Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “It’s just the fun of hearing these amazing stories,” Denisof says, “and having some surprises of some people playing certain parts and an overriding enjoyment of how amazing Shakespeare is. If you’re a Shakespeare geek like I am, then it’s always pleasurable to hear Shakespeare read aloud. It’s what it’s designed for.”

  Even as years passed and Joss moved on to new projects or saw old ones end, the readings continued, becoming a well-known and much-loved tradition. When Joss was working on something new, he would get a feel for which members of his cast and crew were into Shakespeare, so he’d have new people to add to his unofficial repertory, alongside those he knew had enjoyed his readings in the past.

  Many repertory members have shared the story of a particular performance of Much Ado About Nothing, which also happens to be Joss’s favorite. Shakespeare’s popular comedy is about two couples on very different journeys to a romantic happy ending. The first pair fall in love quickly and then are torn apart by nasty rumors, and the second bicker constantly and swear never to fall in love. In this performance, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof played the latter couple, Beatrice and Benedick. Kai recalled that the settings included a tea party on the back lawn with quilts and finger sandwiches.

  Singer and Whedon friend Angie Hart played the role of the musician Balthasar. When another character called out to Balthasar to sing them a song, Hart’s then-husband, Jesse Tobias, pulled out his guitar, Joss took up a lute, and Joss’s brother Sam pulled out a mandolin, and they began to sing “Hey Nonny Nonny.” Aside from the four of them, no one else knew what was coming—Joss had written music to the songs in the play. He had taught it to his small band about a half hour earlier. Neil Patrick Harris, who was brought along by his How I Met Your Mother costar Alyson Hannigan, was taken by the entire experience. “It made me want to eat a giant turkey leg until I’m sick and watch people joust,” he says. “It was an amazing Santa Monica bohemian afternoon”—which he admits makes them all sound “like we were much more hippies than we all were.”

  Harris would do four plays at the Whedon home, and each time he’d do his best to come prepared. “I didn’t study Shakespeare, and so I just didn’t want to look like an asshole who didn’t know what I was talking about,” he explains. “So for whatever part he would give me, I’d go out and read it Cliff Notes style as quickly as I could and sort of get the gist of it, and then show up and do it.”

  Jane Espenson was particularly excited to act with Harris. “It’s crazy! I loved it but it was also terrifying. I’m not very good, but I jump in with enthusiasm and I’m very useful, because I used to have a set of clamp-on Eeyore ears from Disneyland that were very necessary for any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she says. “I’ve been to three different readings of that play at Joss’s house—I read big long scenes opposite Tony Head once! I am no actress and this is well beyond my comfort zone. But it was also one of my most cherished accomplishments.”

  The readings were always a lot of fun, and as they went on, ideas were bounced around about capturing them somehow. Joss started using a still camera to take shots of the performers, as a record if nothing else. “It was that that got him thinking maybe there’s a way to capture the fun and feel of one of these readings in some kind of medium that other people could enjoy,” Denisof says.

  The Shakespeare readings had become such a part of their lives that when Kai, having earned her master’s in architecture, was rebuilding the new home they bought in 2004, she thought about the spaces and how they could be used for different readings. They could read in the courtyard and then go up on the balcony. There was also a space in the backyard with a big drop of a slope that went down into the hills of a golf course and protected parkland. (Joss describes it as Vietnam in the morning and Tuscany at night.) She decided to surprise Joss with a little stone amphitheater.

  “I just pictured it in my head that Joss could have that and how much he would love it,” she says. “I was the happiest person in the world when he had a Shakespeare reading out there. I was taking pictures. I was serving people. I was too distracted, loving watching them all read Shakespeare down here.”

  Choosing one’s family—going beyond blood, beyond marriage to create a support system—is not only a strong theme in Joss’s writing and his professional life, it is a centerpiece of his personal life as well. He has fun bringing all different kinds of people together to create something. “He loves it so much,” Kai says. “Probably the happiest I’ve ever seen him is during a Shakespeare reading.”

  15

  BUFFY GOES BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL

  When the fifth season of Buffy premiered on September 26, 2000, it marked a huge shift in focus for the series. At the end of the first episode, viewers are introduced to Dawn, Buffy’s previously unmentioned little sister. Much of the season to come will focus on the Slayer’s relationship with her younger sibling; though easily irritated by her immaturity, Buffy will put protecting Dawn above everything and everyone else in her life.

  Joss created Dawn as a way to “have a really important, intense emotional relationship for Buffy that is not a boyfriend.” He also modeled Buffy and Dawn’s interactions on Kai’s early relationship with her own younger sister, Dawnmarie. Kai’s mother and stepfather brought the baby home on Kai’s birthday, an event that everyone had forgotten about. “She was all cranky about it,” Joss said. Then “they put Dawn in her arms…. She said she just felt like, ‘I have to take care of this.’” Initially, Buffy’s Dawn was written to be much younger than her sister, but she was aged up once fourteen-year-old Michelle Trachtenberg was cast.

  Joss did establish an in-story reason why Buffy suddenly had a teenage sister. Subsequent episodes reveal that Dawn is actually a mystical object called “the Key,” which its guardians placed in human form and sent to Buffy to protect. Buffy learns that these guardians also altered her memories and those of her friends and family, causing all of them to believe that Dawn had been there all along. It was a development Joss had been planning for a while, dropping the occasional cryptic hint as far back as the season three finale.

  But many viewers were still resistant to the sudden appearance of a whiny interloper. To them, Dawn was an example of “Cousin Oliver Syndrome.” Named for the annoying eight-year-old added to the cast of The Brady Bunch in its final season, a “Cousin Oliver” is a young character shoehorned into a series to add a youthful energy the existing cast members are growing too old to provide. Even though Dawn had a more meaningful purpose within the Buffy narrative, the sudden focus on her teenage angst was grating to fans used to a more nuanced portrayal of adolescent life. Whether Joss’s idea was a miscalculation or the writers simply didn’t know quite how to write for the new character, Dawn ended up on a number of “hated characters” lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s “Most Annoying TV Characters Ever” and TV Guide’s “Most Loathed TV Characters.”

  Another member of Buffy’s family evoked an intense reaction of a different sort. It was in the sixteenth episode of the fifth season that Joss killed off Buffy’s mother, Joyce, mirroring the death of his own mother nearly a decade earlier. To Sarah Michelle Gellar, herself the daughter of a single mother, portraying Buffy’s grief “was probably the most awful experience of my life—and I mean that in the best way…. It was gut-wrenching for me, and though it cut to the heart of the character and the show, I never want to do it again.” Millions on the other side of the screen were also devastated—though the fact that many viewers also drew comfort from “The Body” was one of the many gifts the series has given its fans that Joss could not have predicted.

  After his first Emmy nomination for writing “Hush” the season before, Joss hoped that “The Body” might again be honored by the Television Academy. He had two chances, having both written and directed the episode, but this time he was snubbed altogether, as The West Wing, The Sopranos, and ER swept the nominations in both categories. “It’s my own fault for getting my hopes up,” said
Joss. “Every now and then, I’ll go, ‘Damn.’ But if I wanted Emmy nominations, all my characters would be doctors.”

  Dawn was not Joss’s only attempt to return Buffy to its teen-centric roots. While the Scooby Gang had moved on to college and other postadolescent pursuits, Joss had formulated a plan to take them back to high school and, this time, make their adventures a bit more colorful and a lot more animated. With two series on the air already, Joss sought out talent beyond the Mutant Enemy family to make Buffy: The Animated Series a reality.

  Buffy was well into its fifth season when writer Jeph Loeb got a call out of the blue to have a meeting with Joss. Loeb had spent many years working on different Marvel comic book series: Avengers, X-Force, Captain America, and Iron Man. He didn’t know what Joss could want to meet with him about, but he was excited by the request, as he was already a fan of Buffy and of Joss, who he felt was doing astonishing work in the challenging field of genre television. “Buffy had cut a swath into this world with humor, pathos, and a voice that was singular,” Loeb says. “Which are critical elements in being successful in network television.”

  Loeb showed up for the meeting, and while waiting for Joss to show up, he noted all the comic books in Joss’s office—a lot of comic books. He figured that was why Joss wanted to see him—that this was a guy who liked comic books and wanted to talk to someone who wrote them. When Joss arrived, instead of explaining why Loeb was there, he sat down and began to strum his guitar. They talked about comics for a bit, until finally Joss got to the point: he was thinking about doing an animated Buffy series and was curious what Loeb thought about it.

  “I’m not sure if he’s asking because he wants me to do something on it or he just wants my opinion,” Loeb says. “But immediately I can see the exciting opportunity of what this could be. And then he asks what I think is a trick question: ‘What would the series be about?’”

  Loeb hedged until he finally said, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” There was a visible look of relief on Joss’s face. Encouraged, Loeb pitched that the series could take place during Buffy’s first year at Sunnydale High. That would allow Joss to return to the series’ early metaphors about the demons of growing up that the live-action show had outgrown. “I guess those were the right answers,” Loeb says. “Joss lit up and started talking about the show as if it had already aired. He had ideas for stories and explained them like he had watched them. It was … enchanting.”

  What Loeb didn’t know at the time was that other people had already come in to pitch for the series, and their answers to Joss’s questions had been less encouraging. “One wanted to star Giles as the headmaster of a wizard’s school in England with a boy with glasses who wanted to fulfill his destiny as a warlock. For a show called Buffy: The Animated Series”? Loeb was dumbfounded. “Potter much?”

  Before Loeb left that first meeting, Joss had offered him a job. Development on Buffy: The Animated Series began soon after, with Joss and Loeb as executive producers. Most of the cast signed on to voice their characters, with the notable exception of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who opted out and was replaced by voice-over actress Giselle Loren. Several of the show’s writers took on script duties: Joss and Loeb wrote the pilot, while Jane Espenson and Doug Petrie also wrote episodes. A new writer, Steve DeKnight, was hired for the animated series on the strength of a Buffy spec script that he had written in which Xander gets Slayer powers, and in doing so demonstrates why men can’t handle such strength. Joss felt it was the best spec script he’d ever read. It was “funny, clever, had twists and that’s all well and good and very important,” he said, but “the most important thing is that he found the underlying emotion. To me, there’s no other reason to be writing. He found what it felt like for Buffy [to be the Slayer], what it felt like for Xander—he found extraordinary character insights.”

  Buffy: The Animated Series was written with the same basic tone—the same humor, action, and excitement—as the live-action series, but with the drama and sexual content toned way down to appeal to kids. It returned to the familiar relationships of Buffy season one: Willow pining after best friend Xander, who pines after Buffy, who pines after the mysterious Angel. “Unlike the series, it’s not about change,” Joss said. “It’s a chance to tell all of the high-school stories that we couldn’t tell because they were only in high school for two and a half years.”

  While the content would be familiar, Joss wanted to break new ground with the show’s visual style. The challenge was to give the series a look that hadn’t been done before in an animated action-adventure show, while still capturing that Whedonesque humor and mood. “That’s a tall order for a Saturday-morning cartoon, but that was Joss,” Loeb says. “If he was going to get into this business, it was going to be something that changed the game the way Buffy had changed network TV and Batman Beyond had changed animated shows.”

  Batman Beyond was a series that aired from 1999 to 2001 on the WB. The acclaimed cartoon was conceived as a kid-friendly, futuristic version of Batman, but it was considerably darker than most other children’s programs at the time: in 2039, Bruce Wayne is an elderly and bitter recluse who reluctantly agrees to allow a newly orphaned teenager to take over the Batman persona under his tutelage. To Joss and Loeb, the series was less of an inspiration for Buffy: The Animated Series than a bar for them to reach for and surpass. They brought in Eric Radomski, who had been very responsible for the look and feel of Batman Beyond’s moody, noirish predecessor Batman: The Animated Series, to run production. Radomski, an Emmy Award–winning producer, was working at Film Roman, an American animation studio that produced content for such shows as The Simpsons and MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head. He, in turn, enlisted Eric Wight, who had worked on Batman Beyond, to join the Buffy animation team.

  Tonally, Eric Wight explains, his new series and his previous one “were very similar. We had to strike a very difficult balance of being a little bit dark but not too edgy. On Batman Beyond, we were taking an established mythology and evolving it into a completely unique direction. With Buffy, we were trying to honor the original series as closely as possible.”

  With scripts in hand, the team set about creating character sketches and storyboarding. “One of my favorite stories Jeph told me was how they had the art hanging up at the offices and on one occasion he looked over and saw Michelle Trachtenberg staring at her character design, unknowingly standing in the exact pose I had drawn her in,” Wight says. “He knew I had a strong attention to detail, but that blew him away.” Wight hoped to bring aboard many friends from his Batman Beyond days. He also had preliminary conversations with Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, about creating some monster designs. “Both Joss and I are tremendous fans of his work, and he was a huge influence on the style,” Wight says.

  Joss and the writers were also excited about the stories they could tell without the limitations of live-action budgets; in animation, a dragon crashing into a library costs the same as people sitting in a room talking. One episode involved Buffy having to deal with a demonic driver’s ed instructor; another was about Buffy getting shrunk down to a super-tiny size. “It’s a very silly show,” Joss said. “We refer to it as Simpsons Beyond.”

  But to Jeph Loeb, “the scripts were like fine pastries in a sea of cafeterias. It was the Murderers’ Row of writers—the Buffy and Angel staff writers at the height of their game writing for Saturday-morning cartoons. They all wanted to work on this!”

  For all the enthusiasm, the development of Buffy: The Animated Series did not proceed smoothly. The plan was for 20th Century Fox to produce the series, to air in its Fox Kids block on affiliates across the country. But in July 2001, Fox Family Worldwide, which oversaw Fox Kids, was sold to Disney. Joss and Mutant Enemy didn’t feel that anything would change—at first. But then they finally got a call: Disney wasn’t interesting in proceeding with the series.

  “We were met with a lot of—I don’t want to say resistance, because it was just more of no response,” explains Chris
Buchanan, whom Joss hired to run the business end of his production company in early 2002. “[Disney] just didn’t really respond to us.” The irony, of course, is that years later Disney would very much be in the Joss Whedon business, when they bought Marvel Comics and produced The Avengers.

  It was an enormous blow to the team. They’d worked hard and were ready to ship the first episodes overseas. The animation test had come back promising. “It was like getting ready for a birthday party and then the cake never arrived,” Jeph Loeb says. “Only worse.”

  They hoped they could find another home for the series. But “because of the sale, there were larger issues between Disney and Fox,” Buchanan says, which made it difficult to obtain permission to shop the show around. “We finally got over the hump on it and made a little presentation, which is different from a pilot because it’s just much shorter. It was really cool—and it was a great style of animation that Joss was really into, and it started that round of conversations with different distribution partners like Cartoon Network. We talked to pretty much everybody.”

  The challenge was that in the time between when work on the show began and when the team sorted out the issues with the Fox Family changeover to Disney, the animation market had changed dramatically. Joss had modeled Buffy: The Animated Series after shows such as Batman Beyond, which featured high-quality animation and demanded a fairly pricey per-episode cost. By the time Buffy was back in negotiations, most animated fare on TV was much less ambitious, demanding perhaps only half the budget of something like Batman Beyond.

  “Essentially what that means is instead of having fifteen days of production in Asia and Korea on your show, you were down to ten days,” Buchanan says. “It was just not the same creative model, and the offers that we had coming in didn’t really make sense. It just ultimately kind of died the death where we didn’t have enough demand on the distribution side to get enough money to execute it the way that Joss and Jeph wanted to creatively. It was just really unfortunate, because the scripts were great, and I thought it was a fantastic way to kind of bring a new generation of Buffy fans into the fold.”