Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “There was almost never a day in which the staff would pitch him a story and he would just take what we’d done,” Espenson says. “We’d help, but it tended to be his—mostly, I think, because he was just that good. He wasn’t failing to see what we’d accomplished; it was just that he really could come up with something better.”

  Occasionally, when they had a particularly tough story to break, the whole writing staff would toil away in the writers’ room for weeks to get the story on the board. Then Joss would come in and throw it all away, and they’d start over. Or they would end up just waiting until he came in, because they didn’t feel like they could make any progress until then.

  “Once, I’d worked a long time on coming up with this story that I wanted to pitch,” remembers later Whedonverse writer Shawn Ryan, who would spend a season with Joss before creating the highly acclaimed dark cop drama The Shield for FX. “I took, like, five, ten minutes to pitch it, and he just looked at me and said, ‘You know, that’s a real good story, but it’s all just moves.’ That was his way of saying that it may have some good plot moves, but it didn’t engage him emotionally with the characters. And so I really needed to learn to change my thinking. Ultimately, I brought that to The Shield and my other shows—to find out what the emotional arc of the episode would be before figuring out the plot.”

  “Behind all of the intelligence and a great sense of story was always a great sense of the end,” Howard Gordon adds. “What was this adding up to? I think that is something that not a lot of writers look at. I mean, you almost have this novelistic approach to these characters, and having just been inside for this brief time and having watched the series recently with my fourteen-year-old daughter, who was too young at the time to watch it, I got to reappreciate just how intricate, how smart, and how special the show is.”

  If even Joss found a story hard to break, it was because he hadn’t yet settled on some important aspect—usually the reason to tell the story or the way in which it was going to emotionally touch Buffy. “He would pace around the room, sometimes climbing on furniture, or lifting furniture, or leading hilarious discussions about everything except the story, while his subconscious sorted stuff out,” Espenson recalls. “The telltale sign that a story was going to take a while to break was the degree of distraction and off-topic-ness that Joss would display.”

  But Espenson adds that there was an upside to such tough break sessions: “We would often just talk in the room, which made us a close group who really liked and understood each other.” Noxon agrees, recalling that the writers’ room was filled with “delightful, funny people who know way too much about useless topics. So it was sometimes hard to stay on track, because it was so much fun to just talk about what we had seen or what we loved, or sing musicals, which happened too often.”

  David Fury, who went from freelancer to staff writer in season three and would later become another co-executive producer on the series, described the writers’ room during his tenure as a civilized environment. Instead of a conference room in which everyone sat around a long table, as was the case with most of the sitcom writers’ rooms in which Fury had worked previously, Joss had a room adjoining his office that was decked out as a kind of den. “Sofas, easy chairs, etc., on which we could also be relaxed and casual, allowing our ideas to come out of banter between us,” Fury explains. “Joss would often sit in a rocking chair with a cup of tea and, no matter how pressing the deadline was for the next script, he’d more often than not exhibit calm yet entertaining leadership.”

  The writers’ room usually had toys, which Joss loved to fiddle with. “We had lots of toys in the Buffy room—action figures and little things from inside those Kinder Egg chocolates,” Espenson says. (Years later, in the Dollhouse writers’ room, “there were little magnetized ball bearings that could be used to build shapes.”) She adds, “The main thing about a Joss room is that it takes on the shape of his personality—you laugh a lot in a Whedon room.”

  Greenwalt, for his part, has a word of advice for future writers who find themselves in a Whedon writers’ room: “If he lies down on a table in the middle of a production meeting, it’s always funny if you lie down and spoon him from behind.”

  Joss ran an informal school of sorts in his writers’ room; he had the writers read Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin’s intense academic tome that had inspired him at Wesleyan. For a much lighter balance to Slotkin’s discussions about how no great change can come without apocalyptic, violent feeling, Joss also assigned them Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, an illustrated guide to how comic books work. McCloud broke down the storytelling devices of comic books, to which Joss would refer the writers when discussing directorial choices. Since most writers were focused on telling the emotional story, Understanding Comics helped them consider the visual elements of how each scene is framed.

  Joss would discuss comic book storylines with his writers as well, because he felt that they were great examples of how to locate the real emotion in a story and then find a way to dramatize it that wasn’t always so literal. Like finding “the Buffy” of an episode pitch, superhero stories had to be emotionally grounded to create a sense of authenticity within the fantastical comic book world.

  Echoing his childhood hours spent watching films with his mother and his college nights watching films in a basement, Joss also brought movies to the writers’ room for viewing and discussion. He and his writers examined the language in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success and Martha Coolidge’s 1985 comedy Real Genius. The first is a film noir about a prominent gossip columnist who enlists an unscrupulous press agent to break up his sister’s relationship with a jazz musician; the second is a satire about a teenage prodigy and a brilliant but outlandish college student who team up to develop a high-energy laser. There couldn’t be two more different movies. “But he wanted us to look at things about language,” Noxon says. “In Sweet Smell of Success, the way they speak to each other is brilliant, and Real Genius has great language, great ways of talking. We got schooled. We had to do our homework, and he would come back after the weekend and say ‘I saw this’ or ‘I read this.’ That surely helped me understand where he was coming from.”

  “I think that is the great privilege of working with Joss—that he makes you better than you are,” Gordon says. “It is one of those things where you have somebody running a show and it doesn’t always work this way. I hope I share with Joss the ability to recognize a voice who can sing in the key [of the series] and then bring out the best in that person. Emphasize their strength and help them to be as good as they can be and also protect them from their limitations. Joss does that really well and very gracefully.”

  The schooling also included some playful hazing, putting Joss back into a high school mode—but this time with people he liked and felt comfortable around. And this time he was at the top of the social pyramid. When Noxon turned in her first script, for the episode “Bad Eggs,” she went home to sweat and shake from all the nervousness. She had a phone message from Joss and David Greenwalt that said, “Marti, we’ve read your script and we have some bad news. There’s just no easy way to say this.” Her heart dropped and panic set in as they continued: “Oh, we’re just kidding, they were great—welcome to the family.”

  Another time, Joss popped his head into her office and Noxon asked if there was something he wanted her to be thinking about. In all seriousness, Joss said “Leprechauns” and then walked away. It didn’t sound like the best idea to her, but Noxon dived into some deep leprechaun research, including watching the Warwick Davis / Jennifer Aniston horror movie Leprechaun. She presented all her research and Joss just stared at her for a while before telling her, “Yeah, that was such a joke.”

  Noxon says, “I have never lived the leprechauns down. I still think about that when I’m talking to a new PA or someone who just wants to get their foot in the business. You say something completely facetious and they’re like, ‘On it, I wil
l go bomb that guy’s house.’ So that was me—I was just, you know, you say jump, I say leprechauns.”

  Jane Espenson was another target of Joss’s teaching and his teasing, as a writer whose previous work had been largely comedic. Joss often approaches writers in the way he assesses actors: “I go for the comic ones. If you can write comedy, you can write ‘the other thing.’” But that didn’t mean that all comedy writers could jump into the waters of Buffy and have no issues. Espenson’s second script was season three’s “Gingerbread.” She was terrified of the story they’d broken, because it had dead children in it. “I had just come off of five sitcom jobs in a row and had been trained to avoid topics, like dead kids, that were certain to kill any comedy,” she says. Buffy was a funny show and she had no idea how to maintain that humor within such an uncomfortable topic. “Instead of leaning into it, I leaned away, trying to compensate with more jokes,” she explains. “Joss hated it and still teases me about all my ‘dead kid’ quips. I learned that there are other ways to be entertaining than to be funny about everything. It was still a long time before I became comfortable writing a script without humor, but I took the first steps toward losing the crutchiness of it at Buffy because of Joss.”

  The schooling wasn’t limited just to the staff writers. Diego Gutierrez, Joss’s assistant from 1998 to 2001, was considering his future and discussed with Noxon the possibility of going back to school. Joss, who had been setting up a shot on a ladder nearby, stopped what he was doing and looked at him as if he’d just said the stupidest thing ever. “That’s dumb,” Joss said. “This is your grad school right here—this is what’s happening right here.”

  From that moment, Gutierrez shifted his focus to take advantage of the opportunities he had at Buffy—the biggest of which was his access to Joss. In addition to his general assistant responsibilities, he shadowed Joss to see how he worked and learn how to break stories. “Joss was definitely a very specific mentorship, because he was so specific the way he did things—he would break the story and then lock himself up for however many hours in his office and he would just come out with a script.”

  As someone who wants things done in a very specific way, Joss is predictably idiosyncratic when it comes to the physical act of writing. Pilot Razor Point is the only pen he’s written with for the last twenty years, and notepads are very, very important. “Muji made a wonderful notebook that I’m just in love with—they were thick and just the right size. And they stopped making them because they hate me.” It’s all about writeability, Joss explains; the wrong notepad can kill an entire writing session. They’ve got to open easily, stay open, and be smaller than eight by ten but bigger than five by seven. “Too small and you just can’t compose a scene on it. Too big and it’s too intimidating and too hard to carry around. The big, thick, bound, precious ones? They never work out,” he says.

  The perfect notebook must be simple; it can’t ever have anything written on it except lines. And it can definitely not have any cute little drawings in the corner. “I make those cute little drawings,” Joss says. “If I doodle anything on the page, I’m not getting anything written that day. I already know that page is useless. Faces, shapes, anything—that means it’s over.” Joss doesn’t toss any notebooks out. He has practically filled an entire filing cabinet with notebooks that he tried writing in—some that he’s filled, some that he wrote three pages in then gave up.

  Another warning sign of an unsuccessful writing session: talking to himself. “If I’m writing by pacing, and I start talking out loud, not like dialogue but like to myself—‘Come on, let’s get out of here, let’s concentrate’—it’s over. It’s not gonna happen.”

  Yes, the pacing. If you ask anyone about Joss’s writing habits, they all say the same thing: he’s always pacing. Joss likes to have an open space that allows him to pace in a circle. Greenwalt says that he’s always drinking tea and always pacing. “By the time he sits down to write, he’s already thought of every single possible idea and he’s picked the best one. He’s like a chess master who can think so many steps ahead.” Diego Gutierrez describes another writing habit: “He basically taps his thumb with the rest of the tips of his fingers like as if you were about to snap without really snapping. He would just be constantly doing that as he was walking.”

  “Oh my God, he would do this thing we called the crab walk,” Noxon laughs. “He would be all hunched over from stress, and he would be like making these little claws with his hands. Sometimes he would like disappear for a day or two—he was in a dark pit of despair and was always like, ‘This sucks, it’s going to be terrible, you know, I’ve really done it this time, you know …’”

  Because no matter how well Joss knew he wrote, he would fall into a “K-hole of self-doubt when he was working on a script,” Noxon explains. “It was routine. It was surprising, because he always turned in an amazing script that didn’t need any rewriting. He did all the editing and all the fixing himself, so you would get these perfect first drafts. But he would agonize and he would have to go off campus and take a walk or go to lunch and try to jog it loose and then suddenly kind of the dam would burst and he would be OK.”

  Without knowing what turmoil was going on in his head, observers could be intimidated to see Joss sit down and churn out a script and be done with it in one pass. Because he waited until he had the whole story in his head before he put pen to paper, he rarely rewrote himself. “He hates to rewrite,” Greenwalt says. “I’ve never met a writer that hates to rewrite more than Joss. He will break a story, which is the hardest part, obviously, and then he’ll pace for a week. He won’t write a word. He’ll just pace. He’s always pacing.” The technique seemed to work for Joss. “You shoot his first drafts. I’ve never seen anybody else who can do that.”

  While his work seldom needed to be rewritten, he often rewrote other writers’ scripts. “You could always tell when a script would come back after it had been to Joss,” Tony Head says. “It was like somebody had sprinkled fairy dust over it. Sometimes it was sparing, but my God, he knew. He always knew it. Just … the jokes were sharper. The moments were heightened. He has great, great writing sensibilities. Bless him, but Joss always got that British reserve, that just Englishness—we are a ridiculous race!”

  Joss’s fellow writers would struggle mightily to rise to his level. “I would get up at five in the morning to try to keep up with this guy and use a thesaurus on every line of dialogue,” Greenwalt says. “I really wanted my stuff to be as good as his stuff, you know, or as close as it could be. He’d put checks in the script when he liked a line, and that was always a big, fun deal, to have a check in a script.”

  Dean Batali also wrote with Joss’s reactions in mind. He knew Joss liked a smart twist of phrase, and the young writer crafted his dialogue carefully. “Can we make him smile with our writing?” he asks. “Can we twist the phrases in a way that makes him smile?”

  Even Buffy’s fans developed an extraordinary admiration for Joss’s writing talents. Espenson has mentioned how Buffy fans, more than any other fans she’s encountered, indulge in the “cult of the writer.” Many writers from the show continue to be showered with affection from fans due to their work on Buffy, which doesn’t tend to happen with scribes from other series. “The Dear Leader of that cult is Joss,” she said. “He’s the one who determined what a Buffy episode was, and in fact, shaped every single story.”

  Since the end of Buffy’s run, Espenson herself has not only served as a writer and producer for Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood: Miracle Day, Gilmore Girls, and Once upon a Time, but also cocreated the web series Husbands, which featured a special guest star in its second season: Joss Whedon. “He sent us all out into our subsequent jobs asking, ‘What’s this story really about? Why are we telling this story? What is the emotional impact of this story on the main character? How is our hero taking a heroic action?’ So in that way, certainly, the Buffy Way has spread.”

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/>   In its first two seasons, Buffy and its cast had enjoyed a certain amount of freedom because the show flew under the mainstream radar on the WB. But by 1999, the network had established hits with its youth-oriented series Buffy, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, and Charmed, and was adding soon-to-be teen favorites Roswell and Popular (an early effort from Glee cocreator Ryan Murphy). The WB started producing image campaigns featuring the young casts of these shows in beautiful, highly stylized promos, and magazine editors soon learned that putting them in their photo shoots would quickly translate into high newsstand sales from fans who had graduated from Tiger Beat and Bop but still had disposable income to burn.

  Feature films wooed the WB actors as well. Joss watched the momentum of the teen entertainment machine begin to affect his cast as a pair of 1999 movies not only starred two of Sunnydale’s favorite girls but reinterpreted them as sex symbols. Cruel Intentions, a retelling of Les Liaisons Dangereuses set in a New York private school, showcased Sarah Michelle Gellar as the manipulative Kathryn Merteuil, who sexes, schemes, and manipulates everyone for her own amusement. The scene in which she instructs the very sheltered and inexperienced Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair) in the fine art of kissing became a pop culture phenomenon, and would go on to win the 2000 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss.

  Alyson Hannigan had a very different role as the nerdy music student Michelle in American Pie, whose “This one time, in band camp” catchphrase throughout the film explodes into infamy with the final punch line about where exactly she had put her flute while on her summer excursion. The shock of seeing sweet Willow—who just a couple years earlier had explained that when she was with a boy she liked, “it’s hard for me to say anything cool or witty or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away”—declare that she knew how to get herself off and instruct the main character how to sex her up properly made for another big pop culture splash.