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Writer/Producer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
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| Continued from previous page... ANDRIODS DO SO HAVE EMOTION! Fresh out of college and degree in hand makes for a happy girl with a goal and a direction. And a lot of talent ain’t bad either. "The very first (job) was that I sold a story to Star Trek ~ The Next Generation. It never became an episode but that was the very first one." Nothing like jumping into the deep end! "Well I had been trying for awhile." Jane tells us, "I mean there were a lot of things that didn’t turn into jobs. When I was in college I knew that you got in by writing a sample script. So the first sample TV script I wrote after the M*A*S*H that I wrote in Jr. High was a ‘Perfect Strangers’ of all things. I got a list from the writer’s guild of accredited agents and I started calling them. One very nice agent talked with me and said ‘Perfect Strangers’ is not a spec-able show. No one will read a Perfect Strangers spec.
Star Trek - TNG: "For one to act human, I always think of Jane now, from her stint on Ellen and the episodes she writes on Buffy as being a comedic writer. So I asked if she always pictured herself writing comedy. "Yes, conveniently the first thing I wrote was a sit-com, the Perfect Strangers that didn’t go anywhere. I really was thinking of myself as a sit-com writer except that Star Trek was the place with the open door and I was a huge Star Trek TNG fan. So the specs that I wrote were generally pretty flat out funny. The one that they called me in on was probably the most humorous of the three. I wrote three samples that I sent in to them and they called me based on the second one that I sent in. It had to do with Data simulating emotion, on the theory that maybe if I correctly capture what it looks like to be angry or in love or whatever, that I will feel it. So it was a lot of these, sort of broad comedy holo-deck scenes of him mimicking emotions and stuff and it was, it was just," she loses thought laughing, "I’ve always considered myself a comedy writer." Actor’s will always attest that performing comedy is much harder than performing drama, does that hold true when writing comedy as opposed to writing drama? "Not for me," enthuses Jane, "I find it very hard to do the things that Marti Noxon (BtVS Co-Executive Producer) does so well which is just completely, sort of, open a vein and write really emotional, meaningful conversations. My instincts is always to go to the funny and sometimes it’s the wrong instinct. Sometimes I have to really rein myself in and say ‘okay this is just going to be emotional’. It’s quite a task for me to write those scenes and to make it sound right and feel right and feel true. I find that very hard, I find it much easier to write jokes." She agrees with the performance issues and explains a bit more about that in conjunction with writing jokes. "I know jokes are hard to perform and they take some getting used to. They take some practice, to learn how to write a good joke but I find it much easier. Although I will say that the kind of jokes in Buffy are easier. Sit-coms often have to have what are called ‘hard’ jokes, which are much more written and constructed and they are fun to write. I love writing that kind of joke but they are time consuming so it actually takes just as long to write a sit-com script as it does to write a drama script even though the sit-com script is half the length." ENTER THE BUFFY: Not very long into her career came the opportunity of a life time. And as with Tim Minear's entrance into the world of Joss, Jane also had a few choices to sift through before making the obvious one. She picks up with the ending of the Ellen series. "We knew that Ellen was going to be cancelled and my agent asked me ‘what show, what’s your dream job?’ and I said Buffy and I think he was a little reluctant to have me make the switch from half hour to hour because you kind of have to start over, it’s a different community. At the time not a lot of people were crossing over. I think it’s more common now because there are no sit-coms right now so they have to go somewhere and there are a lot of these intriguing comedic hours that need funny people.
Jane worked on the fifth "And they told me they were going to set up a meeting for me with Joss and that I should come back in with stories to pitch. I went home and I developed maybe five different episode ideas, came in and met with Joss. Pitched them to him and David Greenwalt who was the Co-Exec at the time, who’s now the show runner at Angel. And they liked a couple of my ideas," Including Band Candy, "including Band Candy, that’s right. I had also been offered Mad About You at the same time. And my old show runner at Ellen was trying to see if he could set up a deal for me at Disney so I could work with him on whatever his next project was so I had to actually delay Joss over a weekend and not give him the answer yet because I was trying to figure out these other things.
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