Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

Lee Stearns died unexpectedly of a cerebral aneurysm on May 20, 1992.

  Nearly a decade later, Joss would relive the experience of his mother’s death—the surreal moments and his seemingly irrational reactions—through one of his fictional female avatars, while writing the Buffy episode in which the main character’s mother, Joyce, dies.

  In the fifth-season episode “The Body,” Buffy arrives home one morning to find her mother on the couch, cold and unresponsive. Buffy blindly goes through the motions—calling 911 and then Giles, her surrogate father figure, to come and be with her, watching the paramedics try and fail to revive her mother—until finally she is once again alone with her mother’s body.

  Over the years, fans have told him that it helped them deal with a death that had happened years earlier. Joss was touched but surprised by how many people reached out to say that they found the episode comforting and cathartic. To him, it was not a story about finding comfort in God or coming to terms with what death means in some grand, preplanned scheme. “At this time a lot of people turn to, as [writer] Tim Minear would call him, the Sky Bully,” Joss said. “But since I don’t believe in the Sky Bully, and don’t really have that to fall back on, I haven’t really found any lessons in death other than I wish it wouldn’t.”

  For Joss, the point of “The Body” was to capture the first few hours after someone dies, when there is “no solution, catharsis, or anything else … the almost-boredom.” At one point, Buffy fixates on something meaningless—the buttons on the house phone—which was something that Joss did when Lee died. It isn’t until the moment when Giles arrives and attempts CPR on Joyce that Buffy reacts with an incredible intensity and yells at him to not touch “the body.”

  “I wanted to be very specific about what it felt like the moment you discover [that] you’ve lost someone. That moment of dumbfounded shock. That airlessness of losing somebody,” Joss said. “Death is a physical thing…. Apart from the sense of loss that you inevitably feel, there is the fact of a body. And dealing with that is an experience that really does kind of stop time….

  “I had always learned from TV that a death made everybody stronger and better, and learn about themselves. My experience was that an important piece had been taken out of the puzzle, amongst my family or friends, and that that piece would never be replaced and people would never be the same. There is no glorious payoff. There are sometimes revelations, and lessons that are useful. You have to take something out of it, because it’s inevitable: none of us [are] getting out of here alive.”

  After 20th Century Fox bought the Buffy film, the studio offered Joss a development deal. As a part of it, he’d written a script called Nobody Move. It was a comedy about a twelve-year-old boy whose girlfriend, the love of his life, and her family are preparing to move away, so he decides to stop them. His schemes, each one bigger than the last, all seem to backfire.

  In addition to becoming the Wile E. Coyote in a tween romantic comedy, the boy is coming to terms with having recently lost his mother. Everyone around him, including his father, thinks that he is fine and doesn’t pay him much attention. Desperate and alone, he constructs all his over-the-top plans to keep his girlfriend from leaving because of his need to keep anything else from changing.

  Joss actually wrote Nobody Move before his mother died. At the time, he felt that the boy’s actions seemed fake and unrealistic. He didn’t know where they were coming from as he wrote them, just that they needed to be done. And then his own mother died, and he did everything the boy did in the script. It wasn’t until years later that he put it all together—that he had all the same reactions and had no understanding of why he did them.

  It was an intense realization for him, and he referred to this time through a quiet, emotional exchange during an awkward moment between Buffy and her friend’s girlfriend, Tara, in “The Body.” Tara reveals that her own mother died when she was seventeen and that there were thoughts and reactions that she had that she couldn’t understand or begin to explain to anyone else. “Thoughts that made me feel like I was losing it, or like I was some kind of horrible person,” she says.

  Buffy then asks if Tara’s mother’s death was sudden. “No, and yes,” Tara replies. “It’s always sudden.”

  Two months after Lee died, Buffy the Vampire Slayer opened July 31, 1992. It would go on to achieve decent box office numbers—around $16 million against its budget of about $9 million—but the reviews were less than stellar. It was an additional blow for Joss in an incredibly painful year. He had lost his lifelong role model and feminist icon, and the icon and role model he had created—nurturing the character for years, even drawing a sketch of her at one point—had been twisted into something unrecognizable by the Kuzuis’ desire to make a broad comedy. It was a hard and important lesson, and one that he took to heart: in the future, he would need to find a new way to take creative control of his work.

  After the Buffy premiere, Kai suggested that maybe a few years down the road, Joss would get to tell the story of his Slayer again, the way he wanted to make it. He remembers telling her, “Ha ha ha, you little naive fool. It doesn’t work that way. That’ll never happen.”

  In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Joss shifted his focus to spend a lot of time with his father. Both men were out of work at the time; Tom had finished up his run as executive producer on The Golden Girls when the series ended in May 1992. So he and his son worked together on some spec scripts and a sitcom pilot. Their pilot was modeled after the show Siskel & Ebert, in which two rival Chicago movie reviewers discussed, and often argued about, films that had recently been released. The sitcom version by the Whedons gave that premise an Odd Couple spin, with extra mutual loathing. To keep the series current and interesting, the fictional reviewers would comment on real movies during the show, and the scenes in which the characters actually reviewed the films would be shot the day before each episode aired so that they could actually reflect what was coming out the following weekend.

  Their pilot wasn’t picked up, but working together so closely was quite fun for both father and son. Not only did they have similar sensibilities in their writing, but Joss also learned a lot from Tom. “His very simple advice has always been the best,” Joss says. “First one being: if you have a story that matters, you don’t need jokes, and if you don’t, all the jokes in the world won’t save you.”

  Joss poured additional energy into working on his own new ideas and spec scripts. Agent Chris Harbert had a special technique for pushing his client into action: when another writer sold a project or a script, he’d send Joss the Variety article about it, because he knew it would engage his competitive side. “I would go upstairs and start writing. It’s that competitive envious thing,” Joss said. “I get jealous of anyone who gets to do cool stuff. That’s never not the case. It’s part of being ambitious.”

  Joss also got into script doctoring—working on other people’s scripts that were already in development to punch up the dialogue or story. In 1993, he picked up his first gig writing “loop lines” for the remake of The Getaway starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. He scripted new dialogue that could be looped in over footage that had already been shot—for instance, when an actor’s back was to the camera—to fill in missing connections in the story or just get rid of dead air. “If you look carefully at The Getaway,” he said, “you’ll see that when people’s backs are turned, or their heads are slightly out of frame, the whole movie has a certain edge to it.” The following year, he would spend a couple of days punching up dialogue for the western The Quick and the Dead so that he could meet the director, Sam Raimi, who had written and directed a film very influential to Joss’s horror sensibilities: The Evil Dead. “That’s a movie that goes genuinely insane, on its own terms, without ever violating its terms of reality,” Joss said. “The movie itself goes bonkers, and I just think that’s a beautiful thing.”

  Joss had several meetings with Jorge Saralegui, the junior executive at Fox who had recommended th
at the studio buy the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film. Saralegui had also worked with Joss on Nobody Move, and while that script never quite made it through the development process, it had helped to establish a friendship between them. One day over lunch, Saralegui pitched the idea of a “dog movie, a movie with a dog in it,” Joss said. “I was writing mostly comedy, and I was being pitched comedies because that’s what I had come from. I was pitched so many [examples] like ‘It’s Wayne’s World meets Flubber.’”

  Joss countered with a gag pitch: “Die Hard on a bridge.” The joke was that in the early 1990s, many scripts were written in the hope of recapturing the blockbuster success of the skyscraper-set action movie Die Hard (1988). But Saralegui thought the pitch, and the idea of setting it on the George Washington Bridge in New York City, had real potential that Joss didn’t see. However, Saralegui knew that Hollywood would see Joss as the guy who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the kid-centric Nobody Move and worked on Roseanne, and with that résumé, he’d have little success selling an action movie on a pitch alone. The executive felt that Joss was better off writing a full spec script; once it was complete, Joss could shop it around town, letting the industry see his versatility.

  Saralegui became adamant that he go home and write the script. “Don’t option it, don’t tell anybody about it, go and write it,” Joss remembered Saralegui saying. “I guarantee you will never be pitched a dog movie again.”

  And so Joss did. His screenplay for Suspension, as in suspension bridge, followed Harry Monk, an ex-con who has just been released from a New Jersey prison after serving a fifteen-year stint for an armed robbery that included the shooting of a police officer. Harry is desperate to get back to New York, to return to an old haunt, but as he crosses over the Hudson River, he and the rest of the people on the George Washington Bridge are taken hostage.

  After leaving his cab and exploring the bridge a bit, Harry connects with Avery, a skeptical female police officer. More officers get pulled into the hostage situation, and they tell her that Harry is not to be trusted. Joss said that due to Harry’s crime, “when he hooks up with other policemen, they hate him; they don’t trust him and he has to earn their trust.” For his first proper action film, Joss explored an idea that echoed back to his classes with Richard Slotkin at Wesleyan: redemption through violence.

  There is a lot of violence in the script. The mastermind behind the bridge hijack is a psychopath named Chi, who is unstable and unpredictable and, in typical Whedon fashion, quite snarky and funny. The funny, however, does not soften his murderous tendencies. In order to show the police how far he will go, Chi has a young boy shot on live TV. “I wanted a baby for that spot,” the character admits, “but having the boy … was a nice touch.”

  With the Die Hard comparisons obvious, the Suspension script does not do much to change up the action formula that will see Harry and Avery emerge victorious and alive at the end of the film. Yet Joss did a great job of keeping the suspense at an intense and believable level, and making all of the characters real and relatable—which were skills that he would soon bring to another action film.

  In June 1993, Die Hard and 48 Hrs. producer Lawrence Gordon’s company Largo Entertainment bought the script for $1 million—a surprising amount for a project with no talent or director attached, from a fairly untested twenty-eight-year-old screenwriter. All of a sudden, Joss was starting to be widely seen not as a comedy guy but as an action writer. Suspension was a huge deal that put him on the map.

  Joss hoped that the filmmakers would keep him on the project, but as often happens with less experienced scribes, he was replaced by another writer. The preproduction costs kept building, and in the end, Suspension was never made. “It’s one of those scripts that you eventually put so much money into it that it wasn’t worth continuing, which happens a lot,” Saralegui says.

  The following year, Joss sold his next script to Sony for $1.5 million. In Afterlife, an intense science fiction tale, scientist Daniel Hoffstettor is in the last stages of succumbing to a fatal disease and trying to make the most of his final days with his wife, Laura. After he dies, he awakes with newfound health in a brand-new body. It has all been engineered by a government agency called Tank that “resurrects” dying men whom the agency feels have more to contribute to society, transplanting their brains into young, healthy bodies. Tank wants him to continue his research, but Daniel is desperate to reconnect with his wife. He escapes from the agency’s facility to find Laura, and while he’s on the run, he quickly finds out that his new body may be healthy, but it comes with some issues of its own. It previously belonged to a notorious and very recognizable serial killer, and the killer’s personality slowly emerges to take control.

  Like Suspension, Afterlife was never made, but it, too, showed some of the hallmarks of Joss’s successful projects to come. First, while the story contained fantastical elements, Joss grounded them all in reality by focusing on the very human interactions that draw the audience to connect with the characters. Second, the script embodied Joss’s deep distaste for large entities that impose their desires on the free will of individuals. This theme would return several times in his television series, with the Watchers Council, which oversees and attempts to dictate the actions of the Slayer in Buffy; the Alliance, the oppressive interplanetary government in Firefly; and the sketchy and morally ambiguous Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse. It would also become a factor in Joss’s personal life, in the form of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which he would go up against in two separate battles.

  By 1993, Jorge Saralegui had been promoted to vice president of production at 20th Century Fox and was producing his first movie, the Keanu Reeves / Dennis Hopper actioner Speed. The film is about Jack Traven (Reeves), a SWAT officer who is pulled into a plot by a deranged bomber (Hopper) in which a Los Angeles city bus has been rigged to blow up if its speed falls below fifty miles per hour. Jack must work with Annie (Sandra Bullock), a passenger who takes the wheel when the driver is injured, to navigate the L.A. traffic, help track down the bomber, and figure out how to get all of the passengers off the bus before it explodes.

  The film was set to shoot with director Jan de Bont, who had been the cinematographer on Die Hard and Lethal Weapon 3. Right before they were about to start production, Fox decided that the dialogue needed to be polished and that Graham Yost, the original writer (who also had been primarily a television screenwriter), wasn’t right for the job. They felt that it was time to bring in a heavyweight.

  The studio hired Paul Attanasio, who had written the soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated Quiz Show and the Michael Douglas / Demi Moore vehicle Disclosure. Two weeks later he turned in a draft, but instead of polishing the dialogue, he had drastically changed the script. Attanasio’s script was sent to Peter Chernin, the new chairman of Fox Entertainment Group, who was very passionate about the project. Chernin called Saralegui on a Saturday morning and asked what he had done to the script.

  “I knew it sucked,” Saralegui says. “I don’t know why [Attanasio] did what he did, but he did what he did.” Chernin subtly told him that he was on the verge of losing control of the project and to look for help. Saralegui brought in big-name producer Walter F. Parkes (WarGames, Awakenings), who read Speed and liked it, and mentioned some writers that he thought would be good to work on the dialogue. Saralegui, remembering how much he’d enjoyed the stylized dialogue in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer screenplay, suggested Joss.

  Parkes had never read Joss’s work before, but he was on board once Saralegui sent him some scripts. “He loved Joss’s writing,” Saralegui says. The two quickly met with and hired Joss, who came onto the film a week before they started shooting in September 1993. Joss didn’t get to see his vision of “Die Hard on a bridge” come to fruition, but he did get to play with “Die Hard on a bus.”

  One of the first things that Joss did was to revise the character of one of the bus passengers. Stephens (Alan Ruck) was originally an obnoxious lawyer. He was always set to di
e, but because he’d been such an unlikeable character, there was no reason for the audience to feel bad for him. “I turned him into a likeable, sort of doofy tourist guy and [they said] ‘Well, now we can’t kill him,’” Joss recalled. “My opinion was ‘Well, now you should, because now people will actually care when he dies.’”

  Joss also pared down parts of the script that he felt were artificial. Reeves’s Officer Jack Traven was initially a hotshot maverick. But Reeves had shadowed law enforcement agents to develop his character, and he was taken by how polite they were, how they often courteously addressed people as “sir” and “ma’am.” He also respectfully asked for changes to particular dialogue and actions that he felt were incongruous with his character. Joss was inspired by the care the actor had put into the character, and he rewrote Traven to be less of a hothead and instead just a cop who thought more laterally than the rest of his squad. “What if he’s just the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed?”

  “It’s all about finding the emotional reality of the characters and getting them from A to B in a realistic fashion,” Joss says. “You’re connecting the dots. ‘OK, he goes from a bus to a train to a plane. Why? What does that mean? What’s that gonna do?’ It can be great fun. Very stressful when you find the flaws, and you go, ‘Ooh!’ Make the flaws where the meat is.”

  Speed was released on June 10, 1994, and grossed $14.5 million in its first weekend, ultimately bringing in $121.3 million in North America and over $283 million worldwide—an impressive follow-up to Buffy’s $16 million. It was also a critical hit; Roger Ebert wrote, “Films like Speed belong to the genre I call Bruised Forearm Movies, because you’re always grabbing the arm of the person sitting next to you. Done wrong, they seem like tired replays of old chase clichés … done as well as Speed, they generate a kind of manic exhilaration.”