29/08/2026
I never knew... she was a saint!
The show that handed a generation of gay kids Willow and Tara was paid for by Dolly Parton and her openly gay manager, and neither of them put their name on it.
Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, founded Sandollar Productions in 1985 with Sandy Gallin, the manager who ran her career for decades and who married his partner Bryan Fox in 2014. In 1992 the company bought a strange little script from an unknown writer named Joss Whedon about a cheerleader who kills vampires. The film made 16.6 million dollars and sank. Sandollar backed the television version anyway. Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on The WB in 1997, ran seven seasons, and spun off Angel. Parton was a producer on all of it and her name never appeared in the credits.
She was not a silent partner either. Gail Berman, the Sandollar executive who pushed the movie into a series, told the New York Times that when Parton found out Berman's cut of the Buffy royalties was smaller than what the male producers were getting, Parton wrote her a personal check to close the gap.
Sandollar also made Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, the documentary about the AIDS Memorial Quilt narrated by Dustin Hoffman. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1990, at a moment when most of Nashville would not say the word out loud.
Sarah Michelle Gellar spent Tuesday posting a clip of Parton talking about the show on Watch What Happens Live in 2021. Buffy trended for hours. It took her dying for most people to find out who paid for Sunnydale.