Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  In readying her troops for the showdown, Buffy gives several speeches about how she’s in charge because she knows better than all of them what’s right and what needs to be done. They all need to fall in line, she says, and she’d sacrifice each one of them if she had to. (“Honestly, gentle viewers,” another character remarks in one episode, “these motivating speeches of hers tend to get a little long.”) One wonders how much Buffy’s speechifying reflects Joss’s own feelings about the conflicts behind the scenes of the series and his view of his role in the Mutant Enemy world. Joss later told the New York Times that “Buffy also became a little bit closed off from the other characters, in the same way that a star is kind of separated from an ensemble, so we dealt with the idea of the isolation of the Slayer, of the person who has to lead.” This characterization is quite different from the Buffy of the first four seasons—the Slayer who was stronger because of her friends and the support system she had built together with them.

  But the season finale, “Chosen,” written and directed by Joss, returns the series to a more inclusive notion of empowerment. As a battle with the First Evil’s minions rages in the newly opened Hellmouth, Willow performs a spell that grants all the Potentials the full powers of the Slayer, defying the “one Slayer in every generation” rule set forth millennia ago by the progenitors of the Watchers Council. As Buffy puts it:

  Here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one Slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman [Willow] is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power…. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?

  It is definitely one of Buffy’s better speeches, and the subsequent montage is a monumental one: girls around the world overcome with a new strength and sense of power. These girls will go on their own hero’s journey, like Buffy herself.

  The loveliest moment in the episode comes just before the final battle, as Buffy, Giles, Willow, and Xander stand in the halls of Sunnydale High School making small talk, with the unspoken understanding that none of them are certain to make it through alive. It mirrors the final scene in the two-hour series premiere, in which Buffy and her high school friends walk off, ignoring Giles’s warnings of upcoming danger, leaving Giles to say in exasperation, “The Earth is doomed.” Here Buffy, Xander, and Willow again ignore Giles as they head down the hallway and off to their separate battle stations. Giles, watching them go, confirms that “the Earth is definitely doomed.”

  Once “Chosen” aired on May 20, 2003, Buffy was finished. Possible spin-offs were discussed, including one starring Eliza Dushku as Faith, who would become a traveling do-gooder in the mold of Kung Fu or The A-Team. “It would have been Faith, probably on a motorcycle,” Tim Minear explained, “crossing the Earth, trying to find her place in the world. I’m sure it would get an arc at some point, but the idea of her rooted somewhere seemed wrong to me.” Dushku passed on the pitch, eager to move on from her character and onto a new Fox sci-fi series, Tru Calling. Another idea, a spin-off set in a Slayer school for the former Potentials who were imbued with Slayer power in the Buffy finale, also failed to come to fruition.

  For now, it was time for Buffy and its characters to rest—as it was for Joss. When asked what he would have done if he’d had one more year with the cast, he answered, “Honestly, if I had a strong answer for that question there probably would be another season. I think it’s time they all went their separate ways. And so my answer is, I can’t possibly think of anything, I’m simply too tired. That’s the end, thanks very much.”

  Yet some time after Buffy aired its final episode, Joss was having lunch with Tim Minear and the subject turned to Buffy’s final two seasons on UPN. “I realized that there was a scene I had never written that I wished I had thought of at the time, which was simply Buffy expressing gratitude about power,” Joss explains. “It was such a burden for her, and we were always turning the screws, and I realized that to complete the statement of the show, it would have been better to have a moment where she just said, ‘It’s awesome that I have this. It matters.’”

  With the end of Buffy and Firefly’s cancellation, Angel was suddenly the last man standing in Joss’s TV regiment. When the WB announced that the series would return for a fifth season, it turned out that Joss would be doing it with one fewer woman. Charisma Carpenter, who had played Cordelia Chase since Buffy’s first day, had become pregnant during season four, and her character was placed in a coma at the end of the season so that she could take time off to have her baby. Viewers expected that Cordy would wake up and return to the show when the new season began, but Joss confirmed to TV Guide that Carpenter had been removed from the cast list.

  “We had taken that story … about as far as it could go,” he said. “Some choices are ultimately kind of controversial about who stays and who goes and who we focus on. But obviously, we had to have her out of a bunch of episodes toward the end of the year because she was having a baby … so what we had [leading] up to it wasn’t a dynamic I wanted to play out that much…. When you have an increasingly large ensemble week-by-week, and you come in in your [fifth] year kind of having to revamp the show and trim the budget and also think creatively, ‘How am I going to service all of these people?,’ sometimes the people who have been around the longest, you’ve done the most with them.”

  Carpenter was shocked and hurt by the turn of events. In 2009, she elaborated on how she felt things had transpired: “My relationship with Joss became strained. We all go through our stuff…. I was going through my stuff and then I became pregnant, and I guess in his mind [Joss] had a different way of seeing the season go in the fourth season…. I think Joss was, honestly, mad at me—and I say that in a loving way. It’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years. As you’ve been on a show for eight years, you’ve got to live your life, and sometimes living your life gets in the way of what the creator’s vision is for the future, and that becomes conflict,” she said. “I found out in a really horrible way…. I never got a phone call from anybody. I actually got a phone call from somebody in the press.”

  Carpenter had also been unhappy with the way her final season had gone. David Greenwalt was the one responsible for bringing Cordelia onto the spin-off in the first place and had been protective of the character, so when he left at the end of season three, she no longer had a champion on the writing staff. Perhaps as a result, season four had seen her character make some very questionable decisions. As her pregnancy progressed, they locked Cordelia up in a love nest with Angel and Darla’s teenage son, Connor (Vincent Kartheiser), who was born in season three but aged rapidly after being kidnapped and taken to a demon dimension. Season three had teased a romance between Cordelia and Angel, so the idea that she would then romance his son was more than a little creepy.

  As for Kartheiser, the future Mad Men star later admitted that he wasn’t a fan of Joss’s work and felt miscast in the role of Angel’s son. He did not like the direction the writers took with Connor, either. “The character lost its thrill about four episodes in…. I felt like I was doing the same scene over and over and over. Every week I’d show up and have a scene with Cordelia, then Angel would show up and I’d have some sort of conflict with him. There’d be a couple of fight scenes where I’d fight with them even though I didn’t want to and then I would sulk and leave. That to me was every episode,” he said. “Ultimately, they wrote him into a corner…. I think the majority of the fans really hated Connor and really hated me and getting me off the show was the highest priority. And I don’t blame them.”

  If Buffy’s sixth season was the one in which fans felt the show most lost its way, many viewers felt the same way abo
ut the end of Angel’s fourth season. Angel’s demon-fighting comrade Gunn (J. August Richards) makes the comment that he “spent most of this year trapped in what I can only describe as a turgid supernatural soap opera”—which is an apt description of the season. Cordelia is saddled with a number of soap opera tropes, from amnesia to the aforementioned love triangle to an unexplained pregnancy, to a sudden personality change that turns her evil. Several other characters are stuck in another love triangle, while Angel temporarily reverts to the evil Angelus, a version far less cunning and charismatic than his earlier Buffy incarnation. By the time Joss brought on Firefly’s Gina Torres as Jasmine, a goddess birthed by Cordelia who brings inner peace to all who gaze upon her, the season felt wrung out and ready for an end.

  Whether it was because two of the people who had been steering the ship—David Greenwalt and Tim Minear—were gone or because Joss had been consumed with launching Firefly and ending Buffy, the Angel storylines seemed to have gone off the rails for a bit. But now Mutant Enemy was down to just one series, and both Joss and Minear returned to give Angel a reboot. Minear penned the fourth season finale, “Home,” in which the team was offered leadership of the evil law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Season five would ask what would happen if the Big Bad they’d been fighting for the past four years suddenly agreed to do their bidding, and whether working within a corporation with immense resources and reach would be worth making a literal deal with the devil.

  20

  AN ASTONISHING RETURN TO HIS ROOTS

  The summer after Buffy was canceled, Marvel Comics editor in chief Joe Quesada considered reaching out to Joss about writing for the company. It would be his second recruitment attempt; he’d first approached Joss nearly two years earlier, when he decided that one of his first projects as editor in chief should be to reinvent the X-Men universe.

  The X-Men are a group of mutants with special powers in a world where “normal humans” fear and mistrust them. This conflict is often compared to the struggles of real-life minority groups in America, such as African Americans and the LGBT community. The property was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1963, and Quesada thought it was very much in need of an update. So in late 2001, he decided to get in touch with Joss, whom he had never met but who was working with his friend Jeph Loeb on the Buffy animated series. Quesada cold-called Joss and basically said, “Hey, Mr. Whedon, you don’t know of me, but I was wondering, how would you like to write an [X-Men] book?”

  There was a pause, and Quesada felt that his pitch was not going well. Perhaps it gave Joss flashbacks to a previous entanglement with the property, when he served as a script doctor for Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men film. He’d been asked to punch up the last fight sequence, but he felt that the story had bigger problems than just the ending and did a major overhaul of the script. To his chagrin, only two exchanges from his draft made it in the final film.

  Joss finally gave Quesada his response: “Can I take a day or two to think about it?” Quesada was floored that Joss would even take the time to think about it. He told him to take a week.

  Joss was surely tempted. This was his chance to produce official stories for the comics publisher that had so consumed him since he was young. But when Joss looked at his schedule—Buffy and Angel on the air and Firefly in the pipeline—he was forced to gracefully decline. Wellknown writer Grant Morrison picked up the X-Men run instead, but Quesada realized that his instinct to draft Joss into the Marvel family had been a smart one.

  Now, in 2003, Quesada was doing a signing at San Diego Comic-Con, when he learned that Grant Morrison had publicly announced that he was leaving his New X-Men series. Morrison hadn’t discussed it with him previously, and as Quesada sat there disappointed, trying to put on a good face for the fans lined up to see him, he was consumed with what he would do next. He tried to remember if he had Joss’s number, and wondered if Joss would consider writing for the X-Men again. “I wish Joss Whedon were here in San Diego. I’d pull him aside and talk to him,” Quesada remembers thinking.

  “I swear, I looked up and there in front of me on the line was Joss Whedon with his hand extended, saying, ‘Hey, man, how are you doing?’” Quesada recalls. “I didn’t see Joss walk up to the table, so I assume he just metamorphosed or transported there—whatever sort of Joss Whedon magic contraption that he has at home, as brilliant as he is.” Quesada, shocked, put his arm around Joss and pulled him behind the booth. He explained his predicament and asked if Joss would want to write an X-Men series now. Joss again asked for time to think about it. “Then I went back to the table and started thinking, ‘Gee, I wish Angelina Jolie were here at San Diego Con.’ I looked up and she wasn’t there.” Apparently that’s a special kind of Joss magic.

  With Buffy and Firefly off his plate, Joss now had time on his hands. A couple days later, he let Quesada know that he was in. He’d get a new outlet for his storytelling skills, and Marvel would get a writer who might attract new readers to the franchise—whether it was people who were fans of Joss or those simply looking for a fresh voice who hadn’t written for Marvel before. The initial plan was for Joss to write for one of two existing X-Men series, Uncanny X-Men or Morrison’s New X-Men, but the more they got into the project, the more they realized how special Joss’s run was going to be. Ultimately, they decided to give him his own series, and so Astonishing X-Men, a title that had been used for limited runs in 1995 and 1999, was born again.

  “What Joss is popular for and what people admire him for is his ability to take characters and breathe life into them, to make the characters feel like they’re people that you and I know, and because of that, we get to care about them so much,” says Mike Marts, the regular group editor for the X-Men series when Joss signed on. “Then he brings these characters that we’ve fallen in love with on these exciting journeys with huge ups and huge downs and twists that we never expect. He did that so well on Angel and Buffy, and then to apply that to the X-Men—that’s great.”

  Marts was already a huge fan of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. “I loved his writing. I loved the way that he ran his shows and, without a doubt, he was someone I would have loved to work with,” he says. “But being realistic, I always thought it was an impossibility, just knowing that he was a Hollywood guy, that his schedule was extremely demanding and he was always working on new projects. So when it happened, it was really just like a dream come true.”

  Joss, in turn, was an X-Men fan who had been keeping up with Morrison’s run on New X-Men. He didn’t see a need to make dramatic alterations in the continuing storylines, and most of the characters he wanted to work with were already a part of New X-Men. In addition, Marvel asked if he could find the right storyline to bring back Peter Rasputin, a.k.a. Colossus, a Russian mutant with the power to turn himself into steel. The character had died in a 2001 storyline when he sacrificed himself to stop the spread of a deadly plague roaring through the mutant world. Joss also wanted to include Kitty Pryde, a young mutant who can phase through solid matter and often serves as the moral center of the X-Men, but she was starring at the time in a different ongoing series, X-Treme X-Men.

  Joss has often discussed how much his creation and development of Buffy owed to Kitty. “If there’s a bigger influence … I don’t know what it was,” he said. “She was an adolescent girl finding out she has great power and dealing with it.” Unsurprisingly, now that he was in the Marvel fold, he had a specific story in mind for the character.

  “We started talking not only about how we could revive Colossus, but also about how we could separate Kitty Pryde from X-Treme X-Men,” Marts says. That series was being penned by renowned writer Chris Claremont, who had started at Marvel in 1969 and wrote the Uncanny X-Men series from 1975 to 1991, the longest run of any writer. He cocreated a number of beloved X-Men characters, including Rogue, Emma Frost, and Gambit. Paul Levitz, who served as president and publisher of DC Comics, said that the complexity of Claremont’s stories “played a pivotal role in assembling the
audience that enabled American comics to move to more mature and sophisticated storytelling, and the graphic novel.”

  Joss was a huge fan of Claremont—and the feeling was mutual. Claremont agreed to relinquish the character of Kitty. “It was fun to see these guys admire each other’s work and then to see the baton passed with Kitty Pryde,” Marts says, “Chris wrapping up the storyline that he had with her in X-Treme X-Men, and then Joss moving on to doing something great with her in Astonishing X-Men.”

  John Cassaday, an artist known for his work on Captain America, Hellboy, and Uncanny X-Men, was assigned to Astonishing X-Men, and he and Joss developed a wonderful working relationship. Still, Marts was concerned about how clean Joss’s scripts would be and how kindly he’d take to editing. When someone has written primarily in other mediums, it can be difficult to learn how to write for comics. But Marts needn’t have worried about the man who had been reading comics for over thirty years, who had made all his writers study Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and who, perhaps most important, hated to rewrite so much that he would wait until he had the story exactly the way he wanted it in his head before putting it to paper.

  “When Joss’s scripts came in, they were so pristine,” Marts says. “I would look for things to try to change, but I couldn’t find them. He was so meticulous with his scripts that I don’t think we ever had a second draft—unless Joss, somewhere along the way, decided that there was a better way to pull off a certain scene or a certain moment. The scripts came in and they were near perfect.”