Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Going from the 4 million US viewers who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer to a worldwide box office of $1.5 billion for The Avengers is quite a leap. Yet the creator of them both, Joss Whedon, told as personal a story with a cast of A-list movie stars and complicated CGI effects as he had with a modestly budgeted teen fantasy series on an upstart netlet.

  Whedon deals in classic themes of love, death, and redemption with a feminist perspective that his mother, a beloved teacher and activist, imparted to him. Although he comes from a family of television writers, he was determined to follow his own path from a young age. This definitive biography shows how his years at an elite English public school led to his early successes, which often turned into frustration in both television (Roseanne) and film (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Alien: Resurrection). But when he resurrected his girl hero on a young network, the results enabled him to direct, write, or produce three more television series, several movies, Marvel comic books, and an innovative web series, culminating in the blockbuster The Avengers. Then Much Ado About Nothing, a personal project shot in his home and cast with friends, allowed him to step out of Marvel’s shadow.

  Amy Pascale has based this revealing biography on extensive original interviews with Whedon’s family, friends, collaborators, and stars—as well as with the man himself. They’ve shared candid, behind-the-scenes accounts of his work with Pixar, his filmmaking adventures, and the making of his groundbreaking series Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Pascale

  Foreword copyright © 2014 by Nathan Fillion

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-104-7

  Lyrics from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Commentary! The Musical used by permission of Time Science Blood Club, LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pascale, Amy.

  Joss Whedon : the biography / Amy Pascale.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61374-104-7

  1. Whedon, Joss, 1964– 2. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. 3. Television writers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN1992.4.W49P38 2014

  791.4502′32092—dc23

  [B]

  2014011192

  Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  To Bronzers everywhere

  “Bottom line is, even if you see ’em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”

  —Whistler, “Becoming, Part 1”

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Nathan Fillion

  Introduction

  1 A Family of Storytellers

  2 “Being British” in the Land of Shakespeare (and Giles)

  3 Crash Course in Television

  4 The Blonde in the Alley Fights Back

  5 The World Upends

  6 To Infinity and Beyond: Toy Story and Alien: Resurrection

  7 Buffy: Resurrection

  8 Buffy Premieres

  9 The Bronze

  10 The Buffy Way

  11 Front-Page News

  12 Growing Up: Angel

  13 A New Challenge: Silence

  14 Shakespeare Fanboy

  15 Buffy Goes Back to High School

  16 Once More, with Feeling

  17 We Aim to Misbehave: Firefly

  18 Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Cancellation

  19 End of (Buffy’s) Days

  20 An Astonishing Return to His Roots

  21 Not Fade Away

  22 Grant Me the Serenity

  23 Election 2004

  24 I Wrote My Thesis on You

  25 Serenity Lands

  26 Strong Female Characters

  27 A New Way of Storytelling

  28 WGA Writers’ Strike

  29 Doctor Horrible, I Presume

  30 Dollhouse

  31 The Cabin in the Woods

  32 Fanboy Dreams Come True: The Avengers

  33 Buffy Lives, Again?

  34 Avengers Assemble

  35 Something Personal: Much Ado About Nothing

  36 The Year of Joss Whedon

  37 The Year of Joss Whedon, Again (Really)

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  FOREWORD

  My generation, we were kind of raised on the super-cool, “I can handle anything” with a gun in his hand hero. Any situation you throw at him, he can handle it—with catchphrases. It was very cool.

  But Joss Whedon’s version of a hero doesn’t always win. He loses more than he wins, and when he wins, the victories are tiny, but he takes ’em. “That’s a victory! I call that a victory!” It’s a tiny victory—he takes it, and that’s what he walks away with. And that’s something I can actually relate to.

  That’s something that people can relate to—because that’s actually life. I don’t know a lot of people who win more than they lose. Life is kind of a losing proposition as you go. It’s not all winning lotteries every day. It’s a lot of “What do I do with this problem? Now how do I handle this?” I think people can relate easier to someone who isn’t prepared to handle every single situation, and everything comes out roses and their way, and all they’ve got to do is be cool. We don’t have that in real life.

  A friend of mine once told me that what he finds so satisfying about Joss Whedon is his way of telling stories. As a society, we are incredibly story literate: We know story. This is the hero; this is the villain. This is the denouement; this is where the twist comes; this is where the learning experience is; this is where the turn is. We know story.

  He said, “Joss Whedon will give you a story twist. But instead of twisting it to the story tradition that we know, he twists it and says, ‘That’s what happens in stories. This is what happens in real life. This is how real life went.’”

  I described Joss to a friend as we were on our way over to his house for a party. And she’s heard me tell stories over the years about this fellow. We went to his house, we had a great time, and on the way home, she said, “You know, I got to say, from your description of the kind of guy this guy is, and from all the stories you’ve told me—I expected him to be six two, chiseled jaw, long, wavy golden hair and bright blue eyes and gleaming teeth, and just chesty and …” The guy, she said, “when you describe him, he’s so heroic.”

  And yeah, he is. He’s heroic like that.

  NATHAN FILLION

  INTRODUCTION

  In June 2011, Joss Whedon stepped onto the set of The Avengers. He was just over a month into shooting on Marvel’s highly anticipated, high-profile comic book movie, with a $220 million budget and a plethora of A-list talent who came to the table with their own high expectations, and it would have been fair to wonder whether he was up for the task. This wasn’t Joss’s first time directing, but his only other feature film was 2005’s Serenity, a big-screen continuation of his shortlived sci-fi western series Firefly. Serenity’s budget was $39 million, and it pulled in just $25.5 million at the US box office and barely broke even worldwide.

  Joss certainly had the geek cred for his other role on the project, as the screenwriter behind The Avengers’ script. A lifelong Marvel Comics fanboy who’d atte
nded his first comic convention while still in grade school, he had a deep understanding of the superhero universe in which the film was set. He’d had his own run writing comic books—and of course, he was the acclaimed writer/producer behind such cult television hits as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His TV work had given him experience handling a large ensemble cast like that of The Avengers, and he’d directed nearly forty television episodes.

  But in television, if you make a mistake, there’s always next week. That isn’t the case with a blockbuster movie featuring some of the world’s most beloved superheroes. So no one would have faulted Joss if he’d been panicked or overwhelmed by the project—or if, on the umpteenth grimy day of shooting, when everything had been covered in ash from daily explosions, he’d been a little bit short or impatient with me, his interviewer.

  Instead, as I wished him well, Joss stopped me. “There is a tiny story that I want to tell you,” he said.

  “My wife is from Barnstable [Massachusetts], and we went with our friends to the Barnstable County Fair one night. We got on this ride that spins—you go up high to the side in a circle, and then you go the other way. The guy at the controls can switch directions and mess around. It’s not for kids.

  “Near me was this ten-year-old girl with her older friend, and she was clearly not ready and terrified. I wanted so badly to help, but there wasn’t anything that I could do. ‘Hey, there’s a creepy old man talking to me.’ That’s weird.

  “So I was sitting there watching her, and I felt so bad, because she’s got that face. I know that face—I wear it most days when I go to work. Everyone was like, ‘Whee, having fun!’ and she’s gripping [her seat] with this death grip. And then gradually she starts to let go a little bit, starts to swing into it. By the end, she has completely mastered it; she is screaming ‘Whee!’ and she has her hands up—she’s completely comfortable. And I just … my head just exploded.

  “I just watched someone get stronger. Just watched that girl get stronger, and I was like, that’s the purest moment of my life. That’s the real deal. That is everything I ever want with what I’m doing, but to have somebody do it for themselves would be better. It was pretty extraordinary.

  “That’s my story. That’s the story of my life….

  “And now I must go and blow shit up.”

  That’s the story I have come back to time and time again while writing Joss Whedon’s biography. It’s the story that came to mind nearly a year later, when I found myself on a bus, sitting next to a man who, twenty years earlier, had broken into my house. I’d woken up to find him sitting at the end of the couch where I was sleeping, and his actions had haunted me for the two decades that followed. I sat there on the bus, overwhelmed and cycling through a flurry of emotions as I tried to decide what I should do—get up and walk away and try not to break down, or confront him and finally let it go. Even though I had friends a few seats away, I alone had to make a decision that would help define me for the next two decades.

  I thought about the girl Joss had watched get stronger on her own, and I realized that this was that kind of moment for me. Then I thought about all the characters Joss had created, ones I had loved since I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1998. I flashed to a moment that so clearly defined his most iconic hero: in the episode “Becoming, Part 2,” Buffy battles with Angel, her vampire ex-boyfriend, who is determined to literally send the world into hell, while reveling in every moment in which he can rip the Slayer into emotional shreds in the process. He knocks the sword from her hand, towering over her on the ground, and taunts her, telling her that she has nothing left in her arsenal to win this fight—no weapons, no friends, and no hope. “Take all that away,” he asks, “and what’s left?” As he lunges his sword at her head, the final physical betrayal by the man she loved, Buffy grabs it between her hands and answers, simply, “Me.”

  Joss’s stories are often centered on moments just like this. He shares a conversation that he had with Stephen Sondheim, in which they were discussing the stories each of them tells. Joss said he was always going to write about adolescent girls with superpowers. Sondheim replied, “And I will always write about yearning.” “Goddammit, his answer was so much cooler than mine!” Joss says—but Sondheim’s answer pushed him to break down his own tales and figure out what his driving impetus was, what he was really writing about.

  “Helplessness was what I realized was sort of the basic thing,” Joss explains. “All of these empowerment stories come from my fear and hatred of the idea of somebody who is really helpless, who is a non-being.”

  Joss felt helpless as a boy, a small, slight child and the youngest of three brothers. He felt helpless and invisible in his first solo trip away from his mother’s comforting home and into a British boarding school, where he was the only new kid and the only American. He felt helpless in his first job at the groundbreaking feminist television series Roseanne, because he never felt like his voice was being heard. And so, inspired by the comic books he’d loved since he was a child, filled with superheroes both spectacular and flawed, he created a superhero of his own: Buffy Summers, the blonde girl who walks into an alley alone like the helpless victim of countless horror movies—only to walk out victorious against the monsters that tried to kill her.

  But the feelings of powerlessness continued when the original film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was released. Buffy’s tale was not told the way Joss had planned, and she did not become the inspiration that he had hoped. Fortunately, four years later Joss was given the chance to revive his girl hero in a new medium—television—in which he would have full control over the story. He gave the character one thing that had eluded her in the film: a group of friends who supported her emotionally and in battle. With new characters as well-drawn and well-developed as the hero, Buffy found success, just as its hero succeeded again and again in saving the world.

  All of Joss’s heroes create a family out of friends, whether it’s the titular character of the Buffy spin-off Angel, whose struggle for redemption hinges on allowing others in to help after years of wallowing in self-hatred, or Captain Mal Reynolds of Firefly, whose ragtag crew of mercenaries choose to stay together and support one another. To Joss, this is a bond stronger than blood.

  It’s how he himself has thrived through those continued moments of helplessness—the swift cancellation of Firefly, a Writers Guild strike that shut down Hollywood. He surrounds himself with a community of creative collaborators, people he has worked with before and trusts the most to help him through every project. Their support allows him to shrug off his defeats within “the system,” and embrace a sort of naïveté wherein he readily admits that he doesn’t know what he’s doing but does it anyway, in a way that makes him happy.

  This community—this chosen family—consists not just of writers and actors but of fans as well. Especially fans. They’re the ones who kept Buffy on the air and gave him a space to engage in smart and passionate discussions about his stories, who raised money for charity while celebrating their love for Firefly. The conversation started more than sixteen years ago on a bare-bones website for a low-rated cult series on a baby network, and Joss has continued it to this day, allowing his fans to share in his heartbreaks as well as his triumphs, just as they share in his characters’ victories and failures, their pain and their joy. Through Joss’s stories, and his own story, his fans find the inspiration to make it through their own life struggles.

  Today at any comic convention, black T-shirts that proudly declare JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW dot the crowds. Even more fans of all ages, races, and genders are clad in costumes from the Whedonverse: Dr. Horrible. Captain Reynolds, Jayne, and Kaylee from Firefly. Spike and Illyria from Angel. For Joss’s fans, it’s not enough to simply declare their love; they need to wear their adoration like a neon badge for the world to see. They also don these costumes for strength—the personal strength that comes from connecting so intensely with a character that the fans also feel more comforta
ble in their own skin.

  After fighting back from the brink of hopelessness and saving the world in the aforementioned “Becoming, Part 2,” Buffy runs away to Los Angeles, hoping to escape both her responsibilities and her grief over the loss of her beloved Angel. She wants to disappear into the masses, but ends up trapped in a demon dimension with other lost souls. The captives are beaten down by demon slave drivers until they answer the question “Who are you?” with “I’m no one.”

  When it’s her turn to answer, she again finds the inner strength she had doubted: “I’m Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. And you are?” It’s a funny moment, and Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the comedy of it perfectly. Yet the humor masks the inspirational power of that scene. In a world that wants to make you invisible, there is such strength in declaring who you are and that you are worthy of the identity you choose. Buffy owns her destiny, with all the responsibilities and challenges that she knows will come with it. She announces that she is not only the Slayer but, even more consequentially, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” It is not just her title the world needs to know; it’s the person that she is.

  It may seem like a small win, especially compared to heading off multiple apocalypses, but it is just as important as every battle she fights over Buffy’s seven seasons. And while Joss’s fans might not be able to take on a giant demon snake on their graduation day like Buffy Summers, they can demand to be seen and make their own statement about who they are. Like the ten-year-old girl in Joss’s story, they can find unknown strength within themselves to conquer their fears. Like Joss and all his characters, they can find friends and build a community to create something better in the world.

  It’s why so many people are drawn to Joss’s work. Because being special is not about being a Chosen One. All of his characters, whether they’re super smart or super strong or just “ordinary” people, are both troubled and capable of great heroism—as are we all. In 2014, an American television show interviewed Russians about their country’s oppressive laws against the LGBT community. To explain what had inspired her decision to protest these laws, one woman quoted a line from Angel: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”