Development Hell
Getting involved with Buffy.
“I came from the movie world. I was in development hell, as they say,”
Doug recalls. “I wrote the movie Harriet The Spy which has Michelle
Trachtenberg (who will play a new character, Dawn in season five) in it,
ironically, and I was ready for a change from the straight-up
screenwriting life.
“With the exception of Harriet The Spy, of which I remain very proud and
happy to have written, a lot of stuff gets swallowed up in movieworld
and not filmed at all.
“Here, I have a job where I'm given an opportunity to write and the
stuff that I do write is seen by millions of people weeks later. If
there is a rewrite, I know that it's been rewritten.”
“The cliché that's true is that television is a writer's medium and film
is a director's medium. That's not a slight to television directors,”
Doug is quick to point out, however. “We have some outstanding directors
and they love the stuff we do on Buffy. If you put it on a feature film
screen, people would go ‘wow, that was well directed, that was well
shot.’ We have a very cinematic look.”
Of course, one of the great plusses of television work, as opposed to
film, is the very fast turnaround time which allow writers such as Doug
almost immediate onscreen gratification and audience feedback for their work.
“It's a pretty fast gratification!" Doug laughs. “We churn out this
pretty high quality product and it's fun to see your work on the screen.
By and large we have been very lucky here that - unlike even a lot of
sitcoms where it's very group-written - when there's an episode written
by Jane Espenson or David Fury or Doug Petrie or Marti Noxon, it's
actually written by that person.
“As much as we are a group, with the fun of a group and the support of a
group, you also get the pride of feeling “I wrote that,” and that's a
great thing.
