Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Unlike on the Buffy movie, Joss wasn’t involved with much of the actual production of Alien: Resurrection. Filming took place from October 1996 through February 1997 on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. While it was nearby, Joss was deeply involved with a new project, also produced by Fox. In addition, he didn’t feel that he had connected with the movie’s director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French filmmaker who had previously helmed the black comedy Delicatessen and the fantasy drama The City of Lost Children. Nor did he agree with Jeunet’s casting and directing choices. Despite his concerns, however, he was completely unprepared for what awaited him when he saw the director’s cut at the studio screening.

  Joss started to cry, heartbroken that Jeunet’s vision for Alien: Resurrection did not match his own. “Then I put on a brave face because Fox is my home … but I can say with impunity that I was shattered by how crappy it was.”

  The story hadn’t changed much from Joss’s script. But Joss felt that Jeunet’s direction “highlighted” all the problems with his script while “squashing” the strongest elements, like the final battle with the alien. The previous three films had ended with huge, dramatic battles between Ripley and an alien, but this time around, the expense of the alien and other special effects ballooned the budget, costs had to be cut, and Joss had to script several endings. “The first one was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard,” Joss said. “The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert.” Each one was cheaper to film than the last, but each one further blunted the emotional impact he wanted the ending to have. The finished film wraps up with a fifth ending, in which the alien is sucked out through a small hole in the spaceship’s window as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. A similar scene appeared in Joss’s first draft as an earlier confrontation between the alien and a soldier, but it seemed anticlimactic as the final scene of Ripley’s battle with the creature.

  More than the ending, Joss’s disappointment came from the fact that what was on the screen was so far from the vision he’d had in his head. “It was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines … mostly … but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do,” Joss explained. “There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script … but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.”

  One visual element that he took great issue with was the art direction of the alien itself. Starting with H. R. Giger’s surrealist, nightmarish design in the first film, aliens had been truly terrifying creatures, often black or bronze with a skeletal, biomechanical appearance. They had blade-tipped tails that would slash anyone to pieces and highly acidic blood that corroded anything on contact. Alien: Resurrection’s alien has been modified with Ripley’s DNA, and so some evolutionary change is to be expected. But “I don’t remember writing, ‘A withered, granny-lookin’ Pumpkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley,’” Joss said. “Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts.”

  After the screening, Joss called up Saralegui, prefacing his comments with “Listen, I don’t want to be a jerk, but …” before launching into his problems with the film. Saralegui understood, but he didn’t fully agree. The exec would admit that the cool and funny details that were a trademark of Jeunet’s films felt like forced quirkiness in the Alien universe. But they didn’t bother him as much as they did Joss, possibly because he’d been worried about the film since he started seeing the dailies footage during shooting. “I think the biggest problem with that movie is something that we—literally every single person involved in that movie—didn’t foresee,” Saralegui says. “You’ve seen Alien too many times already. And by that, I’m saying in your life. You’ve seen Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3. And now here they are again.

  “I had that sick realization one day watching dailies when we were seeing [the alien] for the first time—one of those classic shots where the alien grins and all that drool spills out of its mouth, which you’ve seen in every movie. I see it for the first time in this one, and I go, ‘Oh, cool,’” he remembers. “And then I’m thinking, ‘You didn’t think that was cool when you first saw it. It scared the shit out of you.’” Whether it was franchise fatigue, tonal issues, or the disappointment of a scaled-back final battle, Alien: Resurrection did not resonate with fans as they’d hoped. Yet, while not the most critically lauded of the Alien franchise, Resurrection pulled in just over $161 million worldwide after its release in November 1997.

  For Joss, the experience was the Buffy movie all over again. Again, he felt as if a director with a drastically different vision had undone the film he set out to make. “It was the final crappy humiliation of my crappy film career,” he said. But if he’d given up on filmmaking, it’s only because he’d found another medium in which he could finally enjoy the creative control he’d always craved.

  7

  BUFFY: RESURRECTION

  In the mid-1990s, few could have predicted that the next teen series phenomenon would come wrapped up in the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The adolescent fare of the time tended to be more limited in scope, more rigidly compartmentalized. ABC’s “TGIF” programming block of family-friendly sitcoms included series such as Boy Meets World, which told tales of growing up yet shied away from the more dramatic issues to be found in day-to-day high school life. For drama, the few options for teenagers aired on the fledgling Fox network, where Beverly Hills, 90210 was still going strong after pretty much launching the teenage soap opera genre in 1990. The series had quickly jettisoned the fish-out-of-water drama of a midwestern brother and sister transplanted to Southern California for more provocative storylines—losing one’s virginity, drug abuse, rape, alcoholism, absentee parents, and, of course, the classic love triangles among the young and pretty characters.

  Still, there were signs that audiences were ready for series that reflected a grittier, more realistic view of life from a teenage perspective. In 1994, Fox had introduced Party of Five, a more sober youth-oriented series than 90210, which followed a clan of five orphans adjusting to a new life after the sudden deaths of their parents. ABC broke further ground the same year with My So-Called Life, which featured newcomer Claire Danes as Angela Chase, a young woman just beginning to maneuver through her relationships with high school friends, her parents, and the cute bad boy. Angela Chase was an icon with whom teens could truly relate—for starters, unlike the characters on 90210, she was actually played by a teenage actress. And where 90210 took a glamorized look at well-off kids in Beverly Hills, Angela’s story focused on the raw emotional trials of trying to figure out who you are at fifteen, and how each decision you make affects your friends and family.

  Both series were critically acclaimed yet fell victim to low ratings; only Party of Five would make it past the first season. Joss loved them both, calling Party of Five “a brilliant show, [which] often made me cry uncontrollably” and saying that “no show on TV has ever come close to capturing as truly the lovely pain of teendom as well as My So-Called Life. And yes, I’m including my own.”

  Mass audiences might still have needed convincing, but by this point there was a passionate niche market of viewers who were waiting, almost aching, to see their own emotions reflected on TV. “I’d been waiting and waiting, too,” Joss says. “It was in the zeitgeist. My So-Called Life came along and did it perfectly, and 90210 came along and did it dreadfully. I had tried to get the rights to [the movie] Pump Up the Volume (1990) and make a series out of it—a soap opera with a DJ as a sort of MC in Cabaret motif. Because teenagers needed a soap opera—nobody takes themselves more seriously. I couldn’t make it happen. So
then Buffy came along, and I said, ‘Here’s the dramatic portion of it, here’s the soap opera.’”

  Buffy would also respond to another need that was in the air at the time. The mid-1990s saw the rise of women of action on the small screen, in particular FBI Special Agent Dana Scully of Fox’s sci-fi series The X-Files (1993–2002) and Xena of the syndicated fantasies Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–99) and the upcoming Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001). Both Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Xena (Lucy Lawless) became celebrated role models for women, but both Scully and Xena were adults; television hadn’t really provided a teenage heroine in the same vein. In fact, few series of the era featured a young female lead of any kind; there was Angela of My So-Called Life, which was quickly canceled, the title character of the NBC sitcom Blossom, which signed off the air in May 1995, and not much else.

  Joss knew that the television landscape was ripe for a new series that addressed both female empowerment and universal teenage fears. But even though the opportunity had arisen for him to create exactly that, he wasn’t quite sure he was ready to go back to television.

  It was Gail Berman of Sandollar Productions who had approached Joss with the idea of developing Buffy into a television series. Inspired by the recent film Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s witty modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma set in a Beverly Hills high school, with its own unique and immediately quotable vernacular, Berman returned to Joss’s blonde, quippy teenager who is far wiser than her initial vapid appearance suggests. She wanted to pitch Buffy as a thirty-minute kids’ series à la Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, to air in syndication, and was working her way through all the associated rights issues. She realized that 20th Century Fox had failed to secure the television rights for the film, so she was free to proceed without their go-ahead, and she obtained the necessary permissions from partial owners of the Buffy character Kaz and Fran Rubel Kuzui. One of the last contractual loose ends she had to tie up was that she had to offer the project to Joss, who had the right of first refusal if Buffy was ever redeveloped. Berman reached out to Chris Harbert, knowing that Joss was deeply entrenched in “big movie projects,” and explained that he just needed to decline the offer so that the project could move on without him.

  It didn’t work out like that at all. “A couple of weeks later,” Berman remembered, “I got a call from [Harbert] and he said, ‘I talked to Joss about it, and the funny thing is, he is interested in it. Why don’t you guys get together and see if there’s something you find intriguing?’”

  Joss was excited by the idea of returning to his beloved character and script, of course. But his previous experiences in television gave him pause. Still, he knew that he would be returning to the medium under far different circumstances than those that affected his tenure on Roseanne. He had earned himself some leverage as a highly sought-after script doctor, after all; he could dictate how he would serve on the show. If he came aboard as an executive producer, he would finally get the chance to direct. He would have more control over the creative aspects of the project. Joss realized that this was an opportunity to finally tell the Buffy story the way he had always envisioned it: instead of the Power Rangers–esque kids’ show Berman had originally envisioned, it would be the saga of high school as a horror movie.

  Joss signed onto the project, and with such marketable talent aboard, Berman shifted her focus from a syndicated Buffy to a network-worthy Buffy. She and Joss readied their proposal for the networks’ 1995–96 pilot season, the yearly period in which writers and producers pitch roughly five hundred show concepts to network executives, of which seventy or so are bought and go through script development, before a final ten or twenty are given the green light to film a pilot.

  Joss needed a pitch with current references that would connect with executives. In an essay he wrote for the My So-Called Life DVD release in 2007, he recalled, “When I pitched Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I told executives it was a cross between The X-Files and … and then I always took a moment to judge how smart they were. If they seemed like empty suits, I’d go with 90210. It was a big hit. But if they seemed like they knew their business, I’d use another example. The example that every writer I know still references. The show that—forget what it did for my writing and my career—I’ll love the way you can only love as a youth: with fierce bewilderment and unembarrassed passion.”

  The first meeting on their dance card was with Fox, where Berman felt Buffy could find a home as a solid coming-of-age drama in the family-friendly 8:00 PM eastern spot. To augment his pitch, Joss prepared a short video; like the movie montages he created for Kai, it combined clips from the 1992 film, special effects shots, and “beautiful images” to demonstrate how different Buffy would be from the other series on television. Yet despite a strong showing by Joss, Fox executives passed, deeming the concept too close in tone to Party of Five. Berman next had Joss pitch the series to NBC, even though she knew it wouldn’t fit into the network’s schedule, which was populated with series aimed at twenty- and thirty-somethings after their runaway success with Friends. The meeting with NBC would be a good way for him to further refine the pitch before they presented it to a new network just launched that year: the WB.

  By the time they got to the WB, the pitch had become more open-ended. Joss told the WB executives that at that point, he didn’t know what the format of the series should be. Hour? Half hour? More drama? Maybe comedy? Should it have a laugh track? But what he did know was the Buffy universe, which he “sketched … out in Dickensian detail, explaining what powers the various types of vampires, slayers, and watchers wielded, and why.”

  The network had been searching for a drama with a teenage girl as the lead—they’d looked into picking up My So-Called Life when it was on the bubble at ABC, but it was beyond their budget. In fact, WB exec Susanne Daniels was looking for a female teen superhero series in particular, but she came into the Buffy meeting with a “slight bias” against the project: she was not a fan of the film and was wary of spending money to develop a series based on it. However, she was quickly won over by the fact that Joss’s pitch “was such a fresh and improved take from the movie” and by “the emotionality that Joss was bringing to Buffy’s story and backstory.” Joss, she said, was unlike anyone else with whom the network had met, and the “overall vision that Joss pitched was more intriguing than anything I’d seen in the movie, and more compelling than other pitches I’d heard in our search for a strong young female character.” On the strength of the pitch, the WB bought a Buffy pilot script; 20th Century Fox came on to produce.

  When the WB showed interest in Buffy and began talking about what the series could be, Joss came back excitedly to Chris Harbert. “It’s amazing that they’re really letting me take the reins. They’re really listening. They’re really interested in the way I want to do it,” he told his agent. To which Harbert replied, “Yeah, they have no idea what they’re doing.”

  There was probably some truth to that. At the time, the WB was desperately searching for an identity. Both it and UPN, the other “netlet” that launched in January 1995, were drawing minuscule audiences compared to the major networks. Where UPN had tried to distinguish itself with a programming slate of sci-fi shows led by the latest series in the Star Trek franchise, Voyager, the WB had developed programming directed at a more urban market with The Wayans Bros. and The Parent ’Hood, both sitcoms featuring African American casts. But the WB was struggling in the ratings even compared to its fellow upstart.

  To change all that, the network’s programming executives were willing to buck the conventional wisdom of the TV business—and hiring Joss was a big part of that. The WB was “the great square hole of television,” he would later proclaim. It was barely a year old and its programming executives had put their faith, and their money, behind someone who had a great story and knew how to tell it. After his disappointing experiences with the major networks, the chance to do what he wanted at this new netlet was very rare and very exciting.
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br />   At the time, most dramatic offerings on American television were medical and police dramas that eschewed season-long narratives for self-contained episodes about the medical emergency or crime of the week. Joss called this “reset television,” noting that these shows tended to have fairly minor consequences for the main characters, and any lessons learned were often swept clean in time for the following episode. Cable channels had begun to develop original programming, but they weren’t nearly as acclaimed or as popular as today’s offerings by HBO, AMC, FX, and Showtime. Ongoing narrative arcs, with which Joss had been fascinated since his early years of watching British dramas with his mother, on American TV were mostly limited to soap operas—and the soaps tended to focus on relationship melodrama and shocking personal reversals rather than meaningful character development. A teenage vampire slayer from Los Angeles was about to change all of that.

  According to Joss, “TV is a question, movies are an answer.” A movie lasts for only a brief period of time and has one goal: to tell a story from beginning to end and then get out. A TV series, on the other hand, needs to fill many hours, many episodes; it needs to make its story last. Thus, while Joss’s pilot script for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series picked up narratively where the Buffy film had left off, it made a number of changes to sustain the premise indefinitely.

  As the story kicks off, a slightly younger Buffy Summers is beginning her sophomore year at Berryman High School as a transfer student from L.A. Buffy’s hoping to leave all of the “Chosen One” business behind, but a quiet new start isn’t meant to be when there’s a suspicious death on Buffy’s first day of school. As it turns out, her new Southern California home—which will be named Sunnydale in the series, with Buffy’s new school renamed Sunnydale High—is built on a Hellmouth, a portal between Earth and hell. The Hellmouth attracts not just vampires but all kinds of demons and spirits. Basically, if it’s supernatural and evil, it sets up shop in town, giving the writers carte blanche when it came to introducing new villains.