Joss Whedon: The Biography Page 18

  Another familiar face makes an appearance in the pilot: Buffy’s tart-tongued high school rival, Cordelia Chase. The producers had made the choice early on to bring Cordelia into this new corner of the Buffyverse. “When Joss [brought up the idea] to spin off Angel, the first thing I said was that we’ve got to bring Charisma Carpenter,” Greenwalt says. “We’ve got to have that comic relief.”

  The visual pitch convinced the WB to order an initial thirteen episodes of the series in June 1998. However, at this point Angel had yet to appear in the third season of Buffy, which would lay the groundwork for the new show. Once the spin-off deal was confirmed, David Boreanaz’s representation called and wanted more money for his role on Buffy. “David was a great guy, and one of my favorite guys, but this didn’t have anything to do with him,” Greenwalt explains. “It had to do with his representation. They wanted a huge amount of money for him that would have been impossible for us to meet, because we were still little shows. We didn’t have The X-Files’ budget, certainly.” People gathered in Joss’s office, worried that Boreanaz would not be available and the show would not happen.

  “Joss sat very quietly and he said, ‘I want you to call the agent. I want you to tell them we’re going to add a new character to Buffy called “Bob Fanooti, Demon Hunter” and we’re going to spin him off into his own series,’” Greenwalt recalls. “There’s a Michael Corleone side to Joss, which is, if you want to play rough with him, don’t fucking cross him and do something immoral or bad to him, because he’s a very smart guy who thinks things through—he responds rather than reacting.” It took just one phone call for Boreanaz’s representation to come around.

  Over three seasons on Buffy, Joss and Greenwalt had built a strong team of writers who understood the voice and the tone of the show. Angel was planned as a darker series with more adult themes, but the tone would be very much the same, so it made sense to hit the ground running by enlisting Buffy writers to script episodes of the new series. They did hire a few dedicated Angel scribes—the most notable of whom, like Marti Noxon, needed to be convinced to apply.

  Tim Minear was already an experienced staff writer, a veteran of the The X-Files and ABC’s romantic comedy take on Superman, Lois & Clark. About a year earlier, he had met with Joss on Buffy and pitched some ideas. If a spec script is a writer’s audition to get in the door, the meeting with a producer is his or her one chance to shine. While Joss was “blown away” by Minear’s talent, his demeanor during the pitch convinced him that Tim Minear was the angriest man he’d ever met. Joss felt that he couldn’t spend a significant amount of time in a room with someone so full of rage. On Angel, however, Joss had given David Greenwalt his blessing to run the writers’ room as he saw fit, and Greenwalt wanted Minear.

  However, Minear was not terribly keen to do Angel. “I frankly didn’t think it was that good,” he says. “I didn’t think it even remotely compared to Buffy—it felt like a pale knockoff to me.” He also hadn’t enjoyed his recent staff experiences. “I was coming off The X-Files, where they didn’t let me do anything,” Minear remembers. “Interestingly enough, the show that I never dreamed I would actually get a job on, the only show I watched, had hired me”—but his year on that show “was miserable. I was never on the inside with that group, no matter how hard I tried. I was coming from Lois & Clark, where they couldn’t give me enough to do, to the show of my dreams where they wouldn’t allow me to do anything. I just got so frustrated that I actually quit. The inertia at The X-Files was too stressful. So I quit at the end of the year with nowhere to go, but I felt great about it.”

  After that, Minear had turned down an opportunity to create a syndicated show for Tim Burton based on the Oz books. Greenwalt pursued him for the Angel writing staff, but Minear turned down several of his offers until former Buffy producer Howard Gordon, who was returning to the Mutant Enemy fold himself after the cancellation of his Fox series Strange World, urged Minear to join him in the Angel writers’ room. Gordon was a fan of Minear, having previously hired him to write for Strange World. The series didn’t last long, but he learned Minear’s voice, and knew it could sing in the key of Whedon.

  “Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, and David Fury really sang in that key and I never felt like I quite sang in that key,” Gordon explains. “That tone was very tricky, so singular and so specific to Joss—the irony and the ability to turn on a dime between emotion, comedy, and scary is really a hard degree of difficulty. You see it when people try to imitate it—it is just so counterfeit. I think all of those writers that have flourished were very funny. There was a kind of intelligence, too. A cleverness and also a love of language. I don’t think you could write Buffy and not love language—and maybe that goes to anybody who is a writer, but even more so with people on Buffy.”

  Gordon told Minear, “ ‘Trust me. I don’t sing in this key but you do, and I guarantee you are going to thrive in this and this is going to be where you cut your teeth and learn.’ I knew that it was going to be a great match. It was like knowing two people who fall in love, and even though you like the girl yourself, you knew you could never get her. I knew Tim would be great, and it happened just as I imagined it would.”

  Minear signed on to Joss’s new show, but it was hardly love at first sight. Angel might have been designed to be a more mature show than Buffy, but sometimes it seemed as if the writers were still in Sunnydale High. The Mutant Enemy building had two floors, with the Angel offices downstairs and the Buffy team upstairs. “There were the freshmen,” Minear remembers, referring to the the Angel staff, most of whom were mid- or lower-level writers, “and then you had the upperclassmen—the Buffy writers who had been with Mutant Enemy for a couple years or more. Everybody had been ‘attending classes’ there for years before we got there. We’re the new class coming in, and David [Greenwalt] felt way more comfortable with the old class. So while we were his writing staff for Angel, for the first several episodes of the show, they had Buffy writers writing those scripts.”

  While it was understandable—the Buffy writers were familiar with these characters, and Joss and Greenwalt were familiar with the writers—the Angel writers were a little disconcerted. They felt that while they were breaking and rebreaking stories for what seemed like interminable weeks, the staff of another show was doing the real work. “Jane Espenson wrote an episode, Doug Petrie wrote an episode, David Fury wrote an episode, and Greenwalt wrote an episode,” Minear says. “All these other writers were writing the episodes and we’re sort of not getting our turn at bat, and that’s making us feel like the redheaded stepchildren.”

  Adding to that stress, Joss seemed to spend more time on the Buffy floor. “As gregarious, entertaining, and as brilliantly as he can hold a room full of people’s attention, he’s also oddly shy,” Minear says. “He didn’t really know us, and there was a whole bunch of people there that he knew, that were sort of like his extended family, which were the Buffy people, so I think it took a while for him to warm up to us.” At first, in fact, “Joss didn’t like me,” Minear recalls. “I didn’t like Joss. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t look at me.”

  Angel’s premiere episode, “City Of,” opens with a voiceover that both immediately acknowledges the series’ connection to Buffy and informs viewers that they are now in a new world:

  Los Angeles. You see it at night and it shines. A beacon. People are drawn to it. People and other things. They come for all sorts of reasons. My reason? No surprise there. It started with a girl.

  Then Angel comes into view, sitting at a bar, nursing a drink, and drunkenly attempting to make conversation with another patron. Soon it becomes obvious that the inebriated monologue was just for show as Angel follows a couple to a nearby alley and protects a blonde girl—but not that blonde girl—from a vampire attack. When she tries to thank him, he sees the blood on her forehead and growls at her to leave, then returns to his apartment, alone.

  “We wanted a much darker show and for it to be different in tone fr
om Buffy…. [It] is set in Los Angeles because there are a lot of demons in L.A., and a wealth of stories to be told,” Joss said. “We also wanted to take the show a little older and have the characters deal with demons in a much different way.”

  However, the initial cut of the premiere went so far into the dark that a portion of it never saw the light of day. “One time, Angel arrives too late to save a girl who’s been attacked by a vampire,” Greenwalt describes. “She’s dead, and he starts licking the blood off her. We scared the bejesus out of the WB.” The moment was removed from the final cut. The script for the second episode was even darker in tone: “Corrupt” was to introduce Detective Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Röhm), a police officer who has gone undercover as a prostitute and become hooked on crack cocaine. The WB shut down show production for a few weeks, and the episode was completely rewritten. “They were right, because we hadn’t earned that level of darkness in the show,” Greenwalt says.

  The writers pulled back from simply being “dark” and struggled to refocus the series. The basic premise remained the same: throughout the third season of Buffy, Angel was looking to atone for his murderous past, and he finds a calling in Los Angeles to help the helpless. “Buffy is always the underdog trying to save the world,” Joss said, “but Angel is looking for redemption.” Unfortunately, that premise was expressed through largely episodic storylines in which Angel either chased after the subject of one of Doyle’s visions or took on a paying client as a supernatural private eye. Joss joked that it felt like “Touched by an Equalizer”—a mix of Touched by an Angel, a wholesome drama about angels who are tasked with a “case” to bring a specific person a message from God, and The Equalizer, a 1980s drama about a retired intelligence officer who provides service as a protector and an investigator, free of charge, to people in trouble. Joss found these types of stories more difficult to write than Buffy’s episodic “monster-of-the-week” tales, so he moved the series away from the weekly case format and “turned it into another ensemble soap opera drama with monsters in it.”

  One way the producers shook up the series’ initial status quo was when they decided that the major character Doyle, played by Glenn Quinn, would be killed off in the ninth episode, “Hero.” Joss had always wanted to kill off a main character early in a series, the way he’d introduced Xander and Willow’s friend Jesse in the first episode of Buffy only to turn him into a vampire and stake him in the second. But here he had another motive: Quinn had a substance abuse problem, which was starting to disrupt production. The producers spoke with him about it, informing him that if he didn’t get it under control, he would be fired. Quinn was “terrific but troubled, and we had to let him go,” Greenwalt says. “It was a really sad turn of events.” They hoped that the firing would force the actor to find help for his addiction, but sadly, he would die from an accidental heroin overdose in December 2002.

  Quinn’s final episode also became a turning point in the writers’ room. Joss was in the room a lot more, breaking stories with the Angel staff, but people still weren’t getting along. There was a “weird uncomfortableness,” Minear says. “It’s a little intimidating—he can be intimidating, because you want to impress him but you only have a certain amount of time to do it in because he’s not there all day. Even though they had been using this other staff, even though they weren’t letting us do that much work at that point, we get to episode six and suddenly we’re behind.”

  There was no script for episode nine, no story up on the board. Tim Minear and Howard Gordon were assigned the episode, and they went into Joss’s office to break the story in the most rudimentary way. They ended up with a general outline of what happens in each act and how Doyle will sacrifice his life at the end, and were given the weekend to write the script. Like they had done on Strange World, the two split up the story and went their separate ways to write. While they checked in to be sure that all the character names were the same, they really didn’t have much time to properly integrate the two halves before they turned in the script. They knew that some of it would not quite line up, but it had all the right scenes in the right order with the right elements. In just over a weekend, they had delivered a script that was ready to go into preproduction.

  “We turned this in on Monday,” Minear remembers. “Neither one of us has slept for like forty hours, we’re plainly fried, but we’ve done it. We’ve accomplished this thing. We’re big heroes, we think.” David Greenwalt called Minear in and gave his frank assessment of the script: half was pretty good and he wanted to wipe his ass with the other half. Minear responded, “Well, when you wipe your ass with it, be sure to keep the brads in,” and went back to his office to pack up his things.

  For Minear, Angel had started to feel like The X-Files all over again; he couldn’t write anything and he couldn’t really talk directly to Joss, just like he hadn’t been able to talk directly to Chris Carter. Adding insult to injury, as they left to write the script, Minear had learned that the following Tuesday, October 5, 1999, Joss was having a big party at his home for the premieres of Buffy and Angel. However, none of the Angel writers had been invited. Again, he felt like they were being treated like an afterthought. “There was sort of a high school atmosphere,” Minear says. “There were cliques, the popular kids, and then the ones who weren’t. It was just like, ‘We’re not eating lunch with you.’”

  Minear then told Greenwalt that he was going to have a free parking space in the back. “I quit,” he said. “I’m not doing this for another year. I just had an experience like this, I’m not doing it again.” When Greenwalt asked Minear to talk, he decided that he had nothing to lose and completely went off about everything that had been bothering him. “I don’t like Joss, he won’t look at me, he won’t talk to me, and there’s just going to be some big premiere at his house tomorrow night and none of us are invited,” Minear said. Greenwalt was shocked and asked how he found out about the party. Minear said that it didn’t matter who told him, that Joss should have known it would get out.

  Greenwalt tried to explain that Joss was very shy, and that the party was in his home and he didn’t really know the Angel writers. Minear reminded him that this lack of a relationship wasn’t the writers’ fault. “We’ve been here for months! Look, I understand that this man has created a brilliant television show about high school because he felt like he wasn’t popular in high school,” Minear said. “Now this office is like a high school and he is popular, but let me just explain something to you: I didn’t like high school either and I have no desire to repeat it.”

  Minear went home, but he didn’t quit. After catching up on sleep, he came back in to work on the edit of an earlier episode he had written, “Sense and Sensitivity.” In the episode, Kate Lockley’s precinct is forced to go through sensitivity training, set up by Angel’s nemeses at Wolfram & Hart. The officers are put under a spell that compels them to be uncontrollably empathetic and unable to stop sharing their feelings. As this new touchy-feely, emotionally wrung-out police force ignores their duties and tries to connect with their prisoners, criminals run rampant. This thrills the mobster who put it all in motion in order to assassinate Kate.

  Before the drama of breaking “Hero,” the staff had watched the cut of that episode together. Joss declared it unairable. “Great,” Minear says. “The first episode that has my name on it, Joss Whedon feels like it’s the first episode in the history of Mutant Enemy that is so bad that America must never see it.”

  Minear had asked to sit in with the editor and work on a new cut of the episode. At the time, it was rare for writers to regularly go into the editing room. They did a tremendous recut, and everyone felt that the results were actually pretty good. Minear himself felt that it never got great, but it definitely got better. Later Greenwalt would tell him that Joss said that he had done a great job and saved the episode.

  Over the next weekend, however, Minear started to replay all the things he had said to Greenwalt and thought that when he repeated them to Jos
s, it would solidify Joss’s theory that Minear was the angriest guy he’d ever met. And most likely, he’d be fired on Monday. Monday came, and lo and behold, Minear still had a job.

  Instead, Greenwalt invited him to lunch on the set at Paramount and asked him about his time on The X-Files, and how Minear had quit that series. “That’s a really big show, a lot of money and prestige. It’s a top-ten show, it gets nominated for Emmys. But you said no,” said Greenwalt, who had also walked away from a turn on The X-Files to return to Buffy season two.

  “Because I wasn’t happy,” Minear replied. “The two things that don’t matter to me, David? Prestige and money.” At that moment, Greenwalt knew that none of the things that people are so afraid of losing really meant enough to Minear to be miserable—quite like Joss. And in the same way that Greenwalt had chosen to come back to work with Joss, Minear decided to stay.

  After Glenn Quinn was written off the series, Doyle’s plot-motivating visions were transferred to Cordelia, but Joss and Greenwalt still wanted to add another character to replace him. One idea was to bring in Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, a straitlaced, jittery Watcher who had been introduced in Buffy’s third season. “I don’t even think it was my idea,” Joss says. “One of the writers said, ‘What if Wesley came?’ and I was like, ‘Done! Solid. Sold. Beautiful.’” Joss had been impressed by his work on Buffy; he says that Denisof’s awkward kissing scene with Charisma Carpenter in the season three finale “may be one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever filmed. We just thought, ‘He’ll bring lightness, he has gravitas.’ And as is always the case in these shows, my goofiest character becomes my strongest.”

  Joss met Denisof for breakfast and told him how things were going on Angel, how they’d like to make Wesley a part of it. The character, after being fired by the Watchers Council, becomes a self-described “rogue demon hunter” and finds his way to Los Angeles. Denisof was very excited. “I had already fallen in love with the character, and I had certainly fallen in love with Joss, so it was a great marriage, as far as I was concerned,” he says. “I didn’t know the journey that was ahead. I knew we’d have a trajectory for the character, but I had no idea the range that we would discover with that character over the five seasons.”