Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies,” he added. “It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, ‘My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,’ and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: ‘If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.’” But perhaps Joss’s film would inspire a change for the better: in February 2014, Kevin Feige announced that Johansson would have an expanded role in several upcoming films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that Marvel had begun development on a Black Widow solo film. Still, with just one female superhero story in the earliest stages of development, the studio and the industry have a long way left to go.

  Four days after The Avengers opened, as the massive international media blitz was reaching its peak, Joss made a very personal post on Whedonesque. It had the typical wit and self-effacing humor of a Joss screed (“People have told me that this matters, that my life is about to change. I am sure that is true…. I think—not to jinx it—that I may finally be recognized at Comic-Con. Imagine!”), yet in the middle he dropped the quips to pen an incredibly direct message of gratitude to those who had supported him long before he had the world’s biggest superheroes doing his bidding:

  What doesn’t change is anything that matters. What doesn’t change is that I’ve had the smartest, most loyal, most passionate, most articulate group of—I’m not even gonna say fans. I’m going with “peeps”—that any cult oddity such as my bad self could have dreamt of. When almost no one was watching, when people probably should have STOPPED watching, I’ve had three constants: my family and friends, my collaborators (often the same), and y’all. A lot of stories have come out about my “dark years,” and how I’m “unrecognized” … I love these stories, because they make me seem super-important, but I have never felt the darkness (and I’m ALL about my darkness) that they described. Because I have so much. I have people, in my life, on this site, in places I’ve yet to discover, that always made me feel the truth of success: an artist and an audience communicating. Communicating to the point of collaborating. I’ve thought, “maybe I’m over; maybe I’ve said my piece.” But never with fear. Never with rancor. Because of y’all. Because you knew me when. If you think topping a box office record compares with someone telling you your work helped them through a rough time, you’re probably new here…. So this is me, saying thank you. All of you. You’ve taken as much guff for loving my work as I have for over-writing it, and you deserve, in this our time of streaming into the main, to crow. To glow. To crow and go “I told you so,” to those Joe Blows not in the know.

  The Avengers was an instant smash, earning more than $1 billion in just nineteen days. It would go on to become the third-highest-grossing film in history—both domestically and worldwide (among numerous other records, including best opening weekend and opening week for any film). And Joss had delivered it on schedule and under budget. So the fact that the studio asked him to sign on for an Avengers sequel was hardly unexpected. What was a little less certain was whether he would accept.

  While the business details were being worked out on both sides, Joss knew that he wouldn’t make the deal if he didn’t have another story to tell about this dysfunctional family. A few days after The Avengers premiered, Joss told the L.A. Times that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to dive back so quickly into that universe. “I’m very torn,” Joss said. “It’s an enormous amount of work telling what is ultimately somebody else’s story, even though I feel like I did get to put myself into it. But at the same time, I have a bunch of ideas, and they all seem really cool.”

  When Joss gave himself a tiny break in a London pub to think about those ideas, he realized that he couldn’t leave the Avengers behind so easily. Within forty minutes, fueled by fish and chips and a pint, he’d filled a notebook with his ideas for the future of the superhero team. He texted agent Chris Harbert and told him to make the deal.

  “I’m so in love with that universe and the characters and the way they were played and I have so much more I want to do with them,” Joss said. “I know I can’t match the success of the first one but I can try to make a better film and that’s what I’m excited about, that’s the new room of fear I’m entering now.”

  In July, Joss returned to San Diego Comic-Con, the place where he had reconnected with the Marvel world through Joe Quesada in 2003 and announced that he was indeed writing and directing The Avengers in 2010. Comic book conventions had been a part of his blood since he was ten years old, and young Joss could never have imagined the fan response he’d get at them almost forty years later.

  “I don’t know how he does it, really. He’ll wait until the end and sign everything,” Kai says. “He never complains about the attention he gets. The only thing that he actually sort of laments is not being able to geek out on other people. He can’t go to the tables and see the stuff that he wants to see. But it’s his job and he really loves it and he loves the fans and he appreciates what he’s got. [There are] other people who complain about it and whine about it, but he’s like, ‘No, this is why we’re here. Without them, we wouldn’t have anything.’”

  Not that Joss always got recognized at the big geek love-in. Just a year earlier, he’d showed up at one of the San Diego Comic-Con parties with the cast of Dollhouse and Drew Goddard. The doorman didn’t recognize him and refused them all entry. “I’m standing there,” Goddard remembers. “I’m like, ‘Do you guys understand? This is … everyone in that party was …’” He laughs.

  Joss didn’t play the “Don’t you know who I am?” card. He turned to his group and said, “OK, well, we’ll just go make our own party.”

  “I feel like that summarizes Joss better than anything I’ve ever seen,” Goddard says. “There was no anger at not getting into the party. It was just, ‘You know what? Let’s just go make our own party. It’ll be fun.’ And it was. It was way more fun than I’m sure that party was. But I will never forget being at Comic-Con and being like, ‘Oh, you didn’t hear? People are still not letting him in.’”

  There was no question that Joss would be allowed into the party this year, but the biggest and most emotional moment was the Firefly reunion panel. Ten years after the series was canceled, over four thousand fans packed the hall, many of whom had slept in line the night before to ensure they’d get a seat. In the middle of the night, Joss went out to the line to thank them. Later that day, the panel moderator asked Joss what the fans meant to him. Joss broke down and wept, speechless. The audience of four thousand Browncoats stood up and roared.

  A month later, Marvel announced that they were expanding their relationship with Joss. He would again write and direct his family of superheroes in the Avengers sequel, which reunites the superhero team after a two-year string of other Marvel projects: Iron Man 3 (2013), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). And he’d be overseeing Marvel’s venture into prime-time television. First they’d worked together on comics, then films, and next up Joss was developing a series for ABC that would give the secret agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a chance to be more than superhero support staff.

  The S.H.I.E.L.D. project was not something new; Marvel and ABC had been working on it for some time (along with a proposed reboot of The Incredible Hulk). When the studio talked to Joss about it, he was initially wary that they were jumping into it because they had a deal with Disney, which owned both Marvel and ABC. “A good opportunity to make a show is not a good reason to make a show,” he explained. And he was a little thrown by their requirement that the series feature Agent Coulson—especially since Joss had killed him off, at Marvel’s request, in the movie. Yet it was the presence of Coulson that convinced him the series could work. In The Avengers, Coulson is the “little guy” among superheroes, and Joss loved the idea of him being “the common man in an uncommon world.” “He’s an e
nthusiast,” Joss said. “And he loves this world as well as wanting to protect the people in it.” That’s a rather apt description of Joss as well.

  Joss wanted to extend that same “little guy” feel to the series as a whole. After all, without the main Avengers, what would be the draw of a series filled with people who had been mostly supporting characters and extras in the films? “Well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don’t?” Joss asked. “And that, to me, is that they’re not superheroes. But they live in that universe. Even though they’re a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that’s interesting to me.”

  Joss pitched his ideas for the series to Marvel Television—which was headed by Jeph Loeb, his former collaborator on the Buffy animated series. Loeb was on board, so Joss was set to direct the pilot. He brought along Dr. Horrible coconspirators Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen to write and produce, along with Angel executive producer Jeffrey Bell.

  The biggest draw for fans, aside from Joss himself, was the return of Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson. “We all love Clark Gregg, there’s no doubt about that,” Joss said in a taped announcement at the Marvel TV panel at 2012 New York Comic Con. “From before we made The Avengers, we discussed whether there was a way for him to be a part of the Marvel Universe, perhaps a part of a TV show even after his death.” The casting announcement was met with an outpouring of cheers.

  As the S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot went into development, the public got its first look at Joss’s passion project. Much Ado About Nothing premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2012. The response from festival-goers was intense and incredibly positive. When the cast came to the stage after the movie ended, Joss was overcome with emotion from all the support for his “little” personal movie.

  “You make a strong man cry,” he told the crowd.

  He and Kai had gone into their production of Much Ado eager to do something of their own, together and quickly. They hadn’t really planned what to do with it once it was done. When they finally discussed bringing the film to the festival circuit with those far more familiar with the traditional indie route, they were asked what their expectations for marketing and distribution were. “We didn’t think about that,” Kai says. “It was about the process of getting it done, making the movie with our own little studio. Let’s just make this stuff. Don’t worry about the end—what we’re going to do with it, who our audience is. Just make the thing, make it great, and it will find a home.”

  Joss had taken the film to Toronto in the hopes of finding theatrical distribution, and he found it in a familiar place. Lionsgate, in partnership with Roadside Attractions, picked up Much Ado just as it had The Cabin in the Woods. The Shakespeare adaptation would have a far shorter wait to hit theaters, though, as it was set to premiere in select cities eight months later, in June 2013.

  But the rest of 2012 was all about The Avengers. Marvel gave the blockbuster film a blockbuster marketing campaign, and with it, Joss Whedon was thrust into the spotlight of the mainstream press. In addition to all his superheroes landing on magazine covers across newsstands, Wired and GQ did big features on him, and Entertainment Weekly named him one of its Entertainers of the Year. This was going to be a difficult year to top.

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  THE YEAR OF JOSS WHEDON, AGAIN (REALLY)

  As the new year began, Joss was well into preproduction on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot. He cowrote the script with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, creating all-new characters for the regular cast aside from Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson. Once shooting began, directing duties were all on Joss, but there were other familiar faces on set to help ease the hectic schedule. Guest stars included Cobie Smulders as Agent Maria Hill, Ron Glass (Firefly) as Dr. Streiten, and J. August Richards (Angel) as Mike Peterson, the first superhero with whom S.H.I.E.L.D. works on the series. The main cast included Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, whom Gregg said “seems very Whedonverse to me, but I guess she hadn’t worked with him before.” The rest of the regulars, he said, “are young actors I didn’t know well, and then as soon as I got to act with them a little bit, I said, ‘Oh, Joss really knows what he’s doing. New members of the Whedonverse!’”

  Production on the S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot wrapped on February 12, announced via Twitter by Tancharoen. As the series headed into editing, Joss needed to tend to Much Ado About Nothing. Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions did not have the same marketing budget as a studio like Marvel, so Joss headed up the promotions juggernaut on his own. This brought about Joss’s first foray into social media, as up until now he’d only posted on sites devoted to him or his series. He tweeted under the film’s account, @MuchAdoFilm; in May, he’d officially join under his own name.

  On March 7, 2013, the cast headed to the film’s US premiere at the South by Southwest festival—many by bus. In a publicity stunt dubbed Bus Ado About Nothing, Joss and much of his young cast made the twenty-four-hour trip from Los Angeles to Austin in a tour bus with only one toilet, documenting their journey via Twitter, Instagram, and Vine videos. The adventure had been conceived when some of the cast were discussing how they’d get to the festival for the March 9 premiere. “I knew people wanted to go and they couldn’t get rooms and they couldn’t get flights. Some of them couldn’t afford them,” Joss said. So he decided to hire the bus. When Lionsgate found out, the studio picked up the tab.

  “I can’t believe Joss took two days out of his time to do that with us. It’s a little insane,” Much Ado cast member Tom Lenk said. “Does Michael Bay get on a party bus with his cast? Probably not—they’re robots. He drives inside of them!” The rest of the cast—including Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, and Clark Gregg—met them in Texas for a discussion panel and screening.

  A week after the bus took off, another beloved set of collaborators announced an even bigger venture in the world of DIY-ish filmmaking. Taking a cue from Joss’s long history of fan outreach, Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell announced a Kickstarter campaign asking fans to help fund a Veronica Mars movie. The plan was to raise $2 million to prove to Warner Bros. that the series, which had gone off the air six years prior, was a viable prospect for a relaunch. If they could raise the money, Thomas, Bell, and much of the original cast would return for a feature film continuation of the cult hit, to be shot later that year. The news immediately went viral, and on March 13, excited fans met the goal in less than ten hours. (Ultimately, the campaign would raise $5.7 million from more than 97,000 devoted fans.) By the next day, news outlets were already reaching out to Joss to see if he’d consider using the crowdfunding method to relaunch Firefly yet again.

  Joss knew the question was coming as soon as he heard about Thomas’s campaign, which tempered his own excitement as a Veronica Mars fan with a feeling of dread. He pronounced his love for Firefly at every turn, often saying how much he’d love to do another film with the cast. “I did have a moment of just, Oh my god! I’m in trouble now,” he said. He worried about matching the level of quality fans had come to expect from the series. “What if it’s not that good? I can do something that’s not that good—that’s fine. But if I do that and it’s not that good, I’m going to feel really stupid.” Ultimately, it was a hypothetical concern; he cited his busy Marvel schedule and his gestating plans for a Dr. Horrible sequel as the reasons why he didn’t currently have time to pursue a fan-funded Firefly film.

  On May 14, ABC announced that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would be joining its schedule for the 2013–14 season. With his commitment to the Avengers sequel, Joss said that the series would be in the hands of showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Still, it would bring Whedon storytelling back to television three years after Dollhouse was canceled, and on a brand-new network.

  Two weeks later, Joss was back at Wesleyan to receive an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address at the school’s 181st graduation ceremony. “He came for our breakfast for seniors and alumni—and he knew what that meant. He s
tood on his feet for four hours, and he never stiffed anyone,” Jeanine Basinger says. “Joss talked to every student, he talked to every parent—he was the last person out the door, because he didn’t leave before anybody who wanted to talk to him had left.”

  These one-on-one interactions were much less stressful for Joss than the task that lay just ahead; he was quite nervous about giving his commencement speech, which he opened by telling the graduates that they were all going to die. After that uplifting message, he went on to explain that we all live with the duality of wanting to experience and create everything while at the same time we’re bound to the limitations of our physical selves and our limited life spans. And that we’re all torn, as well, between the two metaphorical roads that Robert Frost wrote about. In making a choice to take one road, one job, one relationship, other options will be closed—yet instead of the dread young Joss felt when listening to Sondheim’s “The Road You Didn’t Take,” this older, possibly wiser one asserted that it’s not the roads we take that will bring us to happiness but the determination to keep searching, questioning, and learning.

  “If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better,” he said. “To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It’s not just parroting your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself.”