Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Sandra Bullock, who was still early in her career, stood out in what could have been an especially clichéd role, that of Jack’s potential love interest. The Washington Post offered Bullock’s Annie the sort of praise that would soon become common for Joss’s female characters: “If it weren’t for the smart-funny twist she gives to her lines—they’re the best in the film—the air on that bus would have been stifling…. She emerges as a slightly softer version of the Linda Hamilton-Sigourney Weaver heroines: capable, independent, but still irresistibly vulnerable.”

  The writing credits for Speed were a matter of great contention, with Joss demanding recognition for his contribution and the film’s original writer, Graham Yost, insisting that he should receive sole screenplay credit. The dispute ended up in arbitration before the Writers Guild. Under WGA rules, a writer must have contributed to the plot of the story, not just its dialogue, to receive official credit, so the guild ultimately sided with Yost and Joss went uncredited. (His writing credit is listed, however, on a rare early version of the Speed poster—a copy of which Joss owns.)

  “The arbitration was a great sticking point with me,” Joss said. “I’ve always just disagreed with the WGA’s policy that says you can write every line of dialogue for a movie—and they literally say this—and not deserve credit on it. Because I think that makes no sense of any kind.” He realized that “writers get very protective of themselves. They’re worried that some producer will want to add a line so he can put his name on it. But what they can do is throw writers at it forever without putting their names on it because of this rule. So I actually don’t think it works for writers. It certainly didn’t work for me.”

  Saralegui also disagreed with the ruling, even if he understood the WGA guidelines. Joss “deserved credit” because he was responsible for a lot of the feel of the movie, he says, and “the characters felt different after he wrote them,” even though these newly fleshed-out characters were still the same ones that Yost had created. “It’s really Graham Yost’s story idea, but it’s also his characters and his plot,” he adds. “So, it’s a tough one.”

  It was not until a decade later that Yost admitted in an interview that Joss “wrote 98.9 percent of the dialogue.” Yost added, “We were very much in sync, it’s just that I didn’t write the dialogue as well as he did. That was a hard part of the whole ‘Speed’ thing. It’s my name up there, but I didn’t write the whole thing. But I fought hard to get that credit, so I’ll live with it.”

  Even later, Yost expressed how impressed he was with Joss’s writing, and said that he would always be grateful to him. “When I read his draft, I went, ‘Oh, thank god. Oh, he gets it.’ He’s a very funny writer, a very smart writer. So I was very, very lucky.” He also credited Joss with Hopper’s signature taunting line: “Pop quiz, hotshot.”

  As for Joss, he said that “Graham Yost has always been very polite to me and very sweet but he did say to me, ‘You would have done the same thing.’ And all I could say to him at the time was, ‘Well, I guess we don’t know if that’s true.’”

  Even without official credit, the Speed script got Joss’s work noticed in the industry. Between it and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he now had two solid projects that showcased his dialogue prowess on screen.

  6

  TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: TOY STORY AND ALIEN: RESURRECTION

  At first glance, the theatrical version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had nothing in common with the 1995 computer-animated classic Toy Story: quippy blonde teenager does battle with evil vampires versus a tale about toys learning how to get along. And yet it was Buffy that brought Joss to the attention of Pixar Animation Studios when it was time for the company to rewrite the script for its first film.

  In 1993, work was well under way at Pixar on Toy Story, a long-form version of its 1988 Oscar-winning animated short Tin Toy. John Lasseter, who had been an animator at the Walt Disney Company, led the project. During his time at Disney, Lasseter had become increasingly interested in the possibilities of full-length film composed entirely of computergenerated imagery (CGI), which made him an anomaly in an era when hand-drawn animation was still the norm. After he unwittingly stepped on the toes of some of his direct supervisors with a plan to produce a CGI version of Thomas Disch’s 1980 novel The Brave Little Toaster, Lasseter was fired. He went on to become a founding member of Pixar Studios, which Apple cofounder Steve Jobs acquired in 1986.

  Toy Story was the then-small animation studio’s first big project, and it was in dire straits. Disney had agreed to back the film, and on November 19, 1993, it screened a rough draft of the picture, essentially just a filmed version of the storyboards combined with dialogue and music. Disney’s verdict: the movie was unwatchable. The story had lost the heart that Tin Toy had; the leads, Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear the astronaut, were sarcastic and unlikeable—not exactly ideal heroes for a children’s movie.

  Ironically, it was Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg who had insisted that Toy Story should not be a children’s movie at all. In the documentary The Pixar Story, Disney’s Tom Schumacher explained that Katzenberg “would always … be pushing for what he called ‘edge’ … snappy, adult, the edge of inappropriate, and not to feel too young.” He worried that the title would repel older kids and adults from the film, and under his guidance, Woody, whom countless children would later come to love and admire, was written as a bitter toy who berated and insulted all the other toys and was bound and determined to destroy Buzz.

  Despite Katzenberg’s prior instructions, Disney insisted that Pixar stop production and take three months to rethink and rewrite the film. It was the latest reversal in a tug of war between the organizations over the project—including a battle with Lasseter, who was insistent that the film not be a musical, unlike other Disney films of the era such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.

  The Disney regime pointed to one problem in particular: no one on Pixar’s creative team was a writer. The group was filled with producers and animators, who were confident that they had good story instincts and could storyboard the film very well. But none of their previous shorts had had any dialogue, and usually a feature-length film needed characters that actually spoke. They agreed that the project needed a professional screenwriter.

  So Lasseter’s team began reading scripts, in search of someone who could save Toy Story. Several writers took a shot at it, but they weren’t generating the top-notch material that the project needed. Unfortunately, a creative team that was new to screenwriting also lacked the skills to recognize the lack of experience of the writers that came through. Disney didn’t want to leave the project in the hands of unproven scribes, so the company brought in an established writing partnership, Joel Cohen and former National Lampoon contributor Alec Sokolow. Cohen and Sokolow worked through seven drafts of the script with Pixar’s story team before departing the project.

  That’s when the story team came across Joss’s original Buffy the Vampire Slayer script. They loved it—they loved his irreverent style, and that the script was both dark and comedic. “It was fascinating to read the script that we loved, that had us cracking up and put wonderful images in our head,” says Pixar’s Andrew Stanton. “All the things that you would attribute to Joss now were fresh to us.”

  As luck would have it, Joss was already in the Disney stable at the time. He had wanted to work on musicals, and what better place to do so, he thought, than the studio whose recent animated blockbusters were inspiring a resurgence of the form? He was working on a new animated film that was supposed to be a musical version of the classic Jules Verne science fiction novel Journey to the Center of the Earth and would eventually become Atlantis: The Lost Empire. He’d also been deeply invested in a project that he called “Marco Polo Meets My Fair Lady.” Through Disney’s songwriter program, Joss had not only written the script but also penned the lyrics for three songs set to music by composer Robert Lindsey-Nassif. The studio, however, wanted to pull him off the p
roject to work on a floundering CGI film that would have no singing whatsoever.

  Yet there was a big reason why Joss wasn’t entirely available to tackle Toy Story. When Disney came calling in late 1993, Joss and Kai were in the middle of an eight-week cross-country road trip. The journey was a bit of a test for their future. They had been together for a couple of years, but with all of the work Joss had been getting as a script doctor, Kai wasn’t sure if he’d have enough time in his career to keep pursuing the relationship with the same intensity. She hoped the trek would prove whether they had the compatibility and commitment to make it long-term.

  “I often say to people, ‘Plan a wedding, take a road trip,’” she explains. “Then you really find out about a person.” So they set out on a drive around the country, during which time Joss promised that he would not work, that he would just live in the moment with Kai. After the first five days with bad directions and bad food, there was little that Joss and Kai could hide from each other. Luckily, they were having a blast. “We loved driving across country and just laughing and talking and reading,” she says. “We get along really well; we’re very compatible.” But about two weeks into their trip, Joss got the call about the Toy Story rewrite—and Disney wanted him right away.

  Put off by the initial script, Kai begged him not do it, but Joss explained that the situation was every rewriter’s dream. It was “a perfect structure with a ghastly script. If you have a pretty good script, but there’s just something you can’t put your finger on and figure out structurally, that’s a nightmare,” he says. “When you read something where the structure was John Lasseter’s story concept, which was rock solid, and you could just go in there and do a strong rewrite, that’s good.”

  Conflicted, Joss called his Wesleyan professor and mentor Jeanine Basinger for advice. He wanted to take the job, but he wanted to spend the time with Kai as he had promised. “Everything can be negotiated except Kai,” Jeanine replied. “Negotiate the other end. Tell them you know exactly how to fix it and you’d love to do it—the problem is, they have to wait four weeks.”

  Joss did exactly that, which was a telling moment for Basinger. “I knew for sure Kai was the one,” she says.

  The rest of the trip went as swimmingly as the first two weeks. The only bad part of the whole experience was a single incident that Joss never lets Kai forget about. It speaks volumes about her tendency to jump into things impulsively and his hatred of spoilers. In a small South Dakota store, they found a big bag of old Nancy Drew books. They took turns reading the tales of the girl detective to each other in the car as they drove. “One day, we were reading this Nancy Drew, and [when] we got to where we were going, we took a nap. I couldn’t help it, and I finished the book,” she says sheepishly.

  “I don’t think Joss has ever been madder at me than when I finished that Nancy Drew. He felt so betrayed that I would go on and finish the book. I was apologetic the whole time: ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I just lost control. I had to know what was going to happen.’

  “Joss responded, ‘It’s Nancy Drew. You know what’s going to happen. It’ll work out OK.’”

  When they returned home, Joss left for Oakland to work with Pixar. The project was so much more creatively involved than the script doctoring that Joss had been doing. It was a complete rewrite of the film, one he would have to undertake with a whole group of collaborators. His first step into that world made him nervous: when he was introduced to the team, they were told that Pixar had to shut down production on the film due to the major story issues. “Many of you are going to be laid off, and Joss is here to fix the script,” he remembered someone announcing. “And then I was just like, ‘Why are you pointing at me? What’s going on? This is horrible!’”

  Yet unlike the tense, awkward group dynamics he’d experienced on the writing staffs of Roseanne and Parenthood, he discovered that the Toy Story team members were eager to jump back into the story and strip it down to the essentials. They threw out all of the extraneous ideas to dedicate their focus on the very simple thing that makes Disney so popular: a story that connects with its audience. Lasseter told them not to concern themselves with fancy applications of CGI animation. At the time, not many people had seen computer animation—certainly not at the level that Pixar is now famous for—so it was easy to wow people with early animated tests of Woody and Buzz and footage of green army men walking. But Lasseter insisted that Joss and the team needed to concentrate on Toy Story’s narrative instead.

  That guidance helped the writers shake off the issues they were having with the script. Or, as Joss explained, they realized, “Oh! We already know how to do this. We’ve just got a slightly new medium to do it in.”

  Despite his strong desire to write songs for Disney, Joss agreed with Lasseter’s choice to refrain from making Toy Story a musical. “It would have been a really bad musical, because it’s a buddy movie,” Joss explained. “It’s about people who won’t admit what they want, much less sing about it.” A staple of Disney’s musicals is the “I want” song, in which the main character plainly expresses how he or she wishes life could change. But “Woody can’t do an ‘I want’ number,” Joss said. “He’s cynical and selfish, he doesn’t know himself. Buddy movies are about sublimating, punching an arm, ‘I hate you.’ It’s not about open emotion.” (Members of the Pixar team were surprised that someone who had written such dark, macabre, funny stuff as Buffy the Vampire Slayer knew so much about musicals and was proud of it. “He would wear his musical interests big on his sleeve, when most people would hide that fact,” Stanton remembers.)

  Joss worked closely with Pixar’s team as everyone got their heads around the idea of Toy Story as a buddy picture. Buzz Lightyear had always been conceived as a Dudley Do-Right: dim-witted but cheerful and self-aware. Joss helped them reenvision the character as an action figure who isn’t aware that he’s a toy, and who therefore takes his job as an Intergalactic Space Ranger quite seriously. It was a huge epiphany that turned the whole movie around and created the chemistry in Toy Story.

  Once they had a good grasp on the film’s characters, the group built the story back up. Joss loved being in the room with all the animators and getting to try anything. “They were so sweet and so much fun,” he says. “Watching them draw caricatures of each other, getting Sharpie headaches and having to leave the room, and come back and draw in pencil. Just throwing ideas back and forth, and really feeling, you know, having your voice heard. My voice has been heard in very few of the rewrites I’ve done, and this was a different animal. This was really something that I felt like I got to help shape totally.”

  The feelings of respect and excitement were mutual. “We’re all animators, so it’s kind of a prerequisite that we know our comic books, we know our toys, we know our movies,” Stanton says. “Our references were his references, so he felt like one of us.” As storyboard artists and as gag men, the Pixar animators were used to sitting in a room together, spit-balling ideas, and pinning drawings on the wall—which turned out to be quite similar to what Joss was used to in a television writers’ room. “I think Joss was a little envious that we could draw our ideas so fast; that tends to be the case with a lot of screenwriters when we work with them,” Stanton adds. “But we were so jealous that he would come up with these incredible one-liners. The thing that I connect to him so strongly is that I got to see, firsthand, the germ of the idea be created in a group.” Sometimes those germs led them down the wrong path for the story. “It’s not like he came in and solved it for us,” he clarifies. “We made our own mistakes, and we made our own solutions as a group.”

  Joss would take all the ideas from the Pixar team and go into his office, crank up the music he needed to be inspired, and write. When he emerged, he delivered pages that evoked exactly what they had been trying to describe in the room as a group—but so much stronger, more economical, and so much more concise. “It was this huge epiphany, because [Joss’s writing] was beyond just the
dialogue—his descriptions and the economy of his scriptwriting forced the exact images he wanted in your head,” Stanton explains. “It was this huge lightbulb for me that scriptwriting is not writing novels—it’s cinematic dictation. It’s having the art of being able to describe what the final image will be on the screen cinematically so well that anybody that reads this script page can’t help but see the same image. That was what a great scriptwriter did.” Stanton’s résumé now includes cowriting credits on Pixar’s later hits Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and WALL-E—and he’s quick to point to Joss as an influence, having soaked up how Joss worked and wrote during their time together on Toy Story.

  Eventually, the story took shape. Toy Story is the tale of a little boy’s toys and their adventures when he isn’t around. The group is led by Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), a generally stand-up and cheerful fella who enjoys his status as Andy’s favorite toy. Things change when Andy’s birthday party brings a new player into the mix: Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), the astronaut action figure who doesn’t realize he’s not a real astronaut. When the Space Ranger usurps Woody’s position as Andy’s favorite toy, Woody decides to get rid of Buzz. His plans go awry, however, when they both get lost. Adding to the drama is the family’s impending move. Can the duo work together to get back home before they’re left behind—or, worse, before they fall into the hands of Sid Phillips, the evil neighbor hell-bent on toy destruction?

  Joss tried to inject some girl power into the testosterone-heavy storyline by suggesting that it be Barbie who comes in and saves Woody and Buzz from Sid. “She’s [Terminator 2’s] Sarah Connor in a pink convertible, all business and very cool,” Joss said. But he wasn’t able to get his way; Mattel execs wouldn’t allow Toy Story to develop an actual action-hero identity for Barbie. In addition, the Pixar team itself preferred to keep the focus on Woody. “We decided we could either be PC and fair about this or bring true toy moments,” Stanton explained. Joss had better luck adding a Whedonesque character to the mix with Rex, a boisterous green plastic tyrannosaur who is often taken over by fits of anxiety and the worry that he isn’t scary enough.