Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  Joss would come to understand that this position—respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze—helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. “You can’t write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that’s a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don’t want to talk about.”

  When he entered his sophomore year, Joss was at a crucial point in his academic career—did he want to follow a path like his father, grandfather, and mother and pursue theater performance and directing, or would he find greater happiness in the school’s film studies department? He’d added film directing to his storytelling skillset, making short films on his own, cast with his family. Joss wrote and directed a film with his little brother Jed as the star that premiered at Jed’s eighth birthday party. “It was the year that Superman [III] came out, so he did a film called Stupidman,” Tom recalled.

  Joss set up a meeting with Professor Jeanine Basinger, the head of the film department. A leader in the field, Basinger was a trustee of the American Film Institute and would later be named to the board of directors of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Under her guidance, Wesleyan’s program had become one of the most respected in the country—a status that allowed Basinger and the school to set guidelines for potential film studies students that are still in force today. Students must meet with her in person before being allowed to register for her class. During these meetings, Basinger and the potential enrollee discuss movies, books, and their lives. She asks questions, trying to work out how the student thinks and what he or she likes. Students’ answers about film preferences usually give Basinger a good baseline for who they are.

  Right away, Basinger saw in Joss a curiosity, a liveliness of the mind. She found him to be a flexible, creative, and deep thinker. “Sometimes people are flexible but not deep; sometimes they are creative but not flexible. There’s a different level of things that you discover,” Basinger explains. “I saw the hard worker he was and how seriously he took it.”

  The respect was mutual. “I’ve had two great teachers in my life,” Joss has declared: his mother and Basinger. “The way everyone in the film department talks about her—she’s like a god,” says Kai Cole, Joss’s wife. “And she is. You meet her and you really regret not going to film school [at Wesleyan].”

  Basinger approved Joss’s enrollment, and he chose her program instead of a theatrical track. Unlike at Winchester, in his film classes he drank in everything there was to learn. “[There were] people who understand theory in terms of filmmaking and film storytelling, and film mythos and film genre, better than anybody else does,” he explained. “Lectures that were so complete, so complex, so dense and so simple that I almost had trouble following them, and by the end would realize they were dealing with things that were already in me. They were already incorporated in the way I thought about story, because they are the American mythos.” In Basinger’s film lectures, in particular, he was super attentive, very involved, very imaginative, and creative about his work.

  Joss embraced Wesleyan’s approach to film studies, which focused on theory rather than production. He wrote a paper on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in which he identified four thematic elements: the Watcher, the Watched, Isolation, and the Role of the Viewer. He said of Tippi Hedren’s character, Melanie Daniels, “She has to give up her superficial life to survive,” and framed the horror she faces in existential terms: “Stop thinking of why the birds are attacking … they just are, that’s all that matters.” Basinger loved reading his work. “His papers seemed so natural, like they were improvisational,” she says. “And yet they were crafted to perfection, because the ideas that he had were delineated at a very precise level.”

  However, his need to absorb film history couldn’t be quenched only by his time in the classroom, or even by Basinger’s extra screenings, which most Wesleyan film students attended. When spring came and his classmates would take advantage of the break from the long winter, Joss would be alone in the basement watching a double feature—and then he’d go home at 2 AM and watch whatever was on TV. He felt it was essential to watch films over and over again, taking time to dissect and truly understand what the filmmakers were trying to do. Anyone can learn where to point a camera, he said. But no one could truly be taught how. Before he could shoot, Joss felt it was more important to study the meaning of each move in a film—“where the simplicity is, where the complexity is.”

  The film students ran and selected films for the campus movie theater. Joss’s choices were the westerns The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and The Furies (1950); the film noir Laura (1944); and The Scarlet Empress (1934), which starred Marlene Dietrich as the German princess Sophia, who became the empress Catherine the Great. Basinger explained that her students felt so strongly about their film preferences that they’d sometimes come to blows, and that “while Joss is a very effective screenwriter, he is weak in the punching department.”

  In his later years at Wesleyan, Joss became a teaching assistant. The first class he assisted with was Language and Film, with Joe Reed. It was an introductory course, with more than two hundred students, and Joss’s first TA lecture was on lighting in film scenes. Initially, things did not look good for the young man.

  “I was terrified,” Joss remembers. “I was terrified until about thirty seconds after I got on stage, and then you couldn’t have pulled me off.” He was on a high from the quintessential point of teaching: “The best part was showing a clip while I was explaining something about lighting and hearing everybody laugh because they had figured something out because they had learned something.” For Joss, that was a feeling everyone should have.

  Joss later became a TA for Basinger herself, and the two grew even closer. He helped select films for her film series and was allowed to grade papers and give lectures of his own. When he graded papers, Basinger took note of his succinct, pointed commentary. “When somebody didn’t get it, he’d nail them,” she says. “Never mean, but he could be very precise—one of his most distinct evaluations was quite simple: ‘This guy’s a puddle.’ And he was right; he said everything there was to say.” She was also impressed by his work in the classroom. “There was a melodious, meticulous perfection to his lectures,” she says. “He had a rhythm, and he had the ability to create the surprise little twist at the end.”

  According to Basinger, Joss’s lecture on the infamous Joan Crawford vehicle Johnny Guitar (1954) was the best she’d heard. Joss discussed the gender politics in director Nicholas Ray’s view of the world and delved into which characters the audience identifies with at what time and why, who owns the space on screen, and, ultimately, whose movie it is and whom it’s about. “His lectures were absolutely brilliant. They had not only the complete understanding and the ability to clarify and delineate, but also they had a kind of poetry that showed how his heart and soul really understood the medium, as well as his brain,” she explains. “He wasn’t just intellectually sharp about film, he was also emotionally, creatively sharp about it.”

  Each lecture Joss did taught him something new. With Otto Preminger’s noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, he and his co-TA learned how to think quickly, as they were only able to screen the film simultaneously with their talk. He returned to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and explained to the students why it’s such a polarizing movie—discussing Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren and how he saw her, essentially, as a prop in the film. “I had an old photograph of him that I’d gotten from a book, of him marking her leg with chalk to show the cameraman where he wanted the frame to end,” Joss says. “That was amazing; she was like a piece of set [decoration].”

  In his lecture on Rear Window (1954), Joss described Jimmy Stewart’s character using a term familiar to Buffy fans. He called him the Watcher—someone who views life as a movie, who thinks that simply watchi
ng the goings-on of the couple across the way through their window can’t hurt him. But it does hurt him, both physically and, more importantly, emotionally. It’s a theme that Joss would revisit in the relationship between Buffy and her trainer/mentor Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the first episode of the series, Buffy pushes him to take action against vampires himself. “I-I’m a Watcher,” he says, stumbling over his words, explaining that he hasn’t the skill, that it’s not his role in life. There is both a sense of safety and a resigned sadness in his declaration. (Giles’s cover job as the librarian at Buffy’s high school also has roots in this period of Joss’s life; while at Wesleyan, he worked the desk at the university library.)

  Another hint toward Joss’s breakthrough series came in his junior-year film project, which was about a girl who goes to the prom and finds out her date is a vampire. A Night Alone had its premiere on Sunday, May 11, 1986, at “Wesleyan Presents: The Student Films and Videos of 1986.” Joss both designed the event’s poster and took the black-and-white noir detective photo featured on it. For one dollar, attendees watched several 16 mm student films, including Michael Bay’s My Brother Benjamin, which won an award. It would be one of the only times the public had the opportunity to screen Bay’s or Joss’s film. At Wesleyan, the students fund their own films and thus have all ownership rights to them.

  To this day, Joss refuses to let anyone screen A Night Alone, because he feels that it was poorly made. While Wesleyan’s film program was exceptional on theory and history, it was sadly lacking in production offerings. “Pretty much what I had learned in our one production class was: Don’t drop the camera. It’s really expensive,” Joss says. “That film was a hot mess.”

  Basinger had a far kinder assessment of her two students’ work. “They both showed great talent for undergraduates in a liberal arts college that has one brief semester in production and who made their own projects. They are both distinctive. In Michael’s case, his is a Michael Bay film: It’s beautifully shot and edited, it’s a fluid forward movement of action, and you could put it up anywhere,” she says. “Joss’s was a narrative, and he had amateur actors. So you have a rougher thing, but you very definitely have an intelligent, amusing piece of work that is clearly a Joss Whedon film, with clearly a Joss Whedon character and story.”

  The following year, Joss made another movie that he liked much better. This one wasn’t done for school credit but instead to “ward off the evil spirits” of A Night Alone. And again, the project hinted at his works to come: the black-and-white, silent Super 8 film was a postapocalyptic western called Tombstone. Joss drew inspiration this time from the George Romero zombie apocalypse movies, The Terminator, and the thesis of another of his Wesleyan professors, Richard Slotkin.

  In Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, Slotkin proposed that American narratives were developed from the frontier mythologies created as European settlers pushed farther west into Native American lands. “We just replace [the Indians] with whatever’s alien, whatever’s other. In WWII, it’s the Japanese,” Joss says. “Zombies are just the latest incarnation of Indians. It’s the West all over again. There’s just a few of us, and we’re trying to survive.”

  3

  CRASH COURSE IN TELEVISION

  After graduating from Wesleyan in 1987, Joss faced the question so many young people confront upon leaving college: what do I do now? The film studies grad decided to move to San Diego to become an independent filmmaker.

  Broke, he ended up at his father’s house in Los Angeles. He picked up the requisite job for a future film director—video store clerk—and later became the part-time video production teacher at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where his younger brothers were enrolled. Through Jeanine Basinger, he connected with a Wesleyan grad who gave him a job doing research for the Life Achievement Award at the American Film Institute. These jobs did not, however, build up his bank account enough for him to be able to move out on his own.

  The disappointing circumstances did have an upside: Joss got to spend time with his father, something he hadn’t done much of since his parents’ divorce when he was nine. That experience, of course, had strengthened Joss’s relationship with his mother, yet Joss was also like his father—himself the son of a writer. And in Los Angeles the bond between father and son, now both grown men, grew deeper.

  Still, Joss was determined not to be “3G TV”—a third-generation television writer, as a friend at Wesleyan teasingly insisted would be his destiny. He’d watched Tom’s career fluctuate as any television writer’s does, dependent on being hired for a show and then dependent on the ratings for the show and job to continue. “That freaked me out a little bit,” Joss said. “As a kid, I was like, ‘You know what I want when I grow up? Financial security.’ Who says that? I was always super careful to save money, and just never be in a situation where I had to do something I didn’t believe in in order to make money, because that would just hurt.” Even Tom admonished his son that “under no circumstances write sitcoms, because it was too hard.”

  But Joss needed a way to make decent money to get out of his father’s house and into his own space, and hopefully fund the movies he wanted to make. Ironically, the one career path that he had rejected for its instability now seemed like his best chance for a steady paycheck. And despite Tom’s own misgivings, he wanted to support his son and believed in his talent. He felt that Joss’s writing would be a good fit for the sitcom he was working on at the time, It’s a Living, which was set in a swanky restaurant atop a Los Angeles hotel and followed the lives of its waitresses. He suggested that his son come in and pitch some ideas for the show. Joss had already spent some time on the set watching production and had taken a liking to one of the two showrunners (the writer/producers in charge of the series), whom he thought was “young, hip, and cool.” He decided to go for it.

  “It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” Joss said. “Horrible, just terror, and then it went as badly as any bad-pitched story you’ve ever heard of—and I did it twice. Both times, it was a nightmare. I was so scared.” The experience was made worse by the other showrunner, who blew off every idea that Joss had and called him out for not being prepared enough, or being overrehearsed.

  Joss realized years later that the response was more about the showrunner’s relationship with Tom than about Joss’s own ability. But that didn’t make it any easier for father or son. After one of the failed pitches, Tom came home and was almost an hour into a conversation before he told his son that he didn’t think Joss would get to write for It’s a Living. “He couldn’t even get up the nerve to tell me,” Joss said. “My poor father. It was harder for him, I think, than it was for me.”

  Feeling that he had been “eviscerated by weasels,” Joss didn’t pursue television writing opportunities any further for the time being. He still had his job at the video store, but that didn’t mean that he stopped writing. One project was a musical parody of the Oliver North hearings, to the tune of the songs from Oliver! North, a former US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, came into the public spotlight in July 1987 when he testified before a joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, an American political scandal that exploded in the final years of the Reagan administration. North had admitted the previous year that he had been partially responsible for the sale of weapons via intermediaries to Iran, the profits of which were channeled to anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua. “We didn’t ever shoot it or anything,” Joss said. “I just recorded it with my family, with my little brothers, my dad and my stepmom, and me.”

  Tom played the recording at parties, where a producer for a new series heard it, liked it, and asked Joss to lunch. The producer asked if Joss had any other writing samples and Joss responded that he didn’t, but if he could get all the scripts from the producer’s new show, Just in Time, he’d write one of those. Unfortunately, Just in Time was canceled after two episodes aired, and before Joss could
finish his script.

  Joss buckled down and developed several more speculative, or spec, scripts for sitcoms that were on the air at the time. Spec scripts are the all-important calling card for aspiring writers. They’re generally intended not to be produced but simply to showcase a writer’s voice and demonstrate how well he or she can develop a story and write to the tone of a particular series. Once a writer has polished specs for a few different shows, he sends them out to agents in hopes of connecting with someone who likes and will champion his work. Joss wrote specs for his father’s show, It’s a Living, as well as the sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.

  When he showed these scripts to his father, Tom had only encouragement and praise—which was something that Joss didn’t know he needed until it was offered. Tom was so supportive that he insisted that Joss skip the traditional path to becoming a television writer—serving as an assistant to a producer, writer, or agent—and hold out for a staff writer position. “I had no idea how huge that was for me until it happened,” Joss said. “This guy could have crushed the life out of me if he had a mean or competitive bone in his body. He has been completely, gushingly supportive since the day I picked up a pen.”

  Tom even called in some favors on his son’s behalf. His literary agency, Leading Artists (a precursor to United Talent Agency), was willing to have someone read his scripts. Another young upstart, Chris Harbert, had just joined Leading Artists as an agent in 1988. After graduating from Boston University, Harbert had worked his way up from the mailroom at ICM before moving to Leading Artists. When he had Joss in for a meeting during his first year on the job, he was surprised by the length of the writer’s hair.