PaleyFest: More Goodies from the Buffy Reunion

BuzzSugar — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:30:08 -0700

Earlier today, I told you about some of the greatest moments from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reunion at the Paley Festival in Los Angeles. There were so many good moments (and a few awkward ones) that they couldn't fit in one post, so here are a few more of the highlights:

Please, everyone, do me a favor. If ever you get a chance to ask a question at a panel like this, don't make it "Could you all tell me your favorite movies and what's on your iPod?" That's how the Q&A started, and it definitely sucked some energy out of the room. The panel played along gamely (Sarah Michelle Gellar's favorite: South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), but at some point, moderator Matt Roush interrupted to ask if we could please have a question that was actually about Buffy.
One of the most awkward moments came when a fan asked Amber Benson to explain why she'd decided to leave the show. She initially tried getting out of it with a joke ("I was having sex with Marlon Brando . . . "), then fumbled around and blamed it on scheduling and availability, and finally turned it around to say that the important thing was the Tara and Willow relationship.
Speaking of which, the only time Joss Whedon ever threatened to quit was when his bosses asked him if he could maybe not show the Tara/Willow kiss.
Also, Whedon apparently liked to take people for walks and tell them they were fired, and then say "ha, just kidding!"

Some more - including the chances of a Buffy movie or Broadway show - plus a video clip from the panel if you read more.

Emma Caulfield hd one of the night's funniest moments when she told the story of a fan asking her what she was thinking about during Anya's monologue from "The Body." She said she'd told the fan the truth - that she was really hungry and had to pee - and then realized she'd pulled an Anya, talking without thinking.
Whedon said he's spent time daydreaming about taking a Buffy musical - not "Once More, With Feeling" but a different Buffy musical story - to Broadway, but at the moment those are just dreams. When asked for a show of hands for who would join him, almost everyone on stage volunteered - except Gellar, who emphatically shook her head no.
Gellar admitted that season six, which made Buffy less kick-ass and more mopey, was hard for her because she'd always looked up to her character and wanted her to be strong. Whedon said he once said to Marti Noxon, "Buffy's been gone for too long," and they started to pull her out of the rabbit hole.
In terms of a movie someday, Whedon didn't dismiss the possibility but said the stars would all have to align for the right people to be available for the right project. That said, he said working with the cast again would be "really cool."
Random fun fact: Noxon's brother is the music supervisor of Weeds and is married to that show's creator, Jenji Kohan. Fun family!
Whedon was actually a little late to the panel because he was filming his Web musical, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Gellar is getting ready to start filming the indie film Veronika Decides to Die, James Marsters is filming Dragonball and is still appearing on Smallville and Torchwood, and Benson is writing a series of young-adult fantasy novels.

Here are some of the goodies in video form:

PaleyFest: The Buffy Cast Reunites!

BuzzSugar — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 06:30:14 -0700

Buffy, Tara, Spike, and Xander, together again! A large part of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the stage Thursday night at the PaleyFest in Los Angeles, revealing some secrets from their eight years of working on the series and taking questions from appreciative fans who often credited Buffy with shaping their whole lives.

And when I say appreciative, there really should be a capital A. This crowd of more than 800 cheered at everything - from the opening clip of one of Sarah Michelle Gellar's 1994 scenes on All My Children to the introduction of the panel's moderator. (In terms of cast members, James Marsters seemed to get the most applause, but show creator Joss Whedon was the only person to get a standing ovation.)

In attendance: Whedon, writer/producers Marti Noxon and David Greenwalt, and cast members Gellar, Marsters, Amber Benson (Tara), Nicholas Brendon (Xander), Emma Caulfield (Anya), Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), Seth Green (Oz), and Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn). Both Eliza Dushku and Alyson Hannigan were listed in the program, but neither showed - bummer. But the others kept the conversation lively - especially Green, who had a one-liner for everything, for better or worse.

The night really got going with a screening of the musical episode "Once More with Feeling" (not a sing-along, sadly). The episode proved to be a perfect starting point for talking about what's made Buffy so enduring, so for the scoop (update: here's part two of my report), just read more.

Noxon introduced the episode screening by saying that, frankly, the writers had some doubts about whether Whedon could actually pull off a musical: "We were - not nervous, we just hadn't ever seen him write a song before," she explained. For his part, Whedon said he was actually more terrified to put together "Hush," the mostly silent episode.
One theme that kept coming up was the way Buffy consistently pushed the envelope, whether by shifting the formats of its episodes, killing off beloved characters, or even taking Buffy herself into a deep, dark hole during the sixth season. Gellar cited the opening shot of "The Body," which was done in one long take, as another example. "We were constantly doing things that had never been done," she said. "We were constantly doing things that challenged both the audience and ourselves.
This is probably not news to anyone who's ever been to a Buffy event, but Nicholas Brendan talks so much like Xander, it's creepy.
Gellar on the initial reaction to getting the role of Buffy: "All of my friends felt sorry for me because I'm on a midseason replacement on a network nobody had heard of, based on a movie that wasn't all that."
Marsters had a great description of what went into the writing of Buffy, saying the writers took the worst things that happened to them in high school and "put fangs on it." Whedon said he and Greenwalt used to call Gellar "Jimmy Stewart" because she picked up his baton of having to deal with tremendous pain on film.
One of the biggest bursts of applause in the entire evening was when the moderator (TV Guide's Matt Roush) mentioned that the Spike/Buffy sex scene had recently been named the steamiest TV scene of all time by his magazine. Gellar noted that the way Buffy shows up on those lists, and the way the fan community has reacted to the show over the years, means way more to her than any Emmys the show could have won.
Gellar said she had no idea until five minutes before the panel took the stage that Buffy had gotten it on with slayer Satsu in the latest comic book. Trachtenberg also had no idea what had happened to Dawn in the comic series. "If these guys were real nerds," Whedon said, "we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Click here for more, including video highlights.

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