Submitted by Unknown on 2002-06-11
SMG / Buffy Movie - More Info

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Sarah Michelle Gellar may be appearing more and more on the big screen, with "Scooby-Doo" and "Harvard Man" coming out this summer, but don't count on her starring in a big-screen version of her TV show.
Read on for more...
by Mike Szymanski
Zap2it.com, TV News

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Sarah Michelle Gellar may be appearing more and more on the big screen, with "Scooby-Doo" and "Harvard Man" coming out this summer, but don't count on her starring in a big-screen version of her TV show.

The reason is that many folks may not even remember that there was a movie called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which failed miserably at the box office in 1992. The film, starring Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry and Paul Reubens, barely made $14 million.

However, the TV show has done very well -- it's entering its second season on UPN, and seventh overall, this fall -- and Gellar tells Zap2it during interviews for "Scooby-Doo" that despite rumblings of the idea, she'd be the first to protest even trying to bring "Buffy" back to the big screen -- even with the same TV cast.

"It didn't work as a movie, and I can't see taking one of our shows and just making it a movie; it doesn't make sense," Gellar says. "I feel like we're making one-hour movies every week anyway."

"When I first started the show, people all were asking me why I was making a TV show about a movie that failed, but I'm glad I did," she says. "We battled so long to get away from the reputation of this failed feature film and tried to do our own thing and separate ourselves from that movie."

Both "Buffys" sprung from the mind of Joss Whedon, but while the film played as a campy comedy, the TV series goes much deeper into its characters' lives and relationships with one another.

Wearing a white tank top at the interview on the backlot of Warner Bros., Gellar shows off the muscles she developed for the fight scenes she does as Buffy, and as Daphne in "Scooby-Doo." The movie was shot in Australia, and she commuted between there and the "Buffy" set in Los Angeles for two weeks at a time over six months last year.

Gellar remains surprised that "Buffy" is so popular.

"If you would have told me that it was going to go into its seventh season, I would have laughed," she says. "Every year we think we can't do any more, but then it comes to the end of the season and we want to continue."

She laments the ending of "Ally McBeal" and "The X-Files" and the cancellation of "Spin City," all of which lost steam in their final seasons. Although she has no specific predictions when "Buffy" may hang up her stakes, she doesn't want to wait until the show suffers a ratings slide.

"I feel like we're doing innovative television," she says. "Unlike some of the shows that ended this year with kind of a whimper, we want to go out with a bang. ... We want to go out on top."
The stress of it all.... & she doesn't work at Telstra....
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