Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  On October 24, Hollywood’s Cinespace nightclub hosted High Stakes 2004. More than two hundred fans attended in person, donating to the Democratic ticket for the chance to hang out with Joss, Alyson Hannigan, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Nicholas Brendon, Amber Benson, Danny Strong, Amy Acker, and J. August Richards. On the conference call, Joss fielded questions about subjects ranging from Buffy storylines to the upcoming Firefly movie to Joss’s involvement in the third X-Men film, though he made a concerted effort to bring all of his answers back around to the impending election:

  Q: You mentioned in [an interview] that the invasion of Iraq caused some changes in the story arc of Buffy’s season six. What was the original storyline, and [how did it change?]

  Joss: The fact is, there wasn’t a huge change in the story for Buffy, but when we were writing the story, we decided that we were going to shake up the paradigm of the show by having her fight evil at its source, attack evil instead of waiting for it to attack her. And then we started hearing a lot of rhetoric from the president that sounded very similar. We as a writing staff got very nervous and very upset, and we were worried that some of those rhetorics might overlap. We’d like to remind the president that he is not a high school girl who kills vampires. Ultimately, what happened was when Buffy crossed the line and she became an ineffective leader who endangered the persons around her, they kicked her out of the house….

  Q: You said that the Angel finale was not a cliffhanger. If the last episode of Angel had [the characters] literally hanging from a cliff, would you consider that a cliffhanger? …

  Joss: If they were all hanging from a cliff, I would probably call it a cliffhanger—unless, of course, I had started the show with all of them hanging from a cliff. The fact of the matter is, the reason I always maintained that the end of Angel was not a cliffhanger, even though we don’t ultimately know the fates of the people involved, is that the message of that show was very simply, you have to keep fighting.

  And once again, there is no more relevant message for what we are here for today than that. You have to keep fighting. One thing about this country, you never get to sit back and just let things happen. When you do that, well, we all see what you get. You have to keep fighting every single day to make things better if you want to call yourself a moral, decent, responsible person. It’s extremely hard, and that is the story that I was telling.

  It was not lost on Joss that he was now enlisting in a political campaign the same people who had often campaigned on his behalf. The spirit of his fans inspired him, and he felt that his fan base had “always been motivated by altruism and by the desire to make things better and by a willingness to get out there and do what’s right.” And he and his fans continued to be optimistic: “Sometimes you work on a campaign that cannot win, and ultimately that’s the only way to win the ones that can be won, so when you work on campaigns, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t … but to our fans, it never seems to matter. This is one campaign that we can, and will, and must win.”

  The day after the event, 20th Century Fox Television announced that, at Joss’s request, it was suspending his overall deal with the studio. Under the agreement, Joss couldn’t work on television projects for any other studio, and if he returned to TV, Fox would get first look at the project. It was the first time since 1997 that he was no longer under contract with the studio. Mutant Enemy closed its office. The production company was not dissolved, however, and although Chris Buchanan left his position as company president, he continued producing and promoting Serenity.

  Joss’s decision to leave television came as a surprise to many, considering he was just a year removed from a five-year run with Angel and he had only a year left on his contract. But with no new series ideas, he wanted out of the television game for a while. “I spent a lot of time trying to think what my next series would be,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything. When that happens, it generally means something is just not working. I didn’t feel like I could come up with anything that the networks would want.” With a “bitter taste” left by the burgeoning reality TV market, plus his frustration and devastation over Firefly’s cancellation, his choice seemed more like a declaration of freedom than a white flag of defeat.

  Ten days later, on November 3, 2004, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry to win a second term in the White House. Joss was disappointed, but his personal campaign against apathy was not dampened. He had reached out to his fans to broaden their activism. In the conference call, he had said that it was time to speak out. “Even if you’re worried that someone else is going to be more articulate than you are. Even if you’re worried that you may not have all the facts,” Joss said. “Nobody has all the facts…. This is a time when … you can stand up and make yourself heard. And I believe this is the one time when we simply have no choice. We must be heard.” It would not be Joss’s last stand against a powerful status quo.

  Joss and Kai were now expecting their second child, and Kai was put on bed rest for the last three months of her pregnancy. Normally, she was the one to keep their house in order—an arrangement that had never bothered her before, since Joss was in charge of all the cooking. But now, she was frustrated by her inability to do so, and her new need to put everything in Joss’s hands. “Joss didn’t really know how to load a dishwasher,” she says. “Or really ever notice if things were messy.”

  Joss has shared a story that makes shockingly clear the degree to which he can be unaware of the immense clutter around him. “My study was filled with crap…. I would literally have to walk this byzantine, video-game path through all the junk to get to my desk to write,” he said. One weekend while he was away, “Kai and our housekeeper went and cleared out everything completely. I went upstairs, went to my desk and Did. Not. Ever. Notice.” But in mid-2004, with a movie in postproduction, a house to clean, and family to tend to, he needed to step up his game.

  Joss’s disappointment over the election gave way to joy when his daughter, Squire, was born on November 7, 2004. Squire was named for his mother’s paternal grandmother’s father, Squire Huguely (1843–1922). Joss noted the irony that Lee’s great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on the side of the South (Huguely was in the Seventh Regiment, Kentucky Cavalry, of the Confederate Army), while his father’s greatgrandfather, John Whedon Steele, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “extraordinary heroism” while fighting for the North. (As a major and aide-de-camp, he “gathered up a force of stragglers and others” to defend against a night attack on the wagon and ammunition train of his corps at Spring Hill, Tennessee, in 1864.) “No wonder [my parents] got divorced,” Joss muses.

  24

  I WROTE MY THESIS ON YOU

  The same year that hundreds of fans gathered in Los Angeles to support Joss Whedon’s political fight, approximately four hundred people assembled in Nashville, Tennessee, for another event that attested to Joss’s extraordinary influence beyond the typical bounds of genre entertainment. The event was the first-ever Slayage Conference, a gathering of academics discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  As a child of a teacher, who delved with equal excitement into comic books and Shakespeare, Joss had made research and academic study an essential part of his first two television series. In Buffy’s early seasons, the Scooby Gang’s home base was the Sunnydale High School library, where they pored over ancient texts to learn how to defeat the supernatural threat of the week. Unlike a lot of teen shows, the series embraced the idea that old-fashioned book learning was cool. It makes sense, then, that the show’s architect would inspire his fans to delve into the symbolism and deeper meaning of his work, and that Joss and the Whedonverse, like his beloved Shakespeare, would be given their own chapter of academic study.

  By 2001, there had been enough scholarly interest in Buffy to warrant several books of essays on the series. These collections explored the show, its characters, and its underlying themes through the lenses of such academic disciplines as psychology, philosophy
, theology, and sociology. One such collection, Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had received so many quality submissions that there was no way that the editors could include all of them. One of the book’s editors, David Lavery, suggested to his coeditor, Rhonda V. Wilcox, that with “a not-soon-to-be-exhausted international critical and scholarly interest” in Buffy, they follow in the footsteps of Whoosh! The Journal of the International Association of Xenoid Studies, an online journal that had been established for the series Xena: Warrior Princess. In January 2001, Lavery and Wilcox published the first edition of Slayage: The Online Journal of Buffy Studies. It included five articles written by PhDs and doctoral students, ranging in topics from “Dissing the Age of Moo: Initiatives, Alternatives, and Rationality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Undead Letters: Searches and Researches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Teen Witches, Wiccans, and ‘Wanna-Blessed-Be’s’: Pop-Culture Magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  Wilcox, an English professor and the editor of the journal Studies in Popular Culture, had been writing about television long before she started to watch Buffy. Initially she brushed off the show as cute, funny, and lightweight entertainment and had no plans to explore it any further. But the longer she watched, the more impressed she was with it. She loved the language of the series (a subject covered by another book, Michael Adams’s Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon), and she saw Joss as a pioneer who recognized the untapped potential of long-term television narratives. “Twilight Zone or Star Trek had wonderful symbolism, but you didn’t have the kind of narrative that Whedon did,” Wilcox explains. “He paid attention to the continuity and therefore he was able to grow the characters. That’s something that, as a person who did her dissertation on Charles Dickens, I could really enjoy. When Dickens wrote, he wrote serialized novels, and those were kind of looked down on during the time period that he was creating those. I think that Whedon did some of the same kind of work.”

  From 1998 to 2012, various publishers would release no fewer than thirty books of essays exploring different facets of each of Joss’s TV series. No other series or creator has inspired such an intense and expansive body of academic work—not even Star Trek, which has been around since 1966. Why such interest? “There are many audience members who were proud of getting the symbolism and invested themselves in the show more because they could see that it had more than one meaning at once,” Wilcox posits. “It was clear that Whedon was counting on having an intelligent audience, which is probably one of the reasons that it worked better on one of the smaller networks, because he never did have that large an audience.”

  The world of Whedon studies has yet to win over all academics as a worthy endeavor—which probably says little about Joss and more about the general resistance to accepting television studies (and sometimes even film studies) as important. At this point it may be difficult to convince more traditional academics that Joss’s work belongs in the literary canon, but broadly popular works are often dismissed as unserious by the intellectual class. “You have to wait for about a hundred years or more for it to be realized,” Wilcox argues. “That applied to Dickens, it even applies to Shakespeare, and you would think by now that people would’ve noticed a pattern, right? Harvard would not allow American literature to be taught in the nineteenth century, because, my goodness, that’s beneath us.”

  But other academics were eager to discuss Joss’s work, and they began gathering regularly to do just that. The first academic conference on Buffy was held in October 2002 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was initially planned to last only one day. However, as Lavery and Wilcox found with Fighting the Forces, there were so many submissions that they had to extend it to a full weekend.

  “That was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,” Wilcox says, “because I’m standing up in front of hundreds of people giving my Buffy paper and every single one of them knew exactly what I was talking about.” She didn’t have to argue about whether studying Buffy was a worthwhile pursuit; everyone in attendance was eager to talk Buffy well into the night. Two years later, the first Slayage Conference was held in Nashville; with its four hundred attendees, it was impressively large for a conference of academics. It would later become the biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses.

  25

  SERENITY LANDS

  On April 26, 2005, Universal issued the first trailer for Serenity, which was scheduled for release in September of that year. But Joss’s fans would not have to wait until the fall to catch the Firefly movie they’d long been waiting for; shortly after the trailer’s release, Universal announced an unprecedented plan to promote the film. On May 5, the studio would start screening a rough cut of the film for fans in three US cities, in hopes of building an early buzz to interest non–Firefly fans. Even though the film wasn’t finished, ticket sales were brisk. Over the next two months, screenings were held in thirty-five US cities—often selling out as soon as tickets became available.

  Joss knew that the enthusiasm of the Browncoats was an important factor in Universal’s decision to greenlight Serenity. During the preview screenings, Joss inserted a message before the film: “All the work the fans have done have helped make this movie. It is, in an unprecedented sense, your movie. Which means if it sucks, it’s your fault…. If this movie matters to you, let somebody know—let everybody know. Make yourselves heard. If you don’t like the movie, this is a time for quiet, for months of silent contemplation.”

  Fan interest was certainly high, but some questioned whether the buzz for such a niche sci-fi film could be sustained for five whole months. And if the movie’s core audience had already seen the film at a special screening, how likely were they to return when opening weekend rolled around?

  Joss had a different concern: whether the film would make sense to the uninitiated. He’d been so close to the world for so long that he had a difficult time seeing it from the point of view of a complete Firefly newbie. Surprisingly, he found a helpful resource in the generally hated process of film test screenings, in which the studio shows a film to general audiences and uses their feedback to suggest adjustments to the filmmakers. In this case, testing highlighted where Joss had overexplained and underexplained important information, and where he actually did need to adjust things to help uninitiated audiences connect with the film. One key takeaway from the testing was that because Serenity’s opening scenes focused on the character of River, audiences didn’t understand that Mal was the central character. Joss went to the set of cinematographer Jack Green’s new movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and they shot a new early scene in which River “hands over” the movie to Mal.

  July 2005 was a good time to be a Firefly fan. Indie publisher Dark Horse Comics released the first book of a three-issue tie-in comic, Serenity: Those Left Behind. The Sci Fi Channel (which was owned by NBC Universal) brought the original Firefly episodes back to television, airing them right before its hit series Battlestar Galactica. And at San Diego Comic-Con, Joss showed the final cut of Serenity, which he had just finalized the day before.

  In August, Joss went in front of the camera for the latest entries in Serenity’s viral media campaign. The “R. Tam Sessions,” a series of five short videos, was a prequel to Firefly that shed light on River’s life before Simon rescued her. The grainy videos show interviews with River at the Alliance “learning facility” where she studied and was then experimented on, depicting her transformation from the sweet, brilliant girl that Simon remembered growing up with to the mentally unbalanced young woman we meet on the series. Although he’s only shot from the back, Joss played the counselor interviewing her.

  Joss and the cast also visited several other countries to promote the film. As the film’s lead, Nathan Fillion was well aware of how essential he was to the marketing of the film. He was humbled by this new big-screen role. “Until Joss Whedon and Serenity cam
e along, I was never considered for a lead,” he says. “I had some small parts, some small roles in films, but no one would give me a crack in this town. I would go in to audition for something, they’d say, ‘He’s very good. We don’t know if he can handle a lead.’ Unless someone lets me, no one will. I’ll never get that chance. I was here for five years before Joss said, ‘You are the guy. I’m gonna give you the chance.’ Joss Whedon opened a lot of doors for me. He was my champion. He was my mentor. I owe so much to Joss Whedon.”

  Fillion’s appreciation did not color their friendship with too much gravitas. While bouncing from city to city in Europe on the promotional tour, he and Joss came up with superhero alter egos Strong Man and Brain Boy to play with. “He would take pictures of me, standing big, chest out, with my hands on my hips looking into the future,” Fillion remembers. “And him, kind of crouched down next to me, pointing at his head like he’s thinking really hard. Concentrating. ‘Tell you what, Brain Boy. With your brains, and my not-so-brains …’ He loves to play.”

  After a screening in Sydney, Australia, the tour took a more serious turn when a fan asked Joss what he had against being a Christian. He replied with what was, up until then, his most detailed and straightforward treatise on his atheism:

  I don’t actually have anything against anybody, unless their belief precludes everybody else. I am an atheist and an absurdist and have been for many, many years. I’ve actually taken a huge amount of flak for that. People who have faith tend to think that people who don’t, don’t have a belief system and they don’t care if they make fun of them. It’s actually very difficult: atheists are as a group not really recognized by the American public as people to be taken seriously. This does not mean that I rail against religion; however, the meaning of life and the meaning of what we do with our lives is something that is extremely important to me…. I think faith is an extraordinary thing. I’d like to have some, but I don’t, and that’s just how that works….