Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  By 1970, Tom Whedon was writing for The Dick Cavett Show, ABC’s late-night alternative to NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Joss’s home was often filled with his father’s fellow comedy writers, along with other friends of his parents who were actors, artists, and teachers. Later that year, Tom left late night after being “lured back” to children’s television. Tom’s former writing partner Jon Stone had continued to work with Jim Henson following the failure of their Cinderella project, and he had gone on to become one of the original producers of Henson’s Sesame Street. Now Stone was working with the Children’s Television Workshop to develop a new educational series for PBS geared toward older children. The Electric Company would be less about Muppets and more about sketch comedy. (Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, and Morgan Freeman would be early stars of the series.) Tom joined the project as head writer.

  Electric Company writers poured into the Whedons’ Upper West Side apartment to continue working on the show’s development after business hours. They would arrive starting in the early evening and might stay all night, their writing and planning often fueled by alcohol. “There were always eight or ten or fifteen of us exchanging views and jokes and ideas, and sipping vodka and laughing till all hours,” said Jon Stone.

  Young Joss loved it. He soaked up the energy and creative spirit of his parents and their friends, often enlisting them as his audience. “While I really enjoyed all of the funny things my dad was working on, it was really just being around someone who was that funny. And all of his friends were comedy writers. So the house was constantly filled with these very sweet, erudite, intelligent guys just trying to crack jokes,” he said. “It just had a great air to it, and what you wanted to do is go into that room and make those guys laugh.”

  It was with great excitement that Joss discovered that he could make people laugh. “There were times when I didn’t feel as though I was getting attention I deserved, and I learned that if you said something funny, people would stop and listen,” he said.

  The Electric Company, with Tom at the helm, premiered on October 25, 1971. At Riverdale, Lee played a strong role in the movement that led to the merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools into one coed institution in 1972. Perhaps the stress of two enormous undertakings was too much for their marriage to handle. Around this time, they made an amicable agreement to separate.

  Joss worked through his feelings by referencing the works of Stephen Sondheim. By the age of nine, he knew all of Sondheim’s Follies, a musical that examines two unhappy marriages against the backdrop of a showgirl reunion right before their former theater is demolished. One number from Follies in particular stood out for young Joss. “The Road You Didn’t Take” is sung by Benjamin Stone, an incredibly successful but cold and detached man, who looks back at his life and sees it filled with lost opportunities:

  You take one road

  You try one door

  There isn’t time for any more

  One’s life consists of either/or

  The character finds himself pondering where the door he didn’t choose might have taken him, and acknowledging that he’ll never know. “The notion that every choice you make means that other possibilities are eliminated forever—as a kid, I found that terrifying,” Joss recalled. “As an adult, I still find it scary.”

  Sondheim’s work echoed his personal experiences, he explained. “Sondheim wasn’t someone you would go to if you wanted to be told that everything was perfect. Neither were my parents, for that matter—all concerned were greatly relieved when they got divorced.” The Whedons finalized their split in 1973.

  By 1974, the kid who had cut his comedy chops by making seasoned comedy writers laugh was honing his skills daily with his Riverdale schoolmates. “He was always the funniest kid in the world. A witty kind of funny—I wouldn’t ever call him the class clown,” remembers Chris Boal, Joss’s best friend at Riverdale. Despite Joss’s declarations of being unpopular at school, Boal insists that “girls really liked him, because he was funny—not too many ten-year-olds can pull that off.”

  The boys met when Boal transferred into the school. He and Joss got into a dispute over a chair, which quickly escalated into a fight. As punishment, their teacher made them sit together at a separate table, and as quickly as their fight had begun, so did their friendship. “We didn’t like sports, we didn’t like Led Zeppelin. We were unusual, we were little geeks,” says Boal, now a playwright. “That was a time when geeky kids were not particularly cool.”

  In Chris, Joss finally found a proper cohort. While his brothers were only two and four years older, they towered over Joss. To the younger boys, Sam and Matt seemed like tough, cool lacrosse players, and they were very popular in school. Sam was like a superhero to them, and a bit of a guardian for Joss—kids wouldn’t mess with him as much because Sam was his older brother. Matt took on the typical middle-brother role of picking on the youngest and his friends (a role Joss and Boal later took on to tease Boal’s younger brother).

  The two developed the all-consuming friendship that young boys often do. They were inseparable—Boal’s mother thought of Joss as a son—and inconsolable at times when their plans were overruled by parents. “One time where we were supposed to hang out on the weekend and we couldn’t,” Boal laughs, “we were crying on the phone.” The boys had sleepovers during which they’d have crazy dance parties, with special preference given to Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” and later lie in bed and make up stories about being superheroes, saving the girls that they liked from the guys in the class who were “awful, jocky, and terrible.”

  Joss and Boal also realized they were passionate about many of the same things, including movies and comic books. Joss’s own introduction to the illustrated world of superheroes had come from the serendipitous decision that The Electric Company do a recurring live-action Spider-Man segment called Spidey Super Stories. The sketches aired from 1974 to 1977 and spawned their own line of comics in the Marvel universe.

  In preparation for the Spidey Stories series, Tom brought home a collection of Marvel comic books for research, and he shared them with Joss. “I was like nine, and I’m like, What’s all this? What’s all this that will now obsess me for the rest of my life?” Joss said. “So in a weird way, The Electric Company was my gateway and Spider-Man was the guy.” Before long, Joss was attending his first Marvel comic convention, where he bought Howard the Duck #1 and, full of geeker joy, got Marvel god Stan Lee’s autograph.

  Both of Joss’s parents remarried within a few years. Tom wed Pamela Merriam Webber, a script supervisor on The Electric Company. By 1975, Tom and Pam had moved across the country to Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, where there were far more opportunities for television writers. A son, Jed Tucker, arrived in July and another, Zachary Webber, would come four years later in August 1979. Joss’s older brothers also made the move to the West Coast, but Joss chose to stay in New York with his mother.

  Lee married Stephen Jerold Stearns, a history professor, which brought Joss a stepsister, Lisa. In their Manhattan apartment, Lee and Stephen fostered a flourishing academic atmosphere. Lee’s Shakespeare performances became more common, as the couple invited people over for elaborate meals, expecting everyone who was there to take a role in the play being performed that night. Joss became quite familiar with Shakespeare being read in a very casual, welcoming setting.

  Lee, Stephen, and Joss spent their summers on a commune-like farm in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. In sharp contrast to the intensity of the city in the 1970s, they lived in a creaky old house, with a big, rustic kitchen, a water pump, and a lot of acreage. The hallways were painted with fake bookshelves that featured funny made-up titles. They shared the space with other families and couples, as well as several of Lee’s students. “We kicked it full ’70s,” Joss remembers. “We had an ex-con living in the barn; we had poetry readings with harp accompaniment. We had a potting wheel—I can make an ashtray that doesn’t fall down.”

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p; His time at the farm wasn’t all hippie peaceful. Everyone had to obey the “quiet time” rule, in which no one was allowed to make a noise between breakfast and lunch. Lee spent that time writing, while Joss spun tales in his head, “walking up and down [the] driveway creating giant science-fiction universes and various elaborate vengeance schemes upon [my] brothers.”

  Back in Manhattan, Lee and Stephen eschewed the television set for regular film viewings. Long before the days of personal VHS players, they set up a small projector in their home to screen classic films, sparking a lifelong love of film in young Joss. Their one exception to the no-TV atmosphere was British television series on PBS. Even during the summer, they’d rush back from the farm on Sunday nights to watch the latest offerings from Masterpiece Theatre, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ripping Yarns (a comedy series from Monty Python’s Michael Palin and Terry Jones) and Connections, a documentary series that explored how seemingly unrelated historical events and innovations were highly essential and influential to the development of certain modern technologies.

  With such focus on academics and cultural studies, the two teachers didn’t quite understand the pull that the decidedly less literary comic books had on Joss and his friends, and felt that the kids were wasting their time on the hours spent poring over these “funny books.” Joss and Chris Boal would go down to the newsstand and spend their allowances on the newest comic books—a pursuit more dangerous than it may sound, as they were both mugged at various times en route. “He looks like an easy mark,” Joss’s wife, Kai Cole, explains. “If I was going to mug someone, I’d mug Joss. He’d probably give me all his money without a fight, because he looks nice.”

  Yet the first time Joss was mugged, he didn’t go down easy. He was thirteen and alone, heading to the Broadway newsstand for the latest issues. As he approached, he saw five older boys and immediately intuited their intent. Hoping to take refuge at the newsstand, Joss took off running with the crew close behind him, only to find that the stand was closed.

  “I duck under them with a certain degree of athletic precision and run the other way. But they catch up with me, grab me by the hair, throw me to the ground, and start kicking me around,” Joss said. “We were on Broadway during rush hour. It was filled with people. They parted like the sea and walked around us. That’s an impression that doesn’t go away.” In the end, though, the boys never got his money.

  On another occasion, a man approached Joss and demanded all of his money. This time, Joss offered what he had in his pocket: thirteen cents. “You just hold onto that,” the would-be mugger told him.

  With real life beating them down at every turn, Joss and Boal wrote and drew new stories in which to find refuge. Their comics starred characters based on themselves: the adventures of a fencer (for Joss, who fenced in school) and his nunchaku-wielding friend (for Boal, who studied karate). The boys continued their pilgrimages to comic conventions, where they collected art from their favorite artists, fantasy / science fiction painter Frank Frazetta and hugely popular comic book artist John Buscema of The Avengers and The Silver Surfer. Joss and his friend were both incredibly excited when Buscema drew and autographed a picture of the Mighty Thor on the back of Boal’s convention booklet. It was a major moment in the lives of two budding comic book artists—actually getting to talk to their idols, artists like them who had succeeded in a world they wanted to be a part of.

  Marvel superheroes defined their day-to-day thoughts. In the mid-1970s, Joss and Boal closely followed a storyline in the Hulk comic books: Jarella, a green-skinned princess from another world, has fallen in love with the Hulk. She accepts him both as his human self, Bruce Banner, and in his monstrous Hulk form; this probably resonated strongly with two preteen boys aching for girls to find them appealing in all their geeky glory. But during a battle on Earth in one issue, Jarella is crushed to death. Joss was devastated. “We were super upset, because we were in love with her, too,” Boal says. “It just killed us.” So they did what so many Buffy, Angel, and Firefly fans would do decades later: they took matters into their own hands and rewrote the story, crafting scripts for their favorite superheroes. This evolved into staging elaborate scenes in their apartments, as the future director/screenwriter and playwright strung up action figures and sent them flying across the room.

  The boys were avid consumers of cinema as well. They saw the 1977 blockbuster Star Wars, of course; when Superman came along in 1978, they saw it so many times they could eventually hum the entire John Williams score. The 1979 classic Alien made such an impact that thirty years later, Joss declared it his favorite horror movie, for the fact that it terrified him. “It was the first horror movie I’d seen where I didn’t think the people in it would look out for each other,” he said. “The way they related to each other frightened me as much as the Alien because usually there’s a safe haven of, ‘Well, we’ve got each others’ backs.’ And they didn’t seem like they did.”

  That sense of alienation was familiar to Joss, despite his close friendship with Boal. He compared himself to superhero Luke Cage, whom he saw to be an outsider to Marvel’s Fantastic Four team. “I wanted to be a part of a group. But I felt like Luke Cage…. Very often you’ll be in a group and you’ll discover that every single person in it feels like they’re the one on the perimeter,” he said.

  “As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family—and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do—I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time,” Joss said. “I wasn’t living a life that was particularly different from anybody else’s … it wasn’t like I didn’t have friends, but … we, all of us, are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life. Loneliness and aloneness—which are different things—are very much, I would say, [among the] main things I focus on in my work.”

  Loneliness was also a common subject in the musical works of Stephen Sondheim—ironically, another interest Joss shared with Chris Boal. “We’d walk down the street, singing the entire libretto to Sweeney Todd,” Boal says. Later, they both took part in a school production of the Sondheim-penned West Side Story, in which, Boal insists, Joss stole the show with the comedic number “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

  Musicals aside, Joss often found himself in a yearly rut with his classes. By fourteen years of age, he realized that every September when he returned to school, he’d be excited for all the new things to learn—yet within a few weeks, he had fallen behind in his schoolwork. “I gave myself this little mantra: I was like, you know, ‘I’m gonna be fierce this year,’” Joss said. “I can’t remember the whole mantra, but it had to do with me being a rocket ship. And it worked…. I’m fierce homework guy, engaged guy, doing my work, I’m a rocket ship, I’m not gonna let up. And I was working great, and then I told somebody about my rocket ship mantra, and they laughed at it. And I just stopped.”

  While his interest in classes waned, Joss was very aware of the interpersonal relationships of those around him. He was not as obtuse as most students about the lives of their educators; since he attended the same school where his mother taught, he knew many of his teachers personally. He knew that when the school day was over, they all continued to deal with their own families and their own lives. Later, it would bother him that so many teen-oriented movies and television shows ignored this seemingly simple piece of knowledge and treated every teacher as a joke, every parent as clueless. His frustration went on to inform the character of Rupert Giles, the stuffy British school librarian who serves as Buffy’s mentor and father figure in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The character would also have its roots in the next phase of Joss’s life: he was about to embark on a transatlantic adventure.

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  “BEING BRITISH” IN THE LAND OF SHAKESPEARE (AND GILES)

  In 1980, the boy who had spent most of his youth tussling with loneliness made what may seem like a stra
nge choice: he left his friends behind and moved to England.

  The dramatic change in scenery was prompted by his mother’s decision to spend a half-year sabbatical in the United Kingdom. It was the middle of his sophomore year of high school, and Joss could have reunited with his father and brothers in California. But Lee didn’t trust the schools in California and strongly suggested that fifteen-year-old Joss join her. To the less-than-stellar student’s surprise, he was accepted into Winchester College in Hampshire, one of the highest-rated and most prestigious boarding schools in the country. Despite the fact that up until this point, Joss had never spent a significant amount of time away from his family and had never even traveled outside the United States before, he was intrigued by the chance to “be British” and experience a life he’d seen only on PBS.

  Founded in 1382, Winchester is the oldest continuously run school in England, with a long line of notable graduates and visitors. The school represented a sea change for Joss and his mother, both of whom were accustomed to the fairly progressive environment of Riverdale Country School. For her part, Lee pushed aside any worries she may have had about Winchester’s conservative leanings, weighing that against the excellent educational environment. For Joss, nearly everything was new and unfamiliar. He was living the life of a British boarding school student at a very traditional school where he had to attend chapel services several times a week. He knew to expect certain adjustments—sharing a room with eleven other boys, for example—but he also struggled to adapt to circumstances British television hadn’t prepared him for.