Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  This would not be the first film project that Joss and Jed had worked on together, since young Joss had directed his little brother in his short film Stupidman when Jed turned eight. “The embarrassing thing about that,” Joss said, “is that it was a group of eight year olds and I did stand in the next room pacing back and forth going, ‘they’re not laughing, they’re not laughing,’ like it was a Broadway opening.” Joss needn’t have worried. After the kids watched the fifteen-minute movie, they immediately requested repeat screenings.

  Joss had already written one song for the web series, “Freeze Ray,” and he played it for everyone on his keyboard at the collaborators’ first official creative meeting. “All of a sudden the world of Dr Horrible started to come clear to us,” Tancharoen said. “It all evolved from there.” Tancharoen and Jed felt that the musical should start with “Freeze Ray,” because it was such a disarming introduction to a supervillain out to take over the world: Dr. Horrible’s alter-ego Billy is an awkward boy with the aching desire to talk to Penny, a girl he sees in the Laundromat.

  With my Freeze Ray, I will stop

  The world

  With my Freeze Ray, I will find the time to

  Find the words to

  Tell you how

  How you make

  Make me feel

  With “Freeze Ray” setting the tone for the script, Tancharoen and the Whedon brothers began to flesh out the characters. Dr. Horrible is an aspiring evil mastermind who longs to be welcomed into Bad Horse’s Evil League of Evil but has yet to make more than a whimper in the villainous world. Where he sees the world as utter chaos and wants to take over, his crush Penny is an idealist who volunteers at a homeless shelter as one of her ways to make the world a better place. Threatening both his villainous and his romantic aspirations is Captain Hammer, a jocky, self-centered oaf of a superhero who dates Penny as a way of lording it over his nemesis.

  Joss wanted to make the web series in three parts, corresponding to the three acts of the story, but without network commercial breaks and time constraints to worry about, those parts could be of any length. He and his collaborators decided that they would just fit in everything that served the story. They aimed for the full story to be thirty minutes, and the final product would clock in at forty-two minutes—an epic by the standards of original online media at the time.

  By 2008, there had been several web series that had their own small followings—lonelygirl15 aired on YouTube from 2006 to 2008, Quarter-life aired on MySpace in early 2008, and The Guild premiered on YouTube in 2007. Episodes tended to be only a few minutes each, and almost none were over ten minutes. Most series were very low-fi, shot with a reality television aesthetic. A high-production-value series broken into three episodes, each nearly fifteen minutes long, was a daunting, daring task.

  Initially, their plans for the series were more modest; they thought they’d shoot the whole thing on a webcam and play all the parts themselves. But as they wrote more songs, the scope of the project kept expanding, and by the time they’d finished about half of the script, Joss began reaching out to his actor friends.

  Neil Patrick Harris, who had previously missed out on the role of Simon Tam in Firefly, was approached to play the titular Dr. Horrible. Joss only got as far as telling him that he was doing a web musical before Harris said yes. “Then he got mad and said ‘Wait a second, let me pitch first,’” Harris explained. “Then he told me the name of it, the idea behind it, and the reasoning behind it and I said ‘Hell, yes.’”

  For the role of Captain Hammer, Joss turned to a Whedonverse stalwart. Nathan Fillion says that Joss called him with the news that he and his brothers were working on a project. “ ‘Hey, so, we have this thing and we’re thinking about putting it together, and the writers’ strike—,’ and I said, ‘I’m in.’ He said, ‘It’s a musical.’ My heart went [exalted sigh]. Because, you know, to be recorded singing, that’s another thing altogether.” Fillion had been incredibly impressed with “Once More, with Feeling,” and he longed to add a musical to the projects he did with Joss. “Then he told me Neil Patrick Harris was gonna be in it. Now, to be recorded singing is one thing. To be recorded singing next to Neil Patrick Harris, that’s another thing altogether.”

  Apparently learning his lesson from two interrupted pitches by phone, Joss e-mailed Felicia Day to ask if she could sing, hoping she could take on the part of Penny. The actress had been a friend since she played one of the Potentials on the seventh season of Buffy, and she was the creator and star of the web series The Guild. That series, a comedy about a group of online gamers, had been an inspiration for Dr. Horrible. “The thing about Joss is that he definitely attracts the most talented people in all areas,” Day said. “When he wants to do an Internet musical starring a supervillain, everybody’s saying ‘Yes, please.’”

  Harris had done a number of musicals, including Sweeney Todd and a Broadway run of Assassins, both by Joss’s beloved Sondheim. Fillion had done musicals in high school and college and had worked his way through college as a karaoke host. With a cast of this caliber, it quickly became obvious that Dr. Horrible would no longer be a webcam video. With improved production values, the budget climbed to roughly $200,000—still limited for the scope they had in mind, but far higher than that of the average Internet project.

  Raising the necessary funds was the biggest challenge of the project. To quote Dr. Horrible himself, “It’s not about making money, it’s about taking money. Destroying the status quo.” In this case, the money that Joss initially took was from himself. Joss and Kai approached their accountant, who was resistant to the idea of them using their own money to bankroll Dr. Horrible, but the Whedons were insistent. They also worked together to reach out to others who might be interested in funding the project. The couple found enough people who wanted to be a part of Joss’s labor of love that they were able to raise the $200,000 they needed.

  The budget would have been roughly double that amount if not for the fact that most of the participants agreed to work for free, in exchange for a share of future profits. “[Joss] said that obviously none of us will be paid,” Harris explained, “but if it catches on like he hoped it would, we would all be paid handsomely at the tail end of it all. That really wasn’t even a concern for me. I would have done it for zero dollars.”

  When it came to working out the details of everyone’s profit participation, Joss was willing to be generous—drawing a contrast with the way the AMPTP was treating the WGA. He was very vocal about the fact that his passion for Dr. Horrible came out of his feelings regarding the writers’ strike. He saw the Internet as a medium in which he could set the rules—because, as he puts it, the “guilds haven’t been beaten down yet.” Since there were no established pay scales for actors and crew working on scripted Internet content, “I got to invent them,” Joss said. “I got to make the writers and stars profit participants on gross level.” They used the WGA and Screen Actors Guild general rates for a series-related webisode as their initial model, and worked with the guilds to finalize the compensation agreements.

  “There’s no reason why there can’t be a business model that is completely inclusive in profit participation,” Joss said. “I’m the studio. I still get way more than everybody else, after I make back my production costs and everything’s paid out. When we’re into pure profit … I win. So—and this was the whole thing during the strike—why try to offer us nothing, when all we’re asking for is a percentage?”

  “The concept was so pure and kind of amazingly moral,” Harris said. “Joss wanted not just to walk the picket lines but actually do something about it.”

  To keep Dr. Horrible on budget, the project needed to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Michael Boretz, Joss’s assistant in the later Buffy years, was brought in as a producer, and his first task was enlisting key crew who knew how Joss worked and could quickly get them into production. Lisa Lassek, editor on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, came in, as did Shawna Trpcic, costume
designer for Angel and Firefly. Ryan Green, Serenity camera operator, jumped in as director of photography. “It was helpful having those years of experience to know the people,” Boretz said, and “then once they were hired, to be able to communicate effectively with them to relay Joss’ vision and help facilitate getting us into production quickly.”

  Boretz credited Joss with inspiring such loyalty and eagerness among his collaborators. Aside from his writing and storytelling talents, Boretz said, Joss is very warm and inviting. “He creates that kind of environment on the set as well. And that’s why people like to come back and continue to work for him and are willing to do favors.” Whedon studies scholar Rhonda V. Wilcox agrees. “One of the things that makes him a really strong television creator is that he is good at collaboration. He’s good at drawing the best out of other folks because if you’re going to do good television, you normally have got to have other people to help you write it. Joss gets people who are glad to work with him. They know they’re going to do interesting work and so they’re willing to do stuff like Dr. Horrible.”

  Simon Helberg, who played supporting character Moist, marveled at Joss’s ability to call in favors. Helberg had produced his own comedy web series, Derek & Simon: The Show, so he had quite a bit of experience with online content budgets and the need to rely on others’ goodwill. “When I pull a favor, it’s like, ‘Can we use your TV room for this party scene?’ When Joss does it, you’re talking about [using] a [Universal Studios] back lot and [getting] a horse.” He adds, “Everybody there was his crew and his team, and it’s rare. I think there are probably a lot of directors and filmmakers out there who don’t have a solid company of people they work with consistently—but a lot of the great ones do. It seems like Joss definitely had that, so when he said, ‘I’m gonna take a camera and take some money of mine and make this little thing, and can I get some of you guys to help?’ they all jumped on the bandwagon. That speaks volumes for what he’s like to work with.”

  By the time the producers had finished writing and had the cast and crew locked, the writers’ strike was over and everyone had to get back to their “regular jobs.” That meant they had virtually no rehearsal time before the shoot. The vocals for all the songs were recorded in Joss’s loft from March 1 to March 5, 2008, and they found a window of an additional six days in March to get everything shot. Yet despite such a quick turnaround, production seemed to go smoothly, due in large part to Joss’s direction. “Joss knows what he wants and sort of how to get there,” Helberg says. “I think Joss and I had strong visions of [Moist]. They were slightly different, I think, and we came to a place that we were both really happy with. Working with Joss is to work with somebody with such a creative voice and a very specific vision and where every detail of it is chosen with care and a point of view.”

  There was lots of scurrying around and shooting on the fly. Joss empowered the very bare-bones crew to do whatever was needed to get each shot. Harris says that it was “all kinds of guerilla filmmaking, but with great passion and love, not anger that it wasn’t going differently.”

  Dr. Horrible became a community project, where “everybody was like a family,” Kai says. Nathan Fillion agrees. “More than any project I’ve done, Dr. Horrible had the feeling of, ‘Hey, I got a box of costumes and old clothes we could use, and there’s an old barn we can use for a stage,’ and everybody pulling together and saying, ‘I’ve got some old lights we could use.’” It was like a bunch of friends having fun and putting on a show, and if someone new came in, “an hour later you know their name and you know what they’re like, and you have a good time with them. It felt the least like a job.”

  Joss’s experiment with a new model of filmmaking was succeeding, but the old ways were just as frustrating as ever. The end of the strike meant that production on his studio projects could continue, but at Universal Pictures, circumstances conspired to keep Goners in limbo. On March 13, Variety announced that Mary Parent was leaving the studio to chair MGM’s Worldwide Motion Picture Group. Without Parent to shepherd the project through the Universal preproduction maze, the future of the film was in question. Joss told MTV in July that it had “gotten backburnered,” and four years later he’d explain that the change in management resulted in his story being orphaned. “Everything was in place. And the new people just completely shit-canned it,” he said. “And I wasn’t ready for that.”

  Parent’s move to MGM may have orphaned Goners, but it found a home for another Whedonverse project. The first film she greenlit in her new position was Joss and Drew Goddard’s horror tale The Cabin in the Woods. When the studio announced the purchase on July 8, it also laid out two brand-new paths for the writers: Cabin would be the first feature film produced by Joss, and the first feature directed by Goddard.

  The two writers had decided on this division of labor while they were working on the script, but Goddard wasn’t convinced that it would actually come to pass. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I had a feeling at some point Joss was going to say, ‘You know what? I think I want to direct this one.’ Which he did,” he laughs. It was disappointing, but to him it meant that they had something special in the script. And if he wasn’t going to direct The Cabin in the Woods, Goddard could “ask for no better director than Joss Whedon to take over.” Fortunately, Joss changed his mind, and Goddard ended up in the director’s chair.

  With The Cabin in the Woods and his Fox series Dollhouse yet to go into production, Joss concentrated his energies on launching Dr. Horrible. He and the producers had meetings about how to roll out and promote the show with a few companies, including Creative Artists Agency, where his agent, Chris Harbert, had moved several years earlier. Since web series were such a new venture, no one knew quite how to proceed. So Dr. Horrible star Felicia Day took charge, drawing on her experience distributing The Guild online. She explained how streaming worked and warned that certain potential hosting sites would not have the bandwidth to support the demand for the show. “She was so on top of it,” Joss said. “The rest of us were like, ‘Yeah, what she said.’ It was like a Buffy moment—the cute little girl in the room blows everybody out of the water.” They decided to distribute the show themselves, with help from the online video service Hulu.

  The next hurdle was possibly the most important: publicizing the show and attracting viewers. This is where most original Internet content failed, because unlike a television network with an established audience of millions of viewers, few online sites at the time had the ability to reach a wide audience. But with Joss’s very loyal and very web-savvy fan base, it ended up being one of the easiest things to deliver. Joss needed only to post a message on Whedonesque. He told fans that the episodes would initially be available to stream for free, and after that brief window passed the series could be purchased for download on iTunes. The grassroots publicity engine of Whedon fans that had faithfully forwarded his pro-WGA messages throughout the writers’ strike was now laser-focused on Dr. Horrible. Fans even managed to track down and watch the trailer before Joss and company were ready to release it. But that was a small price to pay for so much free publicity.

  Midnight on July 15, episode one of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was released to the world. Until everything crashed shortly thereafter. The streaming servers were not prepared for the onslaught of viewers. “We like to say we broke the Internet,” Joss said, “because ‘we were too cheap to pay for more bandwidth’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.” Jed Whedon explained that they were hoping the audience would build over time; they didn’t expect everybody to try to see it all at once. But they did—to the tune of about a thousand viewers a second. “We broke other things they had streaming nearby and all ancillary sites, like Whedonesque and Felicia’s site for The Guild, they all went down.” Joss added. “There was this domino effect, people either looking for it or some connection, and that made us feel pretty awesome. We didn’t feel bright, but we felt cool.” By the time the next day rolled around, the sites
stayed up and the views kept coming.

  “Releasing it for free was a brilliant idea,” Neil Patrick Harris says. The fact that it was available to stream for only a limited time gave the fans a sense of urgency and excitement. “It was very, very enjoyable for me and the rest of the cast and crew and writers to sit and watch the comments right after episode one was released—to see what people thought of it,” Harris says. They watched fans speculate on what was to come next as they waited for subsequent episodes to be released. Harris likens it to the way that Stephen King published his 1996 serial novel The Green Mile: “The paperback books came out once a month for [six] months, and I had that same feeling when the new paperback dropped. I would go out to the bookstore and buy it first thing [and] read it, devour it.” Dr. Horrible proved that people will come, and keep coming back, for online content that they’re interested in.

  Fans also turned out in droves for the Dr. Horrible panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, 2008. Joss was surprisingly nervous to face the four thousand attendees, Simon Helberg recalls. “Backstage, he was even redder than he normally is, then he goes up and destroys, and you feel like, ‘How could you be this nervous? You’re such an amazing writer, and every question that somebody asks you, you have the most hilarious, articulate answer.’ He was amazing.”

  It was Helberg’s first year at Comic-Con, and it gave him a glimpse at the differences between Joss Whedon fandom and the fans of his hit CBS television series The Big Bang Theory. While the two groups had huge overlap, Dr. Horrible fans tended to be consistently younger. “[Big Bang] has an array of people, whereas Dr. Horrible, those Joss fans, are all the geeky hipsters or just pure geeky people,” he says. “I think it’s definitely that quality that Joss has that I don’t know how to even really describe, but that sort of self-reflective, kind of intellectual, self-deprecating geek pop culture kind of thing. It’s so tasteful and specific. I think that appeals to a lot of younger [fans]—and by younger, I just mean not seventy. I don’t mean, like, twelve.”