Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  This was just the beginning of Joss reaching across series to bring the people he loved working with together again. He had been building his own family of friends for years, and going forward, he would often staff his projects big and small from that ever-expanding community. One recent addition to Joss’s on-screen family actually had his first experience with the Whedonverse years earlier, when he guest-starred in the first-season Angel episode “Somnambulist.” Jeremy Renner was one of over fifty actors who came in to read for the part of Penn, a vampire whom Angel sired in 1786 and must confront when he comes to L.A. on a killing spree. It was extremely unusual for that many actors to read for a guest role, says casting director Amy Britt. “We just couldn’t figure it out, as finding a worthy toe-to-toe adversary for Angel is tough. When Jeremy Renner came in we knew we’d finally found the guy. Even though Renner is smaller than Boreanaz physically, he has formidable in spades. About a decade later the rest of the industry figured that out as well.”

  The notion of chosen family became an important part of the Angel story, too, just as it had with Buffy. In the season-one finale, “To Shanshu in L.A.,” Cordelia is cursed with horrible, incessant visions that drive her so mad that she has to be tethered to a hospital bed. When Angel finds her, he pushes past the doctor asking if he is family with a fierce and insistent “Yes.”

  Later that same episode, another established character makes a shocking return. “I ran into David Boreanaz on the Paramount lot, where I was working at the time. He grabbed me in a big hug and said, ‘Benz, we’re bringing you back,’” laughs Julie Benz. Her character, Darla, the vampire who sired Angel, had appeared in the very first scene of Buffy and was killed off several episodes later. “I got a phone call asking if I could come in and do a couple of flashback episodes.” She had been working on Roswell, and being on two separate WB shows became an issue for the network. “Both shows catered to the same audience, so they ended up kicking me off of Roswell to put me on Angel.” She had also done a pilot for Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz) that year, so they didn’t know her future availability when they sent her the script for the season finale. “They didn’t tell me what was happening, so I was halfway through the script and Darla hadn’t shown up yet, and I called my manager: ‘I think they sent me the wrong script.’ I got to the last page and it was like ‘Oh my god.’”

  Darla is resurrected, in Wolfram & Hart’s latest attempt to get to Angel and take him down. Joss had kept it very hush-hush, as they didn’t know if Benz would be available to stay on. “If you’re available, we’re going to do a great arc with you,” Benz remembers being told. “If you’re not available, we’ll kill you in the first episode [of season two].” She, and Darla, would make it through the next two season premieres.

  The first season finale also introduced an important new element in the mythology of a series that was quickly developing its own identity separate from Buffy. A new prophecy is revealed that a vampire with a soul will play an important role in the apocalypse and then be rewarded by becoming human once more. That prize for redemption grounded Angel’s journey and the series, allowing the writers to push the limits of their storytelling in a way that hadn’t worked for them in their first few episodes. “Angel got very dark, but when it got dark, it was usually in a horror movie way, or even in an emotionally complicated way,” Tim Minear explains. “The first script couldn’t do it well, because we couldn’t do it realistically.”

  Angel’s Nielsen ratings seemed to confirm that the series was on the right track. Its first season averaged more than 3.2 million viewers per episode—the same numbers that Buffy was garnering. There was no question that Joss had again delivered the WB a solid hit. It seemed a safe bet that the network would long be Joss’s home.

  Over the first season, the relationship between Minear and Joss had developed from an adversarial one based on mistrust to a surprising kinship of like minds. While Minear had already produced about fifty hours of television when he started on Angel (somewhat unusual for someone who had only recently started working in network TV), Joss gave him the gift of a new world of expression. “When he talked about a story that we were breaking and putting up on a board being just a bunch of plot moves, as opposed to being about something, getting to the heart of what’s the Angel of it, what’s the Buffy of it, what’s the emotional center of this story, what we’re trying to say about this character—that process gave me language to articulate what it was I had already been doing,” Minear explains. “Once I knew what to call things, I got better at it. That’s one thing he gave me.”

  Joss also bestowed on Minear his favorite title: the first person at Mutant Enemy to break stories without him. Minear found a way to synthesize what he thought Joss wanted and would corner him with his pitch. He knew that he’d have as much time as it took to pass Joss in the hallway to bounce an idea off him, and he would get him to either say “yea” or “nay” to it. If he got a “yea,” Minear would then go into the writers’ room and break the story, put it on the board, bring Joss in, and walk him through it as Joss made one or two adjustments.

  “We ended up getting this rhythm together where we could go out to dinner or we could just be in the room and just start riffing,” Minear says. “We went to dinner once and broke like two or three episodes in the course of one dinner. That was pretty great.”

  (Shawn Ryan, who worked on Angel the following season, recalls that sometimes Joss would decide that problem-solving was better done with food. “I had always had the belief that you’re in the writers’ room and you’re a prisoner there until you come up with what works,” Ryan explains. “Joss likes to contemplate big story problems at nice restaurants. There were a lot of times that we’d be discussing [a plot turn] and he’d say, ‘Well, why don’t we go to this restaurant to figure it out?’ The next morning, I’d come in and David [Greenwalt] would say, ‘Oh yeah, by dessert we kind of figured out what we’re gonna do.’”)

  Minear also reached out to Joss when he needed help, especially when it came to the Buffyverse canon. When writing season one’s “Sanctuary,” in which Buffy comes to Los Angeles seeking revenge against rogue Slayer Faith, Minear was suddenly blocked when it came to writing the Buffy moments. He asked Joss to write them instead. Joss did so, and when Minear submitted the script, he included the byline “Written by Tim Minear and Joss Whedon.” Buffy was not really in that many scenes, so Minear had written at least 70 percent of the script, but he thought Joss’s Buffy scenes were important enough that they merited a coauthor credit. When Joss saw the script, he told him that he didn’t have to do that. Minear said, “Look, I’ve been lucky enough up to this point in my career where pretty much everything that’s gone on screen with my name on it, I’ve actually written.”

  That was something that was not all that common, which Joss knew from his time on Roseanne. “I definitely want to get credit for my work,” he told Minear, “but I also don’t want to get credit for work that’s not mine. I am in the unusual position where I can make that stand. You’re the first person that’s ever insisted that my name go on something.”

  Minear retorted, “Let’s be honest. Mostly I just wanted a ‘co-’ screen credit with Joss Whedon and I wanted my name to go first.” It was a ballsy move that Joss found hilarious.

  “At the beginning of season one, I think Joss Whedon is a dick. But at the end of season one, he’s my bestest girlfriend,” Minear says. “I want to sit around with him and braid his hair and make cheese balls. By the end of season one, I’d completely proven myself to him, and he had likewise proven himself to me. Part of it is that he respects my talent. It goes without saying that I respect his, but not only does he love talent, he loves for you to succeed, because it makes his life easier.”

  Two years later, Tim Minear would be offered an overall deal at 20th Century Fox, for which he gives Joss a lot of credit. Minear says that the president of the studio called Joss and asked if Minear was the one he really wanted. Jos
s said, “Absolutely, you should make a deal with him.” When it was announced in the press, Joss was quoted in Variety: he called Minear a “genius writer” and said that “if there was no Tim Minear, there would be no ‘Angel.’ … He’s the unsung and unbelievably necessary hero of the show.”

  Minear was shocked. “That’s the thing. It’s not hyperbole—it’s effusive. And I realize that here’s a guy that has earned his reputation for his talent and his excellence, but also he’s a guy who is really quick to give credit to the people that work with him,” he says. “There are a lot of guys in Joss’s position who are not quick to do that. He’s very generous with making sure that people get recognition for the things that they do. So I know now that this is exactly where I want to be.”

  13

  A NEW CHALLENGE: SILENCE

  In the fall of 1999, as Angel moved off to Los Angeles and his own show, the remaining members of Buffy’s Scooby Gang faced a new challenge of their own: freshman year of college. Their creator, too, found that it was time for something new; Joss decided that he needed to challenge himself more as a director. Gone was the ambitious rule-breaker who wanted to explore a new movie genre every week. Instead, he felt he had started to fall into the typical television patterns of “just get his coverage, just get her coverage,” and move on.

  Joss resolved to write a Buffy episode that would require him to up his directorial game. His script for “Hush” would forgo the snappy and innovative dialogue for which he and the show had always been heralded. Instead, it would convey the story almost solely through visual information, which Joss would then have to bring to the screen as the director. He knew that it was a risk—could a Slayer-slang-free episode hold his viewers’ attention?

  “Hush” frames the altogether unfamiliar lack of speech within the comforting contours of a Buffy monster-of-the-week episode. A group of ghoulish fellows named the Gentlemen come to town and steal everyone’s voices, which leaves their victims unable to call for help when the ghouls cut out their hearts. Joss devoted much attention to their presentation. He conceived them as fairy tale monsters, heralded by a sing-song rhyme of warning (“Can’t even shout, can’t even cry / The Gentlemen are coming by …”). Physically, they were modeled after classic pop culture villains with disturbingly sharp edges and pointed features such as Nosferatu and Pinhead from Hellraiser. The Gentlemen were dressed in proper Victorian fashions, their metallic teeth set into permanent grins. They were cast with actors who were also professional mimes; their training gave each movement, from floating down the street to wielding a scalpel, a deliberate and almost delicate grace.

  Joss wanted the Gentlemen to “remind people of what scared them when they were children.” They may have been influenced by a specific childhood memory that frightened him. When asked about the first piece of popular media that had made an impression on him, Joss mentioned Help, Help, the Globolinks!, a horror opera by Gian Carlo Menotti that he saw when he was five. The Globolinks are dangerous alien creatures that disable a school bus and attack the riders but are scared off by the sound of the bus horn, and later by music played by the children. “The Globolinks came, and the only thing that would keep them away was music. A young girl had a violin and she would play the violin at them and they would go away,” Joss said. “It just terrified me. But, at the same time, I adored it.” In “Hush,” Buffy plays a role similar to Emily, the lone girl with a violin who drives off the Globolinks. The Slayer is the one girl who has the power to fight the Gentlemen and recover their box of stolen voices, and once her own voice is restored, she uses it to defeat them. Joss and composer Christophe Beck also looked to the past to inspire the episode’s score, playing tribute to the live musical accompaniment that old silent films employed to carry the viewers through the story.

  Amid the glorious music and “genuinely disturbing imagery,” as one critic would term it, Joss used the episode to cast a spotlight on the limitations of speech. Before the Gentlemen cast their spell, the characters’ conversations mostly consist of attempts to avoid speaking the truth. Buffy and her new love interest Riley (Marc Blucas) struggle to flirt while keeping their mutual secret identities as demon hunters from each other; Xander’s girlfriend Anya is frustrated that he won’t express what she means to him; and budding magic-user Willow is fed up with the fact that the college’s Wicca group is all talk and no action. But once they lose their voices, the characters find themselves expressing how they feel physically, with a sense of urgency and almost desperation. For Joss, this was one of the scariest things he could write: to strip away a form of communication we often misuse and take for granted and explore how easy it is to slip into isolation without it.

  “Hush” was highly praised when it aired on December 14, 1999. Critic David Bianculli described it as “a true tour de force, and another inventive triumph for this vastly underrated series,” and Robert Bianco from USA Today wrote that “in a medium in which producers tend to grow bored with their own creations, either trashing them or taking them in increasingly bizarre directions, Whedon continues to find new ways to make his fabulously entertaining series richer and more compelling. With or without words, he’s a TV treasure.” The episode has since often been referred to as one of the best Buffy episodes of all time—as well as one of the scariest episodes in TV history. As Jane Espenson put it, “ ‘Hush’ … redefined what an episode of television could do.”

  What isn’t obvious from the shivery recollection by fans, critics, and colleagues is just how very funny the episode is. Each character has a particularly amusing reaction to the realization that they have lost their voices (Willow, for instance, initially thinks that she’s gone deaf), and the scene in which Giles presents his research on the Gentlemen to the gang results in some hilarious misunderstandings (Buffy suggests staking their enemies, miming the action near her lap, which her friends mistake for a masturbatory gesture). Even without Joss’s trademark Buffy-speak, his witty voice comes through loudly.

  “Hush,” with just seventeen minutes of dialogue in the entire forty-four-minute episode, earned Buffy its only Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. (Buffy earned several nominations in the makeup, hairstyling, and musical direction categories, and “Hush” was also nominated for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series.) Joss lost to Aaron Sorkin for an episode of his political drama The West Wing.

  “Hush” also represented a milestone in the ongoing narrative of Buffy, as it depicts the beginning of a relationship between Willow and one of her fellow Wicca group members, Tara (Amber Benson). Until this point, Willow had only been involved in heterosexual pairings, harboring a longtime crush on Xander, and pursuing a relationship with Oz until his struggles with his werewolf nature forced him to leave town. The early intimations of Willow and Tara’s same-sex attraction are largely subtextual—in “Hush,” they simply join hands to cast a spell, then exchange significant looks. But their relationship status is solidified for both the audience and the characters themselves nine episodes later in “New Moon Rising,” when Oz returns and Willow realizes that she has moved on with her life and given Tara her heart.

  Between the airings of “Hush” and “New Moon Rising,” the Bronze had seen sporadic surges of angry posts in opposition to the Willow/Tara relationship. Most were from outsiders; since the Bronze was an official fan board frequented by the show’s own staff, conservative church groups told members to go there to register their disapproval. But even within the fan community, some parents announced that they would no longer let their kids watch Buffy if Willow “turned gay.” The uproar reached a crescendo when “New Moon Rising” aired on May 2, 2000, and sympathetic members of the community decided they needed to counter the protests by sending the Buffy crew a tangible sign of their support.

  Bronze poster “Kristen” suggested that they should send Joss Whedon, Alyson Hannigan, and Amber Benson a toaster—a reference to the famous “coming out” episode of the sitcom Ellen. Many
other fans loved the idea. They raised enough to purchase a big, expensive toaster from Williams-Sonoma, which Kristen had engraved with an exchange between Willow and Tara that closed out “New Moon Rising”: “YOU HAVE TO BE WITH THE ONE YOU L-LOVE.” “I AM,” MAY 02, 2000, WHEN SUBTEXT BECAME TEXT. It was hand-delivered to Mutant Enemy, and later the fans “heard from other people [that] from then on the toaster was kept behind his [Joss’s] desk, right where everyone could see it,” said Bronzer Paula Carlson.

  The next day, Joss posted an original song about his esteemed award to the Bronze:

  LESBIAN TOASTER

  LOVE YOU THE MOST

  ALTERNATIVE LIFEstyle CHOICE TOASTER

  HOT GIRL-ON-GIRL TOAST

  (DRUM SOLO)

  LESBIAN TOASTER AH-WHOOOOO!

  (TRIANGLE SOLO)

  TOAST FOR YOU AND FOR ME….

  Got an Emmy nom, all very well but my beautiful engraved (ENGRAVED, for the love of God) toaster is far far cooler…. So thanks, and thanks, and thanks. Bread shall be warm….

  Kristen—“like” is not the word. (“pudendous” is not the word either, but it’s a damn fun one.) NO ONE i know has an engraved toaster. Plus, coolness aside, the fact that you cared that much about what we’ve been doing with Willow and Tara … sniff sniff, something in my eye … Can’t wait also to show JANE, who wrote for Ellen back when. Thank you.