that David was so gracious to do a cameo on Buffy’s final episode, without even asking for a lot of money, so he expected the same consideration back ‘which he did not get’

And finally Ian Woolf (first assistant on Angel) said that the cast were all happy to be there for the first couple of seasons, but then typically they get restless and don’t realise how good they have it. He said that Alexis Denisof was one of those people which really surprised me (he always seemed very gung ho about the part of Wesley?), supposedly he complained a lot and really wanted out. Then he had trouble finding work after Angel, and when Kelly Manners came across him at an audition he acknowledged that they didn’t realise how good they had it at the time. Amy Ackler was still enjoying the show however, and seeing the save angel billboards got her hopes up a little bit that they might get another season after all

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_profiterole_/]

Thanks for sharing all this! :-)

I would have loved a Faith show so much! I watched one season of Tru Calling and that's where I first saw Matt Bomer, iirc. I was glad she did Dollhouse afterwards, because I liked it more than Tru Calling.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

No worries :) Haha I didn’t realise how long it would turn out though, reading it back now it looks like I got a bit carried away!

And yeah I was surprised at David Fury saying that the potentials were *never* there for a spin-off, because I definitely the rumours that a lot of different spin-offs were being considered (Willow running a slayer school, a Dawn spin-off with her new friends from Lessons, a Faith spin-off with Spike), but he was very clear that they only ever considered doing a show with Faith. And that makes sense I suppose as that was the one that I remember being the most seriously discussed definitely, and seeming like it was going to happen at one point

I never saw Tru Calling, but I really enjoyed Dollhouse as well, and think that Eliza was very underrated in it :) It bugs me a little how so many fans dismiss Echo as the weak link, wishing that one of the other actresses was the lead instead, I thought that Eliza was great as Echo :shrugs:

[roxymissrose.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Makes me think much more was going on than we knew. I'd heard that that Cordelia story-line on Angel was a hot mess--I don't think I've ever hated a storyline more.

I still miss not having Alexis on my TV screen.

Christian Kane...lol! I kind of figured he was an asshole, but I can't help but like him anyway. :D

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

He came off as such an asshole to me tbh lol, it seemed like he was just never happy playing a lawyer in a suit instead of a real physical badass

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

THANKS FOR THIS JUICE!!

so they had the idea to cast her as a sex slave robot as that’s how they felt she was presenting herself at her shows at the time. Britney balked and didn’t want to do that

lmao Team Britney

Oh and there were a few different comments on how well Sarah and Eliza got on, even though Faith was brought in as a rival for Buffy, the actresses themselves really liked one another and there was never any competition there.

♥

It was only after she signed the contract that David decided to tell her that they were killing Cordelia and she was really upset, but he asked her to hear out his script which changed everything for her. She also notes that Joss left her a bouquet of flowers in her trailer, and a really nice note which she had framed where he thanked her for coming back

Hmmm.... Interesting. (I seriously never know what to make of the Charisma v Joss pregnancy drama, the story seems to change every time????)

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Yeah I thought that was a bit confusing because in the infamous convention clip Charisma is talking along the lines of feeling so betrayed at being tricked into coming back for Cordelia to die, only hearing the script idea convinced her otherwise because ‘Joss is good’, but then in her interview for this book she talks about that in regards to David Fury. (It didn’t sound like she had any contact with Joss at all on the set of season 5 actually, other than the flowers and the thank you note in her trailer.) Which makes sense because the script was written and directed by David Fury, and I believe he was actually the one who had the idea to bring Cordelia back for the 100th episode after plans with Sarah fell through, so that seems like one thing the fans blame Joss for (bringing Cordelia back to kill her off without being upfront with Charisma about it) that he really didn’t have anything to do with

Joss never did write all that much for Ats Cordelia actually looking back... In Waiting In The Wings she was written as shallow and bored during the opera, and then spend most of the episode possessed, in his season 4 episode she’s regressed to her high school self, and his season 2 episode was mostly a showcase for Angel and Lorne, so it seems like he was never particularly interested in writing for the more mature Cordelia on Ats for whatever reason

[rogueslayer452.livejournal.com]

All of this is so fascinating. I knew some of these things, but not everything. I like reading behind the scene tidbits.

I knew that Britney Spears wanted to be on BTVS and was offered that role of the robot in the sixth season, but I wasn't aware that she was a huge fan of the show! That is super cool. I always thought it was due to scheduling conflicts that didn't have that happen in the end, but if they just wanted her to be a sex slave robot because of how she presented herself in the media that is kind of uncomfortable. I would have preferred it if she appeared as, say, just a regular girl or something that didn't hypersexualize her in anyway. That would've been more interesting, tbh.

(I do wonder if there's been any information on the casting of Ashanti in that one episode in the seventh season.)

I remember the actor who played Dracula also did a TV movie about Dracula that premiered around the same time Buffy vs. Dracula aired, looking and acting pretty much the same, and I always believed that there was a deal made to include that to promote that movie to have him appear on the show or something. I do agree that it didn't really mesh with their mythology on the show, though. If they wanted to add Dracula into the mythos (promotion for that movie or no), it should've been done better to fit the structure of the show rather than a one-off.

I do love Dawn, but I agree that she wouldn't have been able to carry her own spin-off. Sadly, I also think fandom's poor reception to her character must've affected this as well, because even today people still outright hate Dawn for reasons I still don't understand.

and she made a comment about how it was interesting that Faith was a fan favourite, yet Eliza didn’t seem as into the fans

That is a rather odd thing for her to say, and ITA that it reads rather bitter and passive aggressive to me. Mostly because I know that Eliza has been a huge among the convention circuit in recent years and has been very vocal about her gratitude and appreciation of the fans. I don't know when Marti must've said that, but I have always assumed that even if an actor doesn't actively engage with the fans it doesn't mean that they don't appreciate the fan support. So I don't know what Marti's issue is. Also, most of the actors did movies during BTVS or after, but Eliza ultimately ended up turning down the potential Faith spin-off for Tru Calling which she has gone on record saying that she wanted to do something different but would have liked to have done spin-off had there been more negotiations further down the line. I am still sad that we never did get that Faith spin-off though (esp with the concept of her riding a motorcycle) or that Giles spin-off, Ripper, something I wished we could've gotten even in comic form.

Every time I read about what Charisma went through during the fourth season of Angel I get really sad and angry on her behalf. She did nothing wrong, and yet she got punished for it. I wasn't aware of all of this happening when the show was airing, because I didn't pay that close attention to the rumors and fandom conversations during that time, but years later when I learned of the drama and controversy surrounding her pregnancy and the reason why she was written off/killed off it just makes me so angry and upset. She didn't deserve that. I also makes me wonder how often actresses are penalized for getting pregnant or changing something about their appearance, threatening their careers. :/

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Nothing was said about Ashanti, I guess that everyone involved just wanted to forget all about that one :P

And yeah David Fury was saying he got the idea from taking his daughter to one of Britney’s shows and feeling like she came across as very robotic and ‘I’m here to please you’, so I can see why she wouldn’t be thrilled at the character they presented to her. I think it still comes across in the finished episode that they intended for April to be played by Britney though, no offence to the actress who was very pretty, but the reactions to April always seemed so over the top to me in the episode. The way Anya and Tara were getting jealous at the ‘Who’s that’ reactions from their partners, the way people were practically drooling, it all felt like quite a pointed way of of winking to the audience that here is a character being played by a really famous sex symbol. It makes me wonder if it was only at the last minute that they found out Britney wasn’t going to do it?

And it sounds like no one was particularly happy with the compromises made for season 4, I just wish that the writers could have been more professional when it came to letting their anger with Charisma affect how the character was being portrayed. It was awful when Charisma was all dressed up in the dominatrix type outfits when she was heavily pregnant, and making out with the Beast with, ‘give Mama some sugar’. It felt purposely degrading in a way, you could tell that Charisma had just given up by then :( And certainly zero effort was put into protecting the character of Cordelia, for practically an entire season there was just nothing to remind us of the real Cordelia with even a few small scenes of her fighting to regain control of her body and be heard

[elisi]

OOOh, fascinating. Thank you for writing all this up!

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

You're welcome :)

[tamsin]

Thank you so much for writing this post! The book is going straight on my wish list. I really feel with Charisma and her struggles with her anxiety.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I’d definitely recommend it, I’m someone who has kept up with online gossip and rumours about Buffy for years, and even I found out a ton of new info from it, I’m was really impressed.

And same :( I had no idea that Charisma even had anxiety, and from everything she said it sounded like it really ruined a lot of the Buffy experience for her. She talks about how it should have been a good time in her life with being able to afford a new house and having a steady job, but the work situation was becoming such a big deal that she just couldn’t relax and stop worrying, and then all that anxiety was only making her worse at remembering her lines

[infinitewhale.livejournal.com]

Started reading at your rec.

Can I just say how much I hate when they include essayists in these things?

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Ah I know what you mean, I did find the beginning kind of long-winded from what I remember! It seemed like they included every possible persons opinions on vampires and vampire shows that they could possibly think of, and then broke it all up into different sound bites in a pretty random way...

Honestly I was just intrigued to get to the behind the scenes stuff that I haven’t been aware of before, that was what made the book one of the more interesting anniversary releases for me, I ended it feeling like I had a lot more insight into what was going on behind the scenes

[tasabian.livejournal.com]

Very interesting read - thanks! Sounds to me like Sarah got unfairly slammed as bitchy, when she was just very prepared and professional. Poor Charisma - I would never have guessed that she was suffering through so much behind the scenes.

I will always cherish "Go Fish" for my first sighting of Wentworth Miller (love the scene where he hides behind Buffy for protection!) and the scene where Giles locks all the "Fish Boys" in the library cage.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I agree, with everything that’s come out about how Hollywood treats women recently, I found it kind of inspiring tbh to read about how confident and in charge Sarah was on Buffy. It’s easy to see her as being strident or unreasonable to fly off the handle about close-up shots, or to make demands of her hair and make-up team, but at the end of the day she was the one on camera that was going to be judged by millions of people, I’d want to make sure that the team around me were getting it right too.

And Go Fish did have its moments, I will just never understand why they decided to place a total filler instalment right after a cliffhanger that was specifically designed to build hype leading into the finale. Different times I suppose *g*

[molly_may]

Yay! I was hoping someone on my flist would read this book and let me know if it had any worthwhile tidbits of information. I've never heard that about Charisma's anxiety before, so that was interesting. I'd also never heard the details of Greenwalt's departure; honestly, it doesn't reflect great on Joss that he wouldn't take the time to go to bat for someone who was so instrumental in creating and running Angel.

They would get very frustrated when she would change her hairstyle in the middle of an episode, or when she got a bunch of tattoos including a cross on her wrist that they had to keep covering up because it was a vampire show. And with her pregnancy it was felt that again it wasn’t timed well to help with production and for them to write around it, she just walked in and said by the way I’m pregnant right at the beginning of the season.

Ugh. At the beginning of this paragraph, I'm on the side of the producers, and by the end of it I'm on Charisma's side. I can see how tattoos and haircuts could add time and money to the production and how frustrating it must have been if she did things like that carelessly, without thinking through the ramifications. But...pregnancies happen, and sometimes they can't be timed out to the perfect moment. Given that they didn't really want to tackle another pregnancy plot right after Darla's, they could have chosen to either hide it for as long as possible and then write her out of the last half of the season (maybe Cordelia could have been offered an acting role out of town, or something), or they could have chosen to incorporate her pregnancy in a way that didn't turn the character into a villain.

David Fury says that absolutely the only spin-off that was ever discussed was one with Faith.

I always got the feeling that the network was interested in the Slayer School spin-off idea, but I don't know if the producers/writers were ever really behind it. A Faith spin-off could maybe have worked (and would probably have been better than Tru Calling), but I wouldn't have wanted to see Spike on it ('cause I'm a petty shipper).


Christian Kane seemed oddly obsessed with not wanting to be ‘beat up by chicks’, saying that’s why he originally wanted to leave the show. He was also very upset that Lindsay was killed ‘by a flunky’,

UGHH.

Anything about Sarah's Type A professionalism just makes me like her more, tbh.

Thanks for this write-up!

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

There was a lot more gossip about what was going on behind the scenes with Ats and the writers actually, I mostly just focused on the Bts gossip though! It sounded like Joss wasn’t even aware of what was going on with Fox and David Greenwalt, that he was just so wrapped up in Firefly that he wasn’t answering calls, and then DG said that by the time that Joss did get involved and try and do something it was too late for him by then

And yep, I can see why changing your hairstyle without advance notice would be a big deal in tv terms, I remember that the WB were practically forbidding leading actresses to cut their hair after what happened with Felicity lol. I always understand it as Charisma literally cut her hair in the middle of a season 2 episode, just showing up with short hair on the day without telling anyone, and so that totally threw the continuity of scenes. Charisma herself talks about her pregnancy being seen as the last straw, so I guess that her already being seen as having a pattern of not considering production needs more all had an effect on how mad everyone got with her as well. It was a sad way to end things though

they could have chosen to incorporate her pregnancy in a way that didn't turn the character into a villain.

Definitely, I guess the issue was that they always originally intended for Cordelia to be the main season 4 villain, and so weren’t prepared to change that? I know that Joss was excited about her character having a big throw down with Angel and the pregnancy and Jasmine was their compromise on that. Honestly they should have just come up with a whole different arc once they knew that Charisma was going to be heavily pregnant in the back half of the season, she deserved to have at least 5 or 6 episodes off for maternity leave.

And ditto on Sarah :)

[geekslave.livejournal.com]

Some interesting tidbits. Had no idea about Charisma's anxiety. It sounds really tough, but also that TPTB were patient with her.

That was nice of Shimerman to apologize to SMG for pre-judging her.

No matter what the producers thought of Spears or her persona, I think it's kind of rude of them to offer her a role that's basically supposed to make fun of her after she came to them and told them how much they loved their show.

I actually like Go Fish for the most part. It probably helps that Xander's my favorite and, shallowly, I loved his speedo scene.

I actually just watched "Buffy" yesterday and I was looking through the episode list and it was the first time I'd thought about "Buffy vs.Dracula" in ages. It definitely felt like a huge wasted opportunity.

Sweet story of Camden Toy and SMG.

I can get the producers getting pissed at Charisma changing her hair in the middle of shooting an episode - that's not cool. The tattoo thing feels like "eh, just cover it up with make-up." I also get not loving not getting heads up on the pregnancy, but these things happen. Lots of pregnancies aren't planned. And they didn't have to write another pregnancy storyline. Like Charisma mentioned, lots of shows deal with this and find ways to hide it. They didn't need to treat her like that. And, while it's great she came around on her last episode them basically tricking her into signing a contract and then telling her they were killing her off is massively unfair.

Stacey

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I actually just watched "Buffy" yesterday and I was looking through the episode list and it was the first time I'd thought about "Buffy vs.Dracula" in ages. It definitely felt like a huge wasted opportunity

I felt like their biggest problem there was with casting honestly. It seemed like Marti wanted him to come across as more seductive and mesmerising in her script, but the actor seemed like he was more interested in doing the sort of campy performance that would have fit better in the Buffy movie. The writers always have the characters making jokes about the villains, but it’s when you turn the villains themselves into a joke that it just doesn’t work

And yeah it’s good that Charisma was ultimately happy with the script, but I don’t really understand why they weren’t upfront with her about what they were thinking of doing, especially when she had specifically said that she didn’t want Cordelia to be killed off

And I agree that they didn’t need to treat her like that, that’s my biggest issue with all that, you could tell that they were taking out some frustrations with how they were portraying the character, and it all felt a bit nasty for a while there

[daria234.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting stuff! Thank you for sharing it.

Ugh, I love Christian Kane's characters, but sheesh. Eliot Spencer would be fine with getting beat up by women. (Not that way - you know what I mean). Sometimes a character >>> actor.

I love how much James Marsters overshares. One of my all time fave celebrity interviews is the one where he describes how much his gf liked directing his and Barrowman's kissing scene.

I never see Alyson Hannigan dish for some reason? Maybe she's private.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Lol yeah James seems to have NO filter, and sometimes he says stuff that make me feel kind of awkward for him, but at the same time he’s so self-deprecating that you end up smiling by the end anyway *g* He said that at his audition for Spike he was trying to intimidate the other actors by doing different Shakespeare monologues while they were all waiting, and it was only afterwards that he realised what a complete idiot he was making of himself XD

I don’t think they used any Alyson quotes for some reason, the bulk of the book was mostly hearing from the writers

[ragnarok-08.livejournal.com]

Wow!

Thanks for sharing all of this :D

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

No problem:)

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the share.Now i really do want to read this book.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

It's definitely worth a read for Buffy fans IMO :)

[sueworld2003.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all this. Some of it I'd heard before, but some now, so It made for an interesting read. :D

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

There was a *lot* more gossip in there, but these were the main bits that I haven’t heard being discussed online before, so I wanted to share them :)

[kazzy-cee.livejournal.com]

That was really interesting - thanks for sharing. Some bits and piece there that were new to me. I'm surprised the cast of Angel were wanting out of a regular gig like that! Surely they must have realised it's a golden egg to be part of a long running show?!!

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I was really surprised about that too! I have heard that it’s very typical of young actors who are just starting trying out to end up regretting signing 6 year contracts for a tv show, and they decide that they want to do movies instead. That was a big issue with actors from teen shows like The O.C, Roswell, Gossip Girl, and I suppose it doesn’t help that those are generally shows that aren’t particularly highly thought of in the industry either. But I wouldn’t have guessed that was going on with the Angel actors, Alexis especially was getting so much meaty material that Wesley was surely an actors dream role, but that was what was said anyway, that most of them were frustrated after the first couple of years and were getting restless to do something else

[stolenglimpse.livejournal.com]

What about a spin-off with Giles that was supposed to be centered on his Ripper days? Man, I know I read about that one way before the Faith spin-off. And I had no clue it was supposed to be with Spike. Never heard that one about Willow and a a Slayer school. Never heard about Dawn but even if I didn't necessarily hate her, I didn't like her either but she kinda grew on me (mostly with season 7)

I like that books like these give us both sides to stories heard like Charisma's pregnancy in season 4 of Angel. Like, all I had heard was how she had acted as if she was better than everyone else and who cares I'm pregnant they have to deal with it but then they destroyed the character as punishment and such.

I still think they really destroyed her character and thank God for You're Welcome, but still. I loved her in Angel a lot lot lot lot more than in Buffy though she had her moments.

Now I need that book like I need the Grimoires and anything ese that came out recently!

And I need a rewatch of Buffy.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I liked Cordelia a lot more on Ats too, she became a more well-rounded character on there, while most of the time on Bts she was written as pretty shallow and superficial quite honestly.

I was thinking recently that it might be fun to have a Buffy re-watch, I was going to start with season 4, but argh so much else to catch up on that I just keep putting it off!

[snogged.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a fascinating read.
Thanks for sharing some factoids!

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

No problem :)

[tinny]

oooh interesting! thanks for typing that all up! I'm (maybe a bit meanly) happy about Christian Kane being not that nice, since I've been surrounded by a bunch of Kaniacs in the Librarians fandom and I never got his appeal. James Marsters, otoh, I've seen live at a con, and he's such a gracious and professional person with a ton of patience for immature fans. I hadn't expected that and it really made me respect him a lot.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

I did like Christian Kane’s character on Ats, but yeah everything he said made me not that impressed with him as a person quite honestly, massive eye roll at the number of times he brought up that he kept asking the producers to stop having girls hitting me. Like what a weird attitude to have when you’ve talking about a character?! And it wasn’t like Lindsay was written as a complete wimp or anything either, he was just more of a lawyer and professional than he was a physical badass, but why even take on the role if it bothered him *that much* that he couldn’t feel like a real macho man?

I met James Marsters once at a con years ago, I was sooo shy and awkward back then lol, but he definitely seemed very friendly, it really came across that he was making the effort to connect with his fans during the autograph sessions and photo ops