Joss Whedon: The Biography Page 7

  They all went out dancing that night at Arena, a gay nightclub in Los Angeles. It was his dancing skills that tipped the scales, Joss jokes, and “the fact that we were at a gay bar and I was the only man that was interested in dancing with her—the lack of competition is what got it.” They just clicked from that time, Kai says. She did continue up to San Francisco but returned quickly. “We sort of celebrate [September 6] as our anniversary. It was very instant. Joss calls it the longest one-night stand, because we actually slept together that first day.”

  It had been a long time since Joss had dated anyone. Unlike during his teen years, however, he had taken a conscious break from romantic entanglements, and he was certainly not looking to fall in love. But the couple was so instantly, intensely together that a couple months later, Joss took her to his mother’s home in New York for Thanksgiving. Naturally, it was an intimidating experience for Kai.

  “His mom was the litmus test. I know Joss did love me, but if his mom didn’t really like me, I think there would have been something wrong,” she explains. Luckily, there were no problems. “Joss’s mom was so easy. A lovely person who made a lot of sense.”

  Next, Kai had to pass the test with the other important female figure in Joss’s life: “I felt the same way with Jeanine, that it was really important that she like me.” It’s a tradition that Jeanine Basinger’s students take their potential long-term partners to meet her, and not one that she or they take lightly: One boy once took his soon-to-be fiancée to meet her. She was appalled to learn that the girlfriend did not like the classic Hitchcock movie Vertigo. Basinger questioned the student about it afterward. The couple broke up two weeks later.

  So the stakes were high when Joss took her to his mentor’s home, but it turned out that Kai had no reason to worry. “My husband and I were both here, and my husband fell in love with her immediately,” Basinger says. “We both knew instantly she was the right one. She’s a wonderful person and a very strong, intelligent, and talented woman in her own right. She’s the kind of woman you know is right for Joss—a very good wife, a very good mother, but she’s a full, equal partner. If Joss went to Borneo for two years, I would be happy to visit with Kai.”

  There were two key moments early in the relationship that solidified the connection between Joss and Kai. The first came when she read the movie script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They had been together for a while at that point, but she had yet to read any of his work. She knew she loved him but was worried that if she didn’t like the way he wrote, it would affect their relationship. One night, Kai finally decided it was time, so she snuck off with a copy. She opened up to the middle of the script, rationalizing that if she didn’t like it, it would be because she hadn’t started it from the beginning.

  To her great joy, however, she loved it—even from the middle. Kai flipped back and read the entire thing from the beginning, then rushed into his office and threw herself on Joss with enormous relief.

  Around the same time, Joss saw Kai working on a dress that he particularly hated. He tentatively asked if she had sewn it, to which Kai responded, “Oh, God no. I’m trying to fix it!” Again, relief was felt.

  “It was very important,” Joss says. “Someone’s aesthetics and art are who they are,” and if you don’t like it, “you can’t go through life pretending that you think that’s all very well.”

  4

  THE BLONDE IN THE ALLEY FIGHTS BACK

  A high school cheerleader named Buffy Summers has just learned that she is the Chosen One. This makes her special, she’s been told, but it will take a while before anyone else believes it—hell, it will take a while before even she believes it.

  Joss had been working on Buffy’s story for years, since before he was even a professional writer. He’d finished the screenplay as a frustrated story editor on Roseanne. His fledgling agent shopped it around Hollywood, until finally it was optioned by Sandollar, a production company founded by Sandy Gallin and the legendary Dolly Parton.

  In 1991, Sandollar executives Howard Rosenman and Gail Berman approached Kuzui Enterprises, in the hopes that the Tokyo-based distribution company would partner with them to produce the film and perhaps bring in some Japanese investors. The company was headed by producer Kaz Kuzui and his wife, director Fran Rubel Kuzui, whose first feature was 1988’s Tokyo Pop. The film, which she also cowrote, tells the story of a young American woman who travels to Japan and falls into a new relationship while dealing with the clash of cultures. Fran had been looking for a new project, and within five pages, she knew Buffy was it.

  The director responded to the script’s competing notions of destiny and making one’s own path, and how they related to growing up. In Joss’s tale, the vapid and popular Buffy’s life changes when she’s approached by a (somewhat creepy) older gentleman named Merrick Jamison-Smythe. Merrick informs her that she is the latest in a long line of Vampire Slayers and he is her Watcher, who holds the sacred responsibility of guiding and training her. Buffy initially refuses to believe him, especially when the ideas of “slaying” and “training” interfere with her social life. Finally, she accepts her fate as the Chosen One—even if it means she’ll come to an early death fighting the undead and their vampire king, Lothos, who’s primed to take down yet another Slayer. “When we’re kids, [we] know we’re part of something, and the process of being an adult is finding the something you’re a part of,” Fran said. “This is the story about a girl—and it’s very important that it’s a girl—finding out how powerful she really is.”

  The Kuzuis agreed to produce the film—on the condition that Fran would direct. As the director, she would have creative control over the project, and she talked with Joss about her ideas for revising the script. In addition to a female sidekick for the lead vampire and a more likeable Buffy, she wanted to make the film more of a commentary on pop culture—not unlike the way Tokyo Pop had explored Japanese culture through an American’s eyes. “The original script of ‘Buffy’ was pretty simple,” Kuzui said. “She was a cheerleader who killed vampires. There were no martial arts and she was a very passive, uninspired girl.” Fran suggested two more iconic Asian influences to Joss: Sailor Moon, the animated schoolgirl whom she felt was very empowered, and the martial arts films of Hong Kong director John Woo. “[Joss] loved the idea,” she recalled, “so we set out to rewrite the script.”

  Fran and Kaz then submitted the revised screenplay to 20th Century Fox to see if the studio would be interested in backing the film. It landed on the desk of script reader Jorge Saralegui. Script readers are studio gatekeepers of sorts—they read all the scripts that come in and, for each, write up a brief synopsis with a breakdown of good and bad points and suggest whether a studio should pass on it or buy it. Saralegui recommended that Fox buy Buffy, for its strong vampire themes and how deftly the lead character transitions from a shallow cheerleader into a warrior prepared to face her destiny. But what really blew him away was the stylized way in which the characters spoke. “That theatrical, neo-surf speak,” Saralegui explains. “At that point, I actually hadn’t seen that anywhere else.”

  Just three weeks after Joss turned in the revised draft, 20th Century Fox bought the film, retaining worldwide distribution rights and giving it a budget of $9 million. Fox wanted the movie and wanted it fast, to capitalize on the impending vampire movie trend. Francis Ford Coppola’s big-budget Dracula was due in November 1992, filled with A-list stars Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, and Keanu Reeves. Horror director John Landis would release Innocent Blood the previous September, and Anne Rice’s bestselling book Interview with the Vampire seemed to finally be headed to production after over a decade in development. And there was still room for a more youth-oriented variation on the theme; Hollywood hadn’t had a big teen vampire hit since 1987’s The Lost Boys with Kiefer Sutherland.

  Casting began quickly so that the film could premiere in the summer of 1992. Kristy Swanson (Knots Landing, Hot Shots!) signed on for the titular role, and
Donald Sutherland, Kiefer’s father, took on the role of Buffy’s mentor and trainer, Merrick. Beverly Hills, 90210 heartthrob Luke Perry was her love interest / boy in need of rescue, Pike. As for the villains, Rutger Hauer, Rice’s original choice for the lead in Interview with the Vampire, would play Lothos, while Joan Chen of Twin Peaks signed on as his sidekick Amilyn.

  But the female sidkick Joss had added at the director’s request would not make it to the screen as written. Just as filming was about to begin, Chen left the project due to a financial dispute. To replace her, producers turned to a male actor: Paul Reubens, best known for playing the childlike Pee-wee Herman. Reubens had been arrested in July 1991 for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater; the resulting media backlash caused him to retreat from the public eye. After reading Joss’s script, Reubens’s biggest concern was over the physical appearance of his character in his first movie after the arrest. He wanted Amilyn to look as far from Pee-wee Herman as he could get—in fact, he wanted the character to look like he did in his mug shot. The offer came in and the role of Amilyn was his; no audition was needed, and he could look how he wanted. The only stipulation was that he was not allowed to announce his involvement, and although Variety leaked it anyway, the news was not nearly as widely disseminated as it would have been in a more plugged-in era.

  Reubens, Luke Perry, and Joss were in agreement early on about the direction the film should take. All three were very specific in their desire to make a really dark, scary movie that surprised people with a strong female protagonist and a lot of jokes. Perry was looking forward to the role reversal. “Buffy’s the one who’s always having to save him, which is a nice change from the way these movies usually work. If Buffy can be seen as a hero, then I suppose Pike is the damsel in distress.”

  Joss was on set through most of principal photography, which began in Los Angeles on February 20, 1992. Shooting mostly took place at night, which took a toll on both cast and crew—but he was more frustrated by the fact that Fran Kuzui had a distinctly different take on the script they’d revised together. Instead of the edgy B-horror movie Joss, Reubens, and Perry had in mind, Kuzui wanted to play up the comedy to the point of camp. She said that Buffy “isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.” That interpretation was a far cry from the dark tale of an empowered blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and kicks some ass. Joss had spent so much time crafting a story with a distinct purpose, but now that someone else was in charge, that purpose would go unfulfilled.

  However, he also felt that as the director, Kuzui should have the final say in creating the film. “Fran Kuzui came in when nobody else wanted the film, said, ‘We’re going to put this together,’” Joss said. “Without [the Kuzuis], there would be no film…. I didn’t agree with the way the movie was going, but I also kept my mouth shut because you respect the director…. You respect the person above you, and you make suggestions and you do your best…. But you don’t ever disrupt the chain of command. You have to have faith in the person who’s running it or things will fall apart.”

  “Kristy Swanson [said], ‘Please, tell me how to do this. Tell me what you want,’” Joss recalled. “I literally said, ‘I can’t.’ Because I have always treated film and television like the army, and I’m very strict about it. It was not my place. It was the director’s movie. At that point I was there to try and help the director realize her vision, and that’s all.”

  It was Donald Sutherland who ultimately drove Joss from the set. Joss felt that Kuzui allowed Sutherland to take control on set, even to rewrite his own dialogue at times with no concern for the plot. “He had a very bad attitude. He was incredibly rude to the director, he was rude to everyone around him,” Joss said. “He’s a great actor … but the thing is, he acts well enough that you didn’t notice, with his little rewrites, and his little ideas about what his character should do, that he was actually destroying the movie…. So I got out of there. I had to run away.”

  Seeing how upset he was by Sutherland’s actions, a friend asked Joss why he couldn’t just suck it up and let all the changes go. Joss felt that was an unacceptable reaction, both for what it would say about the integrity of the story and how it would affect his writing going forward. “You can’t sit down at your desk and go, ‘Meh, it doesn’t matter what I write, because they’re going to change it, or they’re going to fuck it up,’” he says. “You have to sit down and go, ‘This will be perfect and pure and delightful, and realized exactly as written.’”

  Interestingly, Sutherland was frustated by the course the film was taking the same way that Joss was. According to Kaz Kuzui, both Sutherland and Hauer disliked how the tone was changing from the script they’d read. “They thought the movie was very serious and became insecure,” he said. “They tried to make their roles more complex, more emotional.” Perhaps if Joss had sat down to talk with them, he’d have realized that they were all closer on the same page than he had thought.

  The experience was not without its saving graces. One of the few redeeming aspects was working with Paul Reubens. According to Joss, Paul was his beacon of hope, the person who made him feel, “OK, that made me feel a little bit better about the movie, even for like thirty seconds.”

  At one point, Reubens approached Joss about potentially changing one of Amilyn’s lines, concerned that the change would affect other elements of the script. Joss was ecstatic that his work was being considered so closely. “I didn’t know that you people existed!” he told Reubens. “Oddly enough, I’d mostly just worked with movie stars. I hadn’t met most of them, but I had worked with people who could just do whatever they wanted. And to have somebody say, ‘Um, no, I get that there’s a bigger picture than me’ was kind of a new experience for me.”

  But by the time they were filming Amilyn’s death scene, it was clear that this respectful attitude wouldn’t rule the day. Unlike how it was written in the script, the scene would be a melodramatic, overtly comedic bit of improv in which the character spends twenty minutes dying. Joss had pretty much clocked out by this point, but Reubens was still worried about how the writer would feel. He knew that Joss wanted the film to be dark and felt that his long and funny death scene may have been a misstep.

  For Joss, however, that scene redeemed, if only a little, the way he felt about Fran Kuzui’s interpretation. “Paul’s adjustment was about spinning on a dime and just being so goddamn funny: ‘This is what I’m in, and I’ve giving myself up to it,’” he explains.

  Production wrapped in April, and 20th Century Fox was so convinced that the film would be a box office success that it moved the release date up to July. The studio developed a surprisingly big marketing campaign for such a low-budget film, including many billboard and newspaper ads across the country. The actors, however, didn’t all seem to be on the same page about how to publicize the film. In the same Entertainment Weekly article, Swanson described Buffy the Vampire Slayer as “a comedy, but also a satire about values in America,” while Luke Perry said that “this is not going to be a critically acclaimed movie, but I still like it. If you’re looking to find the meaning of life, don’t watch our movie. If you’re looking to have a good time, this is the best place to be.”

  Joss knew that the final film would not be representative of the dark and comedic action-horror film of empowerment that he had scripted, and he had time to prepare for the release a few months down the road. However, he had no warning of the next, far more devastating event in his life.

  5

  THE WORLD UPENDS

  By 1992, Lee Stearns had spent nearly half her life teaching at Riverdale Country School. Two years earlier, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars honored her as an outstanding teacher, yet people had held her in high esteem long before she received the prestigious title. Lee constantly pushed her students to think about their personal effect on the world around them, both on a global scale—she helped establish New York City’s first high school chapt
er of the human rights organization Amnesty International—and in much smaller, more personal terms, as in the afternoon teas she cohosted for senior girls, which focused on the issues particular to the lives of female students at Riverdale.

  Lee often took both her children’s friends and her students into her personal life. On one of her earliest sabbaticals, instead of heading off and leaving all things work-related at home, she and husband Stephen had taken four students along with them to travel through Europe. (She also developed plans for a never-realized sojourn from Britain to the Middle East through Rome via the old Roman roads.) Over time, her home became a sanctuary for several students and faculty colleagues who needed a place to live. Joss’s best friend Chris Boal lived with Lee and Stephen for a time after he left college. And a few were lucky enough to be asked along for a getaway at Lee’s Catskills farm.

  Lee spent much of her time upstate writing. She had the final manuscript for one historical novel and was working on her next, for which she had spent time in the British Museum researching, among other things, an immensely powerful woman in Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Several years earlier, she and fellow Riverdale teacher Nancy Rosenberg had written Bellwether, a comedic story about a prep school. The last full manuscript she finished involved a presidential campaign in the year 2000—a time that, though just eight years in the future, she would not live to see.