Marti Noxon

Martha Mills Noxon (born August 25, 1964) is an American television and film writer, director, and producer.

Noxon graduated from Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1987 with a B.A. in Theater Arts.

Initially Noxon wanted to be an actor because it seemed glamorous, but after trying for a while realized it was not something that she wanted to do.

She said that she had always been told that writing was her strength, and eventually that was what she focused on.

She met producer Rick Rosenthal while working as a waitress and eventually became his assistant.

She then became TV writer Barbara Hall's assistant.

Noxon said that Hall was a strong mentor in what is an informal mentorship that writers sometimes find.

Noxon had written a senior thesis project that was required for her major in college, then forgot about it for four years.

She reconnected with the material and showed it to a producer and they tried to get it made.

It was the beginning of her writing career.

That said, she sold something early on (that was never made) and then it took seven years of writing on her own developing her abilities as a writer before she got onto Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Although the industry at the time was all about the log line which was very successful for writers like Joss Whedon, Noxon had to go through a process where she discarded that construct and got in touch with the vision that she felt connected to—and also there was a realization that all of the work she had been doing was in a vacuum, so Noxon began writing plays and getting actors to speak her lines as a way to get feedback and get better at writing.

She said that for her it was about voice, not concept.

After the first season of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were produced, Noxon's agent encouraged her to watch them and try to take meetings and get on the show.

Noxon was skeptical as she wasn't wowed by the concept, and knew the original film hadn't done well.

After watching the initial episodes, she realized she loved the show, but was already booked to work on The Pretender, which was picked up to air, so seemed like it was a more safe bet.

She is best known for her work as a screenwriter and executive producer on the supernatural drama series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003).

In 1997, Noxon joined the writing staff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its second season.

During her tenure there, she wrote or co-wrote 22 episodes of the series, half of these during her first two years on the show.

Noxon described her experience on Buffy as charmed, as The WB Network allowed the show creators to work with little interference.

The pace of the writing was extremely fast, with deadlines from 3 weeks to sometimes 4 days.

In 1998, beginning with its third season, Noxon became a co-producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1999, upon the beginning of Buffy spin-off Angel, Noxon was promoted by series creator Joss Whedon to supervising producer for its fourth season, which gave her increasing charge of producing Buffy.

During this season, Noxon cast Amber Benson as Tara Maclay.

Noxon co-produced the show over its fifth season (2000–2001) with fellow executive co-producer David Fury, as well as direct two episodes ("Into the Woods" and "Forever").

She made a singing appearance in the sixth-season episode "Once More, with Feeling".

At the season's conclusion, fan reaction was mixed, leading some to criticize Whedon for abandoning creative control and stewardship of Buffy to Noxon.

In response, Whedon said:

"Dis not th' Nox. [...] Marti [...] and I shaped this year very carefully, and while we made mistakes (as we do every year), we made our show. We explored what we wanted to, said what we meant. You don't have to like it, but don't think it comes from neglect."

Noxon was executive producer of Buffy between 2001 and 2003, for its sixth and seventh seasons.

In 2004, Noxon wrote and produced a pilot entitled Still Life for Fox about a family recovering from the death of their son, a police officer.

Noxon also wrote the science fiction action film I Am Number Four (2011), the horror thriller film Fright Night (2011), and the biographical drama film The Glass Castle (2017).

She was also executive producer, writer, and creator of the Bravo comedy-drama series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce (2015–18) and the Lifetime drama series UnREAL (2015–18), and an executive producer of the CBS medical drama series Code Black (2015–17).

She wrote and directed the drama film To the Bone (2017).

Noxon created the AMC dark comedy series Dietland and the HBO limited series Sharp Objects, both of which premiered in 2018.

Noxon was born in Los Angeles, California, to National Geographic documentary filmmaker father, Nicolas Noxon, and Mary Straley.

Noxon has said that she grew up in nearby Santa Monica, and that her mother was gay.

She has a brother, Christopher Noxon, who is a writer and was previously married to TV writer Jenji Kohan.

Her grandmother was painter Betty Lane.

Noxon would often accompany her father when he traveled to shoot documentary films and was already in love with the idea of movies.