November 27, 2010
IT WAS the story the fans have long been waiting for: the return of Buffy, feminist icon and slayer of vampires - and this time on the big screen. Take that Twilight! But any good cheer was quickly drowned out by rage and upset this week as it emerged that Warner Bros was planning to make its film version of the cult TV series without Joss Whedon, the show's creator - and, it appears, without any of the cast of the long-running TV series.
Whedon reacted with fury. ''This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths - just because they can't think of an original idea of their own,'' he said. ''I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, after.''
The writer of the new screen adaptation is Whit Anderson, a relatively unknown actor with only a smattering of screen credits, the most high profile being a small role in the Jim Carrey film Yes Man.
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''I was the same age as Buffy, and it was so rare to have a female lead character on TV in those days who was strong and capable and smart but also allowed to be feminine,'' she told the Los Angeles Times.
Whedon appears to have fallen victim to Buffy's unusual history. Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a TV phenomenon when it premiered in 1997. It ended up running for 145 episodes and seven series, charting the life of an ordinary teenage girl who happens to kill vampires and other monsters by night.
The show hit upon a mix of ordinary teenage angst, humour and gore that earned it a devoted fanbase.
Whedon used the series to explore increasingly off-the-wall story ideas - including the episode entitled Once More with Feeling, in which the cast sing almost every line of dialogue.
But Buffy had originally seen the light of day five years earlier, in a feature film script, which Whedon had sold to director-producer team Fran and Kaz Kuzui. The first Buffy film emerged in 1992, with Kristy Swanson as the eponymous vampire-killer alongside Luke Perry and Rutger Hauer, but scored only moderate returns. Whedon is known to have been less than happy with it. After he was approached to turn the concept into a TV series, the Kazuis acted as hands-off executive producers alongside him. It was very much Whedon's show, but the Kuzuis retained their rights.
Last year, no doubt motivated by the continuing success of teen vampire films such as the Twilight series, the Kazuis said they hoped to revive the Buffy character.
No casting details have been announced, but one of the producers, Charles Roven, has dropped a hint that Buffy will be an older character this time. ''This is not your high school Buffy. She'll be just as witty, tough and sexy as we all remember her to be,'' he said.
Whedon is cynical about the likelihood of teen-vampire overkill - ''But seriously, are vampires even popular any more?'' - but is also realistic about the way the movie business operates. In an email to entertainment website E! Online, he wrote: ''Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this … I don't love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I'm also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was … I can't wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill. I can, however, take this time to announce that I'm making a Batman movie. Because there's a franchise that truly needs updating. So look for The Dark Knight Rises Way Earlier Than That Other One and Also More Cheaply and in Toronto, rebooting into a theatre near you.''
The new film's producers may have reason to fear anger among Buffy fans. The power of the community was shown when Whedon's 2002 sci-fi series Firefly was dropped after only 11 episodes by its parent network, Fox. After a campaign to save the show, Firefly fans persuaded another studio, Universal, to put a feature film, Serenity, into production.
This same vociferous online community has been registering its outrage at plans to produce a new Buffy film, among them the showbiz blogger Perez Hilton. ''We are not liking this,'' he said. ''Without creator Joss Whedon or the original cast, we're afraid this has failure written all over it. It's going to have to be pretty spectacular if it's going to impress us.''
Mike Goodridge, the editor of trade paper Screen International, feels it is too soon to write the film off. ''Charles Roven is pretty cool. He's the man that made the Batman movies with Chris Nolan, so he knows what he's doing - and lots of people were against that at the time. Remember, Buffy was nothing as a movie, and the audiences are very different from TV - Warner know that people have an appetite for revamps. I think it's a great idea.''
Guardian
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