Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “It came down to about the middle of my back,” Joss says. “Yes, I was often mistaken for a rock star. Not anyone in particular, usually just sort of vaguely people thought I might be a rock star. I was asked to sign a Simply Red album by a record store owner.” Not knowing the lead singer’s name (Mick Hucknall), he declined, as he didn’t feel that he could inscribe it with “Signed, the guy from Simply Red.”

  Harbert, who was a year older than Joss, had a distinctly different style. “Very ’80s, slick, like frat boy,” Joss said. “I’m like, there’s no way.” But once the initial shock over each other’s appearance wore off, Harbert signed Joss as his first client. They began a relationship that would take them through the ups and downs of Joss’s whole career, from his long, curly red locks to his current buzzcut. “He’s a really sweet guy,” Joss said. “Turns out I’m not, but he was. That was the plot twist.”

  Joss spent the next year writing more comedy spec scripts. He wrote a script for The Wonder Years, which featured a storyline based on his own experiences of being mugged in New York City, and one for Roseanne. He wasn’t particularly interested in writing for a sitcom, but it was the format that he was most familiar with, since both his father and grandfather had been staff on sitcoms for most of their television careers. Even with all that exposure, Joss didn’t love the joke-joke-joke structure of sitcoms, which he felt wasn’t as interesting as when “something creepy happened, something real” occurred in an episode.

  The underlying “something real” was what excited him about the new sitcom Roseanne. The series, which began in 1988, was quite different from anything else on at the time. Built as a vehicle for Roseanne Barr, a stand-up comic whose routines focused on her life as a “domestic goddess,” Roseanne told the story of a working-class family: Roseanne Conner; her husband, Dan (John Goodman); their three children, teenager Becky (Alicia Goranson), middle child Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and young D.J. (Michael Fishman); and Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf). With Roseanne, according to Joss, Barr “changed the landscape of American television. She should be credited for having done it.”

  Roseanne drew attention to the hardships facing middle-class America during the 1980s. The looming threat of unemployment came up often in storylines, and the series dealt with its effect on the Conners, who constantly struggled to make ends meet while still trying to achieve their dreams. It was a stark and honest series surrounded by prime-time dramas filled with wealthy families and their over-the-top materialism (Dynasty, Dallas, Falcon Crest) and sitcoms featuring well-off families who rarely fought (The Cosby Show). For Joss, Roseanne also “had a feminist agenda … it was real, and decent, and incredibly funny.”

  So when staffing season came up in April–May 1989, the time during which shows look for new writers to read, interview, and hopefully hire, Harbert sent Joss’s Roseanne spec to the series. The usual rule is that a writer should never send a spec of a series to that series, since a show’s own writing staff can be particularly picky if a script fails to capture some nuance of the series’ tone. But apparently Joss’s script was good enough to get him a meeting with executive producer Jeff Harris. Soon after, Harbert got his client an offer to work on what Joss felt was one of the most important shows on television. The producer told him to bring in his no. 2 pencil on Monday, so Joss went out and bought a hundred no. 2 pencils. “I know he meant that as a metaphor—but what if he didn’t.”

  The novice writer was brought on staff as a story editor for the show’s second season, which he quickly determined was “total chaos.” The chaos had its roots in the show’s first season. Barr had spent much of the early days of Roseanne sparring with producers Marcy Carsey and Matt Williams. They battled over writing credits, storylines, even wardrobe choices. Barr had fired most of the writers and production staff at the end of the first season, and the second season wasn’t starting off much calmer.

  As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about the tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: “It’s us against the world, and dammit, we’ve got good work to do here, let’s all get it done.” Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn’t expecting.

  “It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said. “Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, even if I’m firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we’re all involved, that we’re all on the same level.”

  All the chaos on the Roseanne set actually worked in Joss’s favor. He was so junior that he wasn’t on Barr’s radar, so he wasn’t held responsible for her frustrations. He kept his job all year by keeping his head down and taking on all the writing assignments he could get.

  That was unusual for a first-year writer. So unusual, in fact, that when a friend of his father asked if they had let him write a script yet, Joss told him he had already written four. “Because they just … they had nobody. I ended up writing six scripts that year,” Joss said, although he would only be credited on four episodes. “The other staff writer I know who’s done that was Marti Noxon. She did it in the second year of Buffy.”

  Joss was getting an unusual crash course in television writing, and credits were stacking up on his résumé, but he was frustrated. Producers often rewrote his scripts—to their detriment, he believed—before they got to air. They backed away from important subject matter. His first assignment, the second episode of the season, had a premise that shocked and then excited him. The episode was to take on abortion: Darlene goes to visit her aunt Jackie only to find her incredibly drunk. Jackie admits that she had an abortion and hasn’t told Roseanne about it. Joss couldn’t believe that the episode they were starting him off on gave him something important to say and touched on the kinds of feminist issues he most wanted to explore.

  A couple days later, the executive producer called him in and told him that he’d talked to the network and they decided that Jackie would have a miscarriage instead of an abortion. There would be no feminist message about a woman’s right to choose; now Jackie’s breakdown would be about an uncontrollable biological event. “It’s totally the same—do that,” an irritated Joss recalled being told. “Welcome to my dream and my first heartbreak.”

  In the final version of “The Little Sister,” Darlene still finds Jackie drunk at home, but now she is drowning her pain over the fact that Roseanne doesn’t support her choice to become a police officer. Nary an abortion nor a miscarriage to be found in the story, although the reasoning behind Roseanne’s lack of support does have some weighty emotional underpinnings: she doesn’t think Jackie is incapable of being a cop but rather fears that Jackie will be killed. The episode also delivers Joss’s first fight scene on television; the ending has Roseanne and Jackie wrestling, both comically and seriously, as Dan quips about making a sexy video from it all. It’s a small foreshadowing of all Joss’s wit-infused fight sequences to come.

  Joss’s frustrations were relieved for a time when he wrote the script for the episode “Brain-Dead Poets Society.” Tom Arnold, another writer on the series who was famously engaged to Roseanne at the time, championed Joss’s work and covertly showed his script to her. “That was the first script of mine she actually read,” Joss remembers.

  After reading it, Barr had lunch with Joss. “It was quite extraordinary,” he said. “The good Roseanne came to lunch. She got it and she was very excited about it, and it was a really fascinating time
.” She asked him how he, a twenty-five-year-old man, could write a middle-aged woman with such authenticity. Joss responded, “If you met my mom you wouldn’t ask.”

  In the episode, middle child Darlene writes a poem for her seventh-grade English class. When the thirteen-year-old tomboy is asked to read it at the school’s Culture Night, however, she balks. Roseanne, who wrote poems when she was younger, is excited to finally have a connection with her daughter and doesn’t understand the girl’s reluctance. Darlene fights to stay home and watch a basketball game with her father but eventually loses to her mother’s demands.

  It was his first script that ended up on the television screen largely as he wrote it, and the episode foreshadowed the way he would address the uneasiness of growing up in Buffy. Another comparison can be drawn between Darlene’s desperation to keep her identity very separate from her mother’s and Joss’s own reluctance to follow his father into a television writing career.

  In the finished episode, Darlene’s poem, “To Whom It Concerns,” starts from a sarcastic, apathetic place (“To whom it concerns, my ma made me write this / And I’m just her kid, so how could I fight this”), but ends on a beautiful, quiet note that cuts to a thirteen-year-old girl’s desire to be heard, while still scared of the visibility that would entail (“To whom it concerns, I just turned thirteen / Too short to be quarterback, too plain to be queen. / To whom it concerns, I’m not made of steel / When I get blindsided my pain is quite real”). It is one of the most memorable scenes of the entire series—but this version of the poem wasn’t penned by Joss. The version in his draft was about basketball. “It was about Michael Jordan,” Joss explains. “It was prose, didn’t rhyme, it wasn’t about her emotions; it was actually just a poem.”

  The young writer who fretted over unnecessary script changes had now seen his work rewritten for the better. Perhaps the simplicity of Darlene’s poem in his draft was a reflection of his own youth and inexperience. The man who would later stress to his Buffy writers that every story must be about the emotional journey, that no episode was “just about the monster,” still hadn’t gained the experience to know that such a pivotal poem couldn’t be “just” a poem.

  By the time “Brain-Dead Poets Society” aired, it was the second half of the season. The politics on the show were still in flux, and on March 27, 1990, executive producer Jeff Harris resigned by taking out a full-page ad in Daily Variety. The show’s remaining higher-ups became increasingly insular, and Joss felt shut out. Worse, his writing assignments dried up. “Chicken Hearts,” the thirteenth episode of the twenty-four-episode season, was the last for which he received a writing credit. He had the financial security he craved—story editors on Roseanne made at least $3,000 a week—but the junior writer who had handed in six scripts now found himself with nothing to work on.

  Instead of continuing to sit in the office and write nothing, Joss decided to focus his energy on an idea for a movie script that had been brewing for a while. It would be a revisionist take on the “girl in a dark alley” trope from so many popular horror films of the 1980s, in which a young woman—usually a blonde—makes the bad choice of venturing somewhere sketchy, where she is inevitably chased and killed by a maniac. “The idea … came from seeing too many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed,” Joss said. “I wanted, just once, for her to fight back … and kick his ass.”

  The idea began as the story of “Martha the Immortal Waitress.” Martha was a stand-in for himself: a person to whom no one would give much concern, but who had “more power than was imaginable.” Joss tinkered with the concept during his time as a video store clerk, when he watched countless films with titles like Assault of the Killer Bimbos. He checked them out thinking that they were a new form of female empowerment film wrapped in some ridiculous B movie premise. Upon watching them, however, he realized that they were little more than sexploitation films with silly titles.

  As a result, Joss became determined to make a movie with a similar low-budget aesthetic, along the lines of legendary director George Romero’s zombie movies, but one centered on the crazy notion that the girls in the film weren’t stereotypical bimbos but rather intelligent and resourceful. He would combine the standard silliness and fun of a B movie with a serious feminist agenda. His main character would be an homage to all the pretty, frivolous girls who dared to have fun and have sex—like Lynda in Halloween and Samantha the cheerleader in Night of the Comet. These were the girls who no one expected could take care of themselves, much less become a superhero who would someday save the world.

  And to Joss, the perfect name for his blonde hero was also the name he took least seriously: Buffy. “There is no way you could hear the name Buffy and think, ‘This is an important person,’” Joss explained. “To juxtapose that with Vampire Slayer, just felt like … a B movie. But a B movie that had something more going on.”

  But that wasn’t his only reasoning for naming the project Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even if the sexploitation films with silly titles continually disappointed him, he still regularly picked them up off the shelf. As did many of his customers at the video shop, thinking that the movies with the silly titles might be “jolly fun.” Joss knew that Buffy, if it even got the chance to be made, would never be a blockbuster hit in the theaters. So he designed it to look like that silly, fun movie that someone would pull from a shelf to give it a try—only to be surprised by the fact that it was actually good.

  For the rest of his contract on Roseanne, Joss would go to work in the show’s offices and, with nothing to do, instead work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He finished an eighty-five-page draft—very short by feature film standards—just to get the story out, then went back in to flesh it out. But the side project didn’t alleviate Joss’s discontent with his role on the series. As much as he’d admired the show for its feminism, its humor, and its honesty, he decided he couldn’t work there anymore.

  “I just wanted to be able to do work for one reason and one reason only, and that was because it was work worth doing,” Joss said. “[Roseanne’s] not the reason I quit,” he hastened to add. “At the end of the day, it was a good stepping-stone, not a good experience.”

  After Roseanne, Joss was brought onto the NBC series Parenthood by executive producer David Tyron King. The show was based on the characters from the 1989 Steve Martin vehicle of the same name; starring Ed Begley Jr. and future household names David Arquette and Leonardo DiCaprio, it followed three generations of the Buckman family. Unlike the straight sitcom format of Roseanne, Parenthood was a half-hour, single-camera comedy-drama, or dramedy, a popular genre at the time that included Doogie Howser, M.D. and The Wonder Years. The series lasted less than a full year and was just one of a number of failed attempts to bring movies to television that season—Ferris Bueller, Working Girl, and Uncle Buck were all canceled in short order as well.

  “It was a very talented ensemble and talented staff,” Joss says. “Ty King is an amazing writer, but there were many forces conspiring against us, people who just didn’t get the show.”

  The politicking going on behind the scenes compounded the disappointing ratings. It wasn’t as dramatic as the chaos on Roseanne, where Joss had already had his trial-by-fire initiation into the realities of Hollywood. But, again, he was able to step up and be an active part of the writing team, complete with a lot of all-nighters. It was his second chance to shine that didn’t quite deliver a Hollywood ending. On Roseanne, his chance had sort of been taken away from him, so he left. On Parenthood, the show was canceled before he could show what he could do.

  Yet the experience wasn’t without its merits. Joss’s major takeaway from Parenthood was his time spent in the writers’ room. In King, Joss found the guidance he’d longed for on Roseanne. King was easier for him to relate to than his previous coworkers; he was relatively young for a showrunner—roughly the same age Joss would be when running Buffy seven years later.

  At one point, the two were venting about the frustrati
ons of the show. “This is terrible,” King lamented. “This is unbelievable what they’re doing. They’re killing us. This is just … I’m so angry.” Then he turned to Joss, with the biggest smile, and said, “This is so much fun.”

  “I never forget that,” Joss says. “It’s so true.”

  The following year, Joss didn’t pick up another television show gig, but his own personal narrative took an unexpected shift when Michelle “Kai” Cole literally walked into the room. She had been driving across country with Joss’s cousin en route to San Francisco. On September 6, 1991, the girls made a stop in Los Angeles, at Tom Whedon’s house.

  Kai and Joss both describe their meeting as something intense and immediate. “He was far across the room, and the first second that I saw him—I had one of those experiences, where he got closer,” Kai remembers. “He kind of came into my face really fast, but he didn’t move. It was sort of this weird, physical reaction that I had to him. It was instant, and we both had it. He says he was in lust at first sight.”

  That moment is captured in a photograph Joss’s brother Sam snapped within half an hour of them meeting. In the picture, Joss and Kai are both looking at each other. “He’s directly looking at me, smiling, and I’m sort of looking under my eye, looking over at him,” she describes. “It’s kind of an amazing thing to have a picture where you meet someone for the first time. And we’ve been together ever since.”

  He was twenty-seven, she was twenty-five. They’d both been working to define themselves on their own terms, each even choosing a new name that they thought fit better. They were well past the teenage awkward stage, yet their meeting was quite overwhelming for both of them. Both were very silent—unusually so, Kai explains—yet they were very aware of each other. They went out to breakfast with Sam and hardly spoke to one another. The first thing Joss said to Kai was “I like your boots.” Kai couldn’t find any words; she barely got out a “thanks.” That didn’t last for very long, though—the not-talking.