How did you become Executive Producer on the Buffy Animated Series?
I was working as a writer/producer on a show that I'm not sure they have in England yet called Maurice Sendak's Seven Little Monsters. Maurice Sendak, the creator of Where The Wild Things Are, had written another children's book called Seven Little Monsters - a very, very simple story about seven monsters. Each had a name that was a number: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven. I took that and adapted it.
It's on PBS (Public Broadcast) over here as an animated series and we're about to go into our third season of the show. It's great fun. It's sort of the Adams Family meets Maurice Sendak, so it's very boisterous, with Marx Brothers references and things I really like in terms of comedy.
In the middle of all this, I got a call from my manager asking whether or not I was a fan of Buffy. You can't watch television and be a comic fan and not be and so I said, "Yeah!". So they said, "Would you like to go over and have a meeting with Joss?" I went really in order to meet Joss. I didn't know there was going to be any possibility of getting the job - in fact, I didn't even know what the job was - I just wanted to meet Joss.
It was one of those very strange things where not only did I want to meet him, but as I found out when I got there, he had wanted to meet me and I had no idea why he wanted to meet me. I immediately went to some awful place where I owed him money in some weird way, but as it turns out, as many people know, Joss is a comic book fan and he was a fan of my writing comics.
It was an odd way to meet somebody in Hollywood, because we're normally only used to meeting people through movies or television or something like that. Joss liked comics, wanted to talk about comics then wanted to talk about Buffy then talk about Buffy: Animated.
