Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  In the end, though, a more established young actress, Alyson Hannigan, was brought on to replace Regan. Hannigan hadn’t been able to get an audition during casting for the pilot, as she was very different from the insecure, mousy girl whom Joss had originally envisioned. She got another chance when network executives called for a different take on the character.

  Hannigan approached Willow with an optimistic spark. “OK, so she’s talking about how guys won’t talk to her, but I’m going to put happiness in her,” she said. “She’s not going to sulk about it…. If she’s talking about something that’s not the greatest love story, she’s still happy in the end.” And so the dowdy girl in need of rescue was reborn as a cheerful, brilliant computer hacker confident in her academic skills, though still struggling with her crush on her best friend, Xander.

  Before long, Willow would join her friend Buffy as a cultural icon and role model. “Willow is a good role model,” Hannigan said, pointing to how the character did very well in school, was confident in her talents, and learned to stand up for herself. “Buffy is the girl everybody wants to be, but Willow is more like what they are.” In fact, as much as Joss described Xander as a stand-in for himself, there is a compelling argument for Willow being yet another facet of her creator. She’s the smart kid who was invisible to the opposite sex, had problems making friends in high school, and thus worked so damn hard to get through the day while feeling alone.

  But that’s the beauty of all the new characters Joss created to populate his Buffy retelling, the Slayer support network that would come to be known as the Scooby Gang (a reference to the teenage crime-fighters in the Scooby-Doo cartoons). Each one fell into a typical social role while pushing against it, and their varied struggles to find their own path gave audiences, Joss himself, and even the show’s actors so many ways to connect with the story. “I’m no more Buffy than I am Cordelia than I am Willow than I am Xander,” Sarah Michelle Gellar says. “I’m parts of all of them.”

  “[Joss is] more of a girl’s guy than a guy’s guy, and he understands women,” Gellar adds. “There’s not a lot of male writers that have the respect for women that he does when writing them. This is still a man’s world and most of the writers are men, and the characters sometimes feel stiff, one-dimensional. That’s where his strength really lies—in creating these female characters because he respects them.”

  8

  BUFFY PREMIERES

  When Joss finally got the green light for Buffy’s midseason run, it was time to select a staff. He had worked on a couple of TV series earlier in his career, but he had never been a showrunner, a role that would require him to oversee not only the creative direction of the show but also its day-to-day operations. He needed a co-showrunner, someone who could help him get Buffy off the ground and guide him through what to do afterward.

  Among the contenders for the position was David Greenwalt, an experienced writer/producer who was just coming off Profit, a small Fox show that he had cocreated. The series, which was produced by the same Stephen Cannell whom Joss beat out for a slot on the WB programming slate, followed future Heroes star Adrian Pasdar as Jim Profit, an utterly amoral main character who worked at a possibly even less ethical multinational corporation. Profit took its storylines to very dark places, impressing Joss with its fearlessness, but in 1996, that fearlessness made audiences and Fox network affiliates uncomfortable. It lasted just eight episodes, only the first four of which were aired.

  Despite its short run, Profit made a big splash within the industry. Variety proclaimed that the show had potential cult-hit status and that it “could go down as the creepiest show, with the most anti-heroic protagonist, in the history of television.” It garnered a lot of attention for Greenwalt, and a number of scripts came his way, including an opportunity to work with TV legend Steven Bochco, who had created Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue. But the one script that got his attention was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot.

  “It’s got feeling. It’s got heart. I have to meet this guy,” Greenwalt says, remembering his reaction to the script. “Joss loves to start a story real—you just feel like you’re in real life and just when you’re about to get bored, he takes your head and slams it onto the concrete and some great thing happens.” Greenwalt loved everything about the script—actually, he considered it the best script of the year, bar none. He appreciated that it was understated, and that Joss had made up a whole language for kids to speak. “So I met him, and it was kind of love at first sight.” The feeling was mutual, and Greenwalt was offered the job.

  According to Joss, his new creative partner was key to his success. “David was more responsible for what Buffy was than anybody really understands,” he says. “He walked me through everything, acting like a mentor without ever talking down to me, contradicting me. He was my co-showrunner, but he had all the experience.

  “I look back on it, and I’m like, ‘I can’t understand why he wasn’t just like, “You idiot!”’ I remember very well that we were on a location scout and were talking about building the set for the classroom. David asked, ‘Let me ask a stupid question: do we need a translight?’ I said, ‘Let me top it! What’s a translight?’

  “I have found many people who’ve been extraordinary, but at that time when I really had no idea what I was doing, having David there was so important. He was so great that I just figured this was how it would go in life, that you’d just have that guy at your side all the time.” However, their relationship already had an expiration date; Greenwalt’s contract was to help Whedon see Buffy through its initial episode order and then go to The X-Files as an executive producer.

  Joss kept his parking-lot promise to David Solomon, bringing him onto the Buffy crew as a producer. He also had to assemble a writing staff—which is where he hit his first major snag. Since Buffy was a midseason series, it wasn’t ready to send out offers to writers until July. By that time, a lot of writers had already been snapped up in May and June by shows with fall start dates. Adding to the uphill climb was the fact that it was a show in an untested niche (teen horror drama) on a little-watched network, with an inexperienced producer leading a young cast. It wasn’t really considered a hot career opportunity.

  Joss and Greenwalt read spec scripts from practically everybody, whether their experience was in drama or comedy. Given his own background on Roseanne and Parenthood, Joss didn’t want to discriminate. He wound up with a mix of writers from both half-hour and hour-long shows, including the team of Joe Reinkemeyer and Matt Kiene (Law & Order and L.A. Law) and sitcom writer Dana Reston (The Nanny).

  Two of Joss’s early hires came from the NBC sitcom Hope & Gloria, but it may have been a previous credit of theirs that got them in the door. Dean Batali and Rob Des Hotel had written for a Nickelodeon live-action series called The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a quirky cult show that chronicled the lives of two brothers named Pete, their friends, and the small town in which they lived. It was a heavily dialogue-driven show that celebrated clever turns of phrase. Due to its wit and intelligence, it appealed to audiences older than the general Nickelodeon grade school demographic—including one Joss Whedon.

  “Joss remembered one line we had written in our Pete & Pete script,” Batali says. “One of the characters says, ‘Now begins the age of Pete,’ and he thought that was such a great line. I’m convinced that that’s why we got the job—because we wrote the line ‘Now begins the age of Pete.’ Because it’s such a Buffyesque line: ‘Now begins the age of Buffy.’”

  Once the writing staff was assembled, the writers set about brainstorming story ideas for the first season’s episodes. Joss opened up the discussion by saying, “Tell me your favorite horror movie and your most embarrassing moment, and we’ll take it from there.” Joss’s own early ideas for scripts included a sexually aggressive football player who happens to be a werewolf, “controlling parents as Stepford/baby-snatching guys,” and a “competitive cute girl as witch.” It was David Greenwalt’s spin on t
he last one that made Joss feel that the show was clicking into place, that they were on to something.

  Once a writer pitches a story idea that sparks some interest, the staff then “breaks” the story, turning the basic idea into a series of dramatic beats and working out the emotional arcs that underlie the plot. From Joss’s witchcraft pitch, the staff broke the story that would become the first-season episode “Witch.” In it, Buffy is in desperate need of some normalcy in her life and decides to return to cheerleading. However, things go awry at the team tryouts (as they so often do on a Hellmouth), and Buffy and her friends quickly realize they must stop Amy, a fellow student, from using witchcraft to take competitors out during the audition process.

  As they were breaking the story, David Greenwalt pitched the idea that “Amy” is in fact her own mother, a former cheerleading queen who has switched bodies with her daughter in order to relive her former glory years. But Amy’s body isn’t as adept as her mother’s, and in frustration, the mother methodically attacks cheerleader after cheerleader until “Amy” finally moves off the bench and onto the court.

  “Oh! This show’s gonna be so good!” Joss remembers thinking when Greenwalt made his pitch. “It’s the creepiest thing, and it’s totally true!”

  Greenwalt’s contributions in the writers’ room helped Joss develop the show’s voice. “I like my stuff to have an edge, but I also am desperate for people’s affection and kind of a big softie,” Joss says. “So is David. Having a voice that was similar to mine but had its own particular spin was invaluable.” It was great, he says, to “have that sensibility next to me at all times, the guy who’s ready for the most painful twist, the cruelest joke, the most agonizing moment—and then, at times, a redemptive angle. Things could have been very, very different if I hadn’t had his whip-smart, completely unflinching, tough, noir kind of sensibility. It took Buffy beyond ‘Let’s talk about our feelings!’ and into a real world of both creepiness and idiotic humor. Because David’s not afraid to go for the cheap jokes any more than I am.”

  But what clicked with Joss most of all was that Greenwalt was able to balance his edginess with an old-school approach to narrative. It was Greenwalt, Joss says, who was “constantly pulling us back to ‘But do we care about Buffy? But is Buffy in trouble?’”

  “We learned early on when we started writing that we’ve got to have the metaphor,” Greenwalt explains. After all, a storyline that’s just about a cool monster every week would quickly get old and predictable. “You’ve got to have the Buffy of it—what does it mean?”

  For Joss, too, the answer to “What’s the Buffy of it?” was of utmost importance to the development of each episode. “He knows what he wants when he sees it, and he’s willing to take the time to wait to see it,” says future Buffy writer Jane Espenson. “He has high standards and is sometimes impatient. He puts story first—or maybe I should say meaning—he puts meaning first.” Rather than taking the procedural approach and focusing on the plot (“What’s going to happen in this episode?”), Joss tackled the story through his characters. How would they interact? What’s the conflict between them? Then he’d tackle the plot points.

  He’d do that by breaking stories from the inside out. Instead of looking at a story from where it would start or end, he would come up with an idea and explore what would be really compelling about it when “blank” happens. For example, in the fifth episode of the series, “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” Buffy is at a funeral home with her date when a vampire appears and corners the guy. “The question then becomes ‘How do we build to that? How do you get to that moment?’” explains Batali. “How, and then you start filling it out, so it’s inside-out story breaking.” Howard Gordon, a second-season hire who’d go on to produce 24 and Homeland, among other series, agrees. “Joss reverse engineered [stories] from the ending. He was not somebody who was overly enamored with the beginning of a story, which most writers are.”

  The Buffy stories that made it out of the writers’ room all had their roots in that central allegory of the series: high school as a horror movie. As Joss explained to his writers, high school was the most horrifying place he’d ever been. The familiar tropes of the horror genre became a prism through which they could explore familiar adolescent anxieties such as peer pressure and popularity.

  Greenwalt remembers being especially impressed with the patience Joss displayed at the next point in the development process. After a story has been broken and the beats of the story sketched out, the credited writer for the episode “goes to the board” in the writers’ room and writes out the beats. From there, the writer maps out the actual scenes with locations on index cards, creates an outline, and finally begins to write the actual script. Every show and writer breaks a story a little differently, but in general, “going to the board” is where the story is finalized. “When we’d break stories,” Greenwalt says, “I’d watch him wait, and wait, and wait to go to the board—writers want to go to the board too soon. Then, finally, he’d get up and write a couple of things on the board, and they’d just be perfect and be right.”

  However, Joss had several story ideas that the Buffy writers were never able to break. In one, he wanted the Scoobies to find a box in the school that they wouldn’t know how to open. “We spent four or five hours one night on it,” Batali says. “We could never figure it out. There was another story about the idea of a race of demons that are aliens. Joss really liked the idea that demons were actually aliens, that they were from outer space.”

  On several occasions, Joss would showcase surprising artistic skills to help his writers visualize certain elements of a story. While working on “Killed by Death,” he left the writers’ room to draw Der Kindestod, the demon who sucked the life out of children who were feverishly ill. Another time, after they’d spent the morning working on a story, Joss returned after lunch with a clay model of the story’s monster that he’d sculpted. In both cases, he delivered the demon with the same pronouncement: “Well, here’s what it should look like.”

  When it came time to shoot the episodes, however, Joss was at first far less in control. “The first year, it was like we were all on Ecstasy. Everybody loved each other, everybody hated each other, and nobody wanted to go home. Because I was literally there all night—I’d sleep on the couch,” he said. “I think we were all so young and so fresh and so crazed when we started, that I let a lot of tension on the set. In trying to be everybody’s friend, and so excited to be doing this work, and sort of assuming we’d all get along, I let a lot of non-constructive emotion take open sway on the set, when I should have just put the hammer down and said, ‘You know what? We’re here to do the work. Everybody, just get it done.’”

  Still, when Jeanine Basinger visited Joss on set, she was excited to see how much he was taking charge. He ran around to check up on every element of shooting, taking close care to even review the wardrobe choices. She was also quite touched to see how much the staff had picked up his manner of speaking, which would later come to be known as “Slayer slang.”

  Later, at lunch, Joss asked if Basinger thought the series would be successful. He followed that up by saying that he was glad he finally got to do what he wanted, and even if Buffy only lasted two episodes, he’d be happy. Together, they decided to be hopeful but to stay realistic.

  Joss’s long hours and all-nighters also proved frustrating for Kai, who’d grown accustomed to her husband’s domestic contributions. “I did not cook at all when we first met,” she says. “He’s an amazing cook, an awesome, natural cook—doesn’t use recipes or anything. His mom was a great cook, so he kind of learned at the foot of her. I’m so jealous because he just doesn’t think about it. He just kind of knows how to do it. He even makes roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas.”

  Their first Thanksgiving together had been a brand-new experience for Kai. She was used to the stressful days of her family gatherings and had seen the holiday as one filled with unavoidable drama. Joss’s em
otional connection to the day was far, far cheerier, filled with memories of Shakespeare readings led by his mother. He told Kai that he’d take care of everything and spent the day cooking, singing along to show tunes. “Everything’s casual. It’s the most wonderful holiday and it’s all because of him,” she explains. “Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday, because it’s about family, but it’s about the family that you choose—he’s always kept Thanksgiving for friends.” (Sometimes those friends were quite random; one year, Joss told Kai that she couldn’t invite any more random people, but that night she came home and asked if a guy from Russia that she’d met at karaoke counted as a random person, as she’d already invited him over. “It was a really nice guy, and he had nowhere to go.”)

  But his responsibilities to his new show meant Joss could no longer spend much time in the kitchen. “I felt it was false advertising when I found out that he was going to stop cooking for me when he started to work for Buffy’” Kai laughs. “I thought that that’s what I signed up for.”

  The entire first season was written and filmed before Buffy premiered on the WB on Monday, March 10, 1997. By then, Joss had fought and won several battles in the journey to bring the series to air—not the least of which was the title. To broaden the show’s appeal, the network wanted to call it Slayer; Joss insisted on the full Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As he explained, each word was crucial to understanding the show: “One of them is funny, one is scary, one of them is action.”