Joss Whedon: The Biography Page 33

  Universal’s Mary Parent was still determined to be in the Joss Whedon business; as with Serenity, she came aboard to produce. The studio had enough faith in Joss’s storytelling to lock him into a seven-figure deal for Goners without seeing what the Serenity box office would bring. But even with a script in hand, Parent and Universal knew that his commitment to Wonder Woman came first.

  And it took a long time for that script to be finished. Before he turned in his second Wonder Woman draft in July 2006, he took a moment to honor another great feminist icon in his life. On May 15, the day after Mother’s Day, the women’s rights organization Equality Now presented Joss with an award at their “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines” event. Equality Now had been founded by Jessica Neuwirth, a former student of Joss’s mother’s at Riverdale Country School.

  Neuwirth had been inspired by the work they did at Riverdale with Amnesty International, in particular when they adopted a prisoner of conscience in East Germany. “When he was released from prison, he wrote back to us, which was an incredible experience for all of us,” Neuwirth says. “In addition to the basic research and writing skills, Lee Stearns tried to develop in her students the ability to think critically, to ask questions, and to be active in the world.”

  Neuwirth went on to graduate from Yale and Harvard Law School, then joined the staff of Amnesty International, where she worked from 1985 to 1990. In 1992, along with two other lawyers, Navanethem Pillay of South Africa and Feryal Gharahi of Iran, Neuwirth founded Equality Now to promote the rights of girls and women around the world. She reached out to Lee soon after and was buoyed by Lee’s excitement for the project and her desire to work with it in her Riverdale classes, as she had with Amnesty International.

  In May 1992, Neuwirth and Pillay were in London for the first organizing trip of Equality Now. When Neuwirth came home, there was a message on her answering machine from Lee, “full of light and energy” and “keen to hear how the trip had gone.” It was followed by a grim-sounding message from another teacher at Riverdale, a close friend of Lee’s. “I knew something was wrong, and she told me the tragic news when I called her back,” Neuwirth remembers.

  The news of Lee’s death was devastating, and as she continued her work with Equality Now, she realized how much of it she had done in Lee’s honor. Lee’s memory, she says, “is with me all of the time. She had a huge influence on me, which carried very much over into Equality Now. I learned human rights from Lee through Amnesty International, but Lee was also a great feminist, which only came to me much later in the course of the creation of Equality Now. I know that Lee would have had so much to contribute to the development of Equality Now, and I have really missed her, though I see so much of her thinking in Joss and his work.”

  Joss quickly took up his mother’s support of the organization. “Joss has been involved with Equality Now for as long as I can remember,” Neuwirth says. “He immediately understood what we were trying to do and has always been helpful in many different ways.” His vocal support brought tremendous visibility to the organization and its work, and thousands of his fans were motivated to join the group and support it financially.

  Firefly fans in particular developed a special relationship with Equality Now. At San Diego Comic-Con 2005, they set up a table where they raised $12,000 for the charity, while producers of Done the Impossible, a documentary about Firefly and its fans, pledged a portion of their profits to the group. In January 2006, with the approval of Universal, fans began organizing Serenity screenings, all the proceeds of which would be donated to Equality Now. The Can’t Stop the Serenity screenings spread worldwide, and by 2013 they had raised over $800,000 for charity, with the majority donated directly to Neuwirth’s organization.

  It isn’t just the financial and promotional support that Neuwirth is grateful to Joss for. “Indirectly, his work—such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer—has had a massive impact on our work, creating new role models of strong women and girls that have inspired so many young women and men to reach for a new paradigm of equality in everyday life. Joss makes gender equality seem like such a natural thing, something taken for granted, which is of course as it should be, but isn’t quite yet.”

  At the Road to Equality event, Joss was introduced by Meryl Streep, who also paid tribute to Lee and her influence on him, his work, and Equality Now. In his own speech, Joss chose to address the one question that he’d been asked repeatedly at press junkets for years. He took on the role of reporter to ask himself, “Why do you always write these strong women characters?”

  I think it’s because of my mother. She really was an extraordinary, inspirational, tough, cool, sexy, funny woman, and that’s the kind of woman I’ve always surrounded myself with. It’s my friends, particularly my wife, who is not only smarter and stronger than I am but occasionally taller too. But only sometimes, taller. And, I think it—it all goes back to my mother.

  So, why do you write these strong women characters?

  Because of my father. My father and my stepfather had a lot to do with it, because they prized wit and resolve in the women they were with above all things. And they were among the rare men who understood that recognizing somebody else’s power does not diminish your own. When I created Buffy, I wanted to create a female icon, but I also wanted to be very careful to surround her with men who not only had no problem with the idea of a female leader but were, in fact, engaged and even attracted to the idea. That came from my father and stepfather—the men who created this man, who created those men, if you can follow that….

  So, why do you write these strong women characters?

  Because equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity—we need it to stand on this Earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it. We need equality, kinda now.

  So, why do you write these strong female characters?

  Because you’re still asking me that question.

  That speech struck a chord with fans, who would continue to quote it for years—although like most complex arguments, it would usually be reduced to the punchy sound bite of the last exchange. His mention of Lee would sometimes be added to give context, but few would mention his salute to Tom and stepfather Stephen. Yet their influence, too, is clearly evident in Joss’s work. Though his series may lack a “world’s greatest dad” like Keith Mars, they’re filled with male role models who support and admire the strong women in their lives, from Xander and Giles in Buffy to Zoe’s commanding officer Mal and husband Wash in Firefly.

  While on the East Coast for the event, Joss spent a day with Jeanine Basinger in Connecticut. It was a rare opportunity for Joss to step away from his work, given how much of his time it demands and how consumed he becomes with the stories he’s writing. The two had a most lovely day, walking around and discussing his script for Wonder Woman. Basinger was a huge fan of the character, and knowing that Wonder Woman’s next adventure was in the hands of her prized student made her proud. Joss was not as confident, confiding in his mentor that he felt that his story was stupid.

  Basinger had wooed him out with the promise of a surprise, and she took him to New Haven for a veterans association event at which she was speaking. The event honored 1940s film star Joan Leslie, who starred with Fred Astaire in The Sky’s the Limit, a favorite of Joss’s. “He’s very fond of the songs and dances in it,” Basinger says. She introduced Joss to Leslie, saying, “You know, Miss Leslie, this is one of my former students who’s now a TV writer. I’d like to introduce you to Joss Whedon.” Joss was thrilled. As Leslie responded graciously, the actress’s daughter was visibly shocked. She asked to speak to Basinger privately. “Is that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy?” she said, gasping. “I’m such a huge fan!”

  Kai recalls a simil
ar story involving Joss’s icon Stephen Sondheim. The couple attended a performance of Sondheim’s play Company in New York, with plans to meet the playwright afterward. Backstage, Sondheim mentioned to his cast that he was going to have dinner after the show with “Joss Whedon and his wife.” Sondheim had no idea that they knew who Joss was; to his surprise, it turned out that several cast members were avid Buffy fans. “The people who liked it crashed our dinner and were gushing over Joss,” Kai laughs. “Sondheim sitting here and they’re like, ‘Tell us another story, Joss.’”

  A couple of months after his visit with Basinger, Joss turned in his second draft of Wonder Woman. Breaking the story had proven unusually difficult; he felt like he was pulling teeth to get the pieces to come together. “Plot-wise, I was like, ‘Uh … I don’t think I’ve cracked this,’” he recalls. “I went back and did an outline and said, ‘I’ve got it!’”

  Unfortunately, while Joss was fairly happy with the draft he turned in, the producers didn’t seem to agree. “I wrote a script. I rewrote the story. And by the time I’d written the second script, they asked me … not to,” Joss said. “They didn’t tell me to leave, but they showed me the door and how pretty it was. ‘Would I like to touch the knob and maybe make it swing?’ I was dealing with them through Joel Silver, who couldn’t tell me what they wanted or anything else. I was completely in the dark. So I didn’t know what it was that I wasn’t giving them.”

  While waiting on final word from Silver and executives at Warner Bros., he returned to rewrites on Goners. He was struggling to get it into the “perfect structure.” Universal had asked for script changes, and while he was hoping to just move forward with the project, he felt that he finally had a basic story that he loved and could work out the specifics instead. That was a relief compared to being in limbo for eighteen months with no constructive direction on the Wonder Woman project.

  With Wonder Woman, Joss felt that he never got to tell the story that he wanted to. “I never wrote my definitive version of the Wonder Woman script,” he said. “I wrote one that had all the characters but the plot was super-lofty just structurally. So there is no sort of definitive Wonder Woman script that I would say, ‘This is how I would have done it.’ Although there are a lot of things in it that I wrote that I adore.”

  On February 3, 2007, Joss took to Whedonesque to make an official announcement about withdrawing from the Wonder Woman film:

  Joss will not be fighting for our rights after all.

  You (hopefully) heard it here first: I’m no longer slated to make Wonder Woman. What? But how? My chest … so tight! Okay, stay calm and I’ll explain as best I can. It’s pretty complicated, so bear with me. I had a take on the film that, well, nobody liked. Hey, not that complicated.

  Let me stress first that everybody at the studio and Silver Pictures were cool and professional. We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that’s never gonna work….

  The worst thing that can happen in this scenario is that the studio just keeps hammering out changes and the writer falls into a horrible limbo of development. These guys had the clarity and grace to skip that part. So I’m a free man….

  But most importantly, I never have to answer THAT question again!!!! And you don’t have to link to every rumor site! Finally and forever: I never had an actress picked out, or even a consistent front-runner. I didn’t have time to waste on casting when I was so busy air-balling on the script. (No! Rim! There was rim!) That’s the greatest relief of all. I can do interviews again! …

  ps All right, it was Cobie Smulders. Sorry, Cobes.

  “I think that was more of a wink to me,” How I Met Your Mother star Smulders explains. She’d become friends with Joss through her costar Alyson Hannigan. “I never met with anyone involved in the project. I was never up for it. But because he was a friend of mine, I think he was just playing around. Joss is one of the most loyal—I want to say friend, but also most loyal coworker. If he likes you, and if he thinks you’re talented, he will fight for you.”

  In the end, Joss felt that Wonder Woman had been a waste of his time, because he “was so ground down. Second-guessing everything, unable to focus,” he said. But he later added, “I would go back in a heartbeat if I believed that anybody believed in what I was doing. The lack of enthusiasm was overwhelming.”

  Joss was “ground down,” but not completely hopeless. He was excited to finally be able to devote all his time to Goners. The year and a half he spent on Wonder Woman was emotionally exhausting, and for more reasons than just the stress of trying to deliver the perfect story in a vacuum.

  “I really kept Goners at bay because of Wonder Woman. There’s also a lot of … there’s personal stuff that I’m not interested in talking about that was difficult,” he said in August 2007. “There’s also wonderful stuff that was difficult, which was my children. I had to create a system whereby I could get a full day’s work [done] and still be the father that I want to be.”

  It felt like it would be just a matter of time until Goners moved out of development and into production. But the rewrite he turned in to Universal later that year “was not incredibly well-received,” he said. So with his major-studio projects failing or stalling and no television series on the horizon, Joss starting thinking about developing “a real production company” that could create and produce smaller projects independently.

  “I’m tired of not telling stories,” he said. “It’s really hard to get on television and birthing any television show is the most painful thing imaginable. Once you have one, you love it so much you forget, so you try to birth another one. Much like the female body…. Right now, the thought of trying to get a TV show off the ground is a little daunting. But the thought of making things that are smaller, a little more streamlined and a little more indie, so that I don’t have to spend three and a half years telling every story. It doesn’t feel like who I am. I feel like there are too many stories to tell.”

  He added, “That’s part of why I’ve been working in comics so much, because the turnaround is so quick.”

  27

  A NEW WAY OF STORYTELLING

  By 2007, Joss was entering his final year as steward of Marvel Comics’ Astonishing X-Men series, but his work as a comic book writer was far from over. For his next project, Joss returned to the defining hero of his career, four years after her television swan song. On March 14, Dark Horse Comics released Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight.

  This was not the first time that Buffy had fought her way through the panels of a comic book. Dark Horse had premiered a monthly Buffy comic in 1998, initially without much involvement by Joss or his writers. At the time, it was rare for a television scribe to work on a tie-in comic while the show was still on the air. In fact, Dark Horse had obtained the license through Fox, not Mutant Enemy, and the series’ editor, Scott Allie, initially knew little about the program it was based on. As time went on, however, writers from the show such as Doug Petrie and Jane Espenson began to work on the comic, and it started to feel more in line with the show. With the success of these crossovers, bringing series writers into the comics fold became more common in Dark Horse’s tie-in properties.

  When Joss was developing the spin-off series Angel, he approached Dark Horse with the idea of doing another tie-in comic, and this time he wanted to be more involved. Scott Allie met with several Mutant Enemy writers, including Joss and Doug Petrie, to discuss what a comic for the series should be. By this point Allie had a much better understanding of the Buffyverse, so he was able to strike up a good rapport with the shows’ creator. Their meeting opened the door to a lot more interaction between Joss and Dark Horse.

  Next, Allie and Joss met to discuss doing a comics series centered around the Vampire Slayer Faith. He had a specific story that he wanted to tell—and he wanted to write it himself. He also had a particular artist he wanted to work with. They discussed it off and on for a little while, until Joss decided that he wanted to work on
a new idea instead: a futuristic Buffy spin-off called Fray.

  The series follows a Slayer named Melaka Fray who lives in twenty-third-century Manhattan. The city, not unlike the 1970s New York Joss grew up in, is crime-ridden and dangerous, but it has also been taken over by mutant mobsters. Fray is a young thief working for Gunther, a mutant boss who’s willing to accept any and every job. Much like the ragtag crew of Firefly, Gunther and his crooks do what they need to do to get by in a harsh and unfair world. Fray accepts her lot in life until she, like a certain blonde cheerleader hundreds of years earlier, learns that she comes from a long line of Slayers.

  Joss picked artist Karl Moline for the series. They were both very early in their comics careers, and thus there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion as they created a brand-new world with all-new characters. “Karl would give me thumbnails and we would go over them because there were certain things I was looking for specifically,” he said. “But I loved what he came up with.” The series was first published in 2001 and concluded in August 2003, with Joss’s TV writing causing publishing delays. Joss has stated a number of times that he has plans to one day return to the world of Fray—beyond the time-travel story that would see Fray and Buffy cross paths as part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight.

  By the time they were working together on Season Eight, Joss and editor Scott Allie had developed a strong collaborative relationship. By talking over stories with Joss, reviewing his scripts, and going over artwork with him, Allie had gotten great insight into Joss’s process and his vision. “His writing chops translate really well to comics,” Allie says. “The number-one thing for me that transcends comics and film and TV, the thing that goes across everything he does that I find so compelling, is the way that he tackles genre fiction in a way that’s all about character. Genre fiction, particularly in comics, tends to just be a quagmire of plot, and [Joss’s work] is funny.”