Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  In Buffy’s past few seasons, as its ratings grew and home Internet access exploded, more and more people had started posting on the Bronze. Word spread about the board’s big annual get-together, attended by the cast and crew, so the Posting Board Party grew in attendees each year. It quickly lost the intimate feel of the first party. “Somewhere along the line,” says “Missi,” a Bronzer, “the PBP stopped being about the people and started being about the cast and who was going to be there and what was going to go on. People got really angry about that.”

  By 2000, the PBP had become a charity event with corporate sponsorship. The event raised money for Make-a-Wish, a noble venture, but it meant that tickets were far more expensive, out of the price range of many Bronzers. And as the organizers established partnerships with Fox, the WB, and other official corporate entities, the party moved away from its initial identity as a gathering by and for the fans themselves.

  Theoretically, the event was still supposed to offer Bronzers unfettered access to any Buffy insiders who chose to attend. The PBP was supposed to be a safe space where all attendees—Bronzers and show VIPs alike—were shown the same respect. But the venue now set aside a separate area for the VIPs to escape the crowds. And crowds there were, especially around the actors. At the 2000 PBP, new cast member Marc Blucas was surrounded in a huge semicircle about fifteen people deep throughout most of the night, making maneuvering through the venue impossible at times. People were knocked over by the swarming fans, and many attendees were embarrassed by the way Blucas was groped.

  Disillusionment with the event grew. Bronzers complained that it had become a celebrity circus where “you could see the stars of the show, usually from a distance … hiding in the VIP lounge drinking free alcohol,” said poster “Leather Jacket.” It was starting to take on the overwhelming, impersonal feel of a current-day San Diego Comic-Con.

  The message board itself retained its free-flowing character, the sense that it was a space where people could talk about personal matters as easily as they did the series. But that quality was tested when a member of Joss’s crew took to the Bronze to discuss his series’ behind-the-scenes tensions and politics.

  Right before the season-four finale aired, stunt coordinator and second unit director Jeff Pruitt was fired. It came as a great surprise to the fans, as his work had been highly respected in the industry, and he had greatly elevated Buffy’s fight choreography upon joining the series in season two. He and his wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double Sophia Crawford, had established themselves as an incredibly integral part of the show.

  On May 17, 2000, Pruitt decided to air his issues with his dismissal, the show, and Joss on the Bronze. That night, the board was heavily trafficked by VIPs, with posts from Joss, Amber Benson, and writer David Fury. Pruitt answered a few questions from the fans, and in response to being asked if he’d return for the fifth season, he posted a link to a story he wrote called “The Parable of the Knight.” It was a thinly veiled allegory of his experiences on the show—so thinly veiled that it was more like a windowpane. Pruitt alleged that he’d been pushed out due to infighting among the cast and crew, likening himself to a long-suffering Knight who, along with his Handmaiden wife, served a young King (Joss), who turned on them once the Princess (Gellar) and her evil cohorts (the show’s crew) began to conspire against him.

  As a long-standing member of the Bronze community, Pruitt found that many posters were sympathetic about his firing—until they started reading his tale. The board had often been a place to connect with the show’s creators in a truly unique way, but this mudslinging among the staff had never happened before. The situation only got worse when Joss and David Fury both returned to the board to refute Pruitt’s accusations—and get in some jabs themselves:

  Joss says:

  … I read the Parable of the Knight. Felt I ought to comment on the situation. Yes, Jeff is leaving. It’s sad. Jeff was a huge asset to Buffy—he took it to a new level of action and grace with Sophia, and his style will always be a part of the show. But this isn’t a fairy tale. Or a thinly veiled “parable.” It’s a hard, gruelingly hard job, ten months a year, thirteen hours a day, with fifty or more people straining, working, getting in each other’s face, stepping on each other’s toes, driving each other crazy. It happens. And the only thing that keeps it together is the effort people make to work together. Doesn’t always happen. There are conflicts, raging egos—and even occasional backstabbing, I’m sorry to say. There are very few “plots,” and as far as I can tell, no jousting of any kind. People just wear on each other and eventually sometimes you have to make a change. No one’s to blame—or everyone is. But either people get into a groove of working as part of the whole or they don’t. And seeing yourself as a noble knight being plotted against by evil courtiers really doesn’t help. Remember that.

  Fury says:

  Hey, Joss—Does this mean I should call off my legions who at this moment are preparing to storm your castle and overthrow your kingdom? Damn. There goes my weekend.

  Joss says:

  Fury, do not storm my castle, for I have read that I am a weak King, and I would probably get a nervous tummy.

  The Bronze was not immune to squabbles. But now the posters were being dragged into a fight they wanted no part of. Pruitt felt betrayed and chose to take his feelings to the fans, but instead of garnering support, he alienated Bronzers, who felt like they now had to watch their divorcing parents have a nasty fight in their bedroom.

  Kathy Hein, a Bronzer, remembered, “Joss came on and he and Jeff were arguing with each other on the Bronze, and we had the creator of the show and the second unit director arguing with each other like children on a public Internet forum in front of fans.” As the Bronzers would police bickering among themselves, they eventually insisted that Joss, Fury, and Pruitt take their arguments elsewhere.

  Over the next few months, Pruitt gave more candid interviews, and most of his ire was aimed at Gellar for her actions on set, her attitude toward fans, and, in particular, her insistence in interviews that she did her own stunts. Joss told her about Pruitt’s parable, but she refused to read it, already feeling weary from all the online criticism she saw daily. “There’s no other word except crushing,” Gellar said of her reaction. “It’s one thing to hear people you don’t know saying lies about you on the Internet, but when it comes from a disgruntled former employee…. It really, really, really hurt.”

  Unsurprisingly, Pruitt’s actions destroyed the relationship he had with Joss. He found out that over the previous year, venting e-mails he had written to friends had been shared with Joss. “He was very upset at my revealing personal things about him in them,” Pruitt said. “I thought I was talking ‘privately’ just as he did when he’d vent to his friends about our private world.”

  Pruitt’s choices hadn’t endeared him to the fans, but no one came out of the situation cleanly. There was residual anger at both Pruitt and Joss for staging their battle in what was supposed to be a welcoming community for fans. The incident knocked Joss off his pedestal just a little—but in some small way it also made him a true Bronzer: someone who was smart and witty but could be petulant and pissy at times. Kai said that Joss had looked to the Bronze for a sense of comfort and community himself, and perhaps he found that he could let his guard down and say what he was thinking—for better or worse.

  14

  SHAKESPEARE FANBOY

  As Buffy’s fifth and Angel’s second season went into production, the writers and cast found new ways to stretch their wings. The previous year, Tim Minear had asked Joss if he could direct an episode—something only two other Mutant Enemy writers, David Greenwalt and Joss himself, had done up to that point. Joss had created the Buffy series in part so he could gain experience as a director when no one else would give him the chance, and now he was in a position to offer that same opportunity to his staff. He knew that the best way to learn how to direct is just to do it, and that with learning comes a lot of mom
ents of getting it wrong. Joss told Minear that he would let him direct an episode of Angel under one condition: if he failed, and he might, Minear couldn’t quit the show. “You can’t get upset and you can’t quit, because I need you as a writer and producer on this show,” he said.

  Minear’s first directorial effort would be the seventh episode of season two, which he also wrote. “Darla” would explore the history of Angel’s vampiric creator, from her own siring by the Master in 1600s Virginia through China’s Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century. Until her resurrection in Angel’s season-one finale, Darla was primarily known as Angel’s lover and guide through his years as a murderous demon, but earlier episodes of season two would reveal that she was brought back to life as a human. In his episode, Minear wanted to explore who Darla was before she was vamped and how that was reflected in the vampire she became, and compare how she deals with her restored humanity to Angel’s actions after his own human soul was returned.

  Minear pitched his idea for the episode without knowing that over on Buffy, the writers had already broken the story that would air the same night—about another vampire, James Marsters’s Spike. The character had lost the ability to feed on humans the previous season thanks to government experiments, and season five would find him struggling with unwanted romantic feelings for his enemy Buffy. Like “Darla,” Buffy’s “Fool for Love” would compare Spike’s current situation to his century-long history of vampiric mayhem. Joss liked Minear’s idea, too, but was hesitant to do both stories, since they covered similar ground. Minear insisted that they not shy away from the similarities; they should develop both episodes in parallel, not as a single crossover tale but rather as companion pieces that tell the story from two points of view.

  “What we decided to do was completely separate stories, although there would be natural instances in which [the vampires] would cross paths,” Minear said. “There are a few scenes in both that are not in each episode, and there is actually one point in history where they all came together. In the Spike episode, it has a particular meaning for Spike, but in the Angel episode we discover that there were pieces in Buffy that make it mean something else.” Minear’s ambitious ideas led to two of the most highly regarded episodes of their respective seasons, and the success of his directorial debut opened the door for other writer/producers, including Marti Noxon and David Fury, to direct future episodes.

  To portray Spike’s complicated history in “Fool for Love,” James Marsters needed to take the character to a lot of different places in a short time frame; he went from a punk on the subway one day to a poetry-writing dandy the next. While shooting, Marsters mentioned that it was like being back in repertory theater. This comment excited Joss, who hadn’t acted much since his days on the Winchester stage. He said, “You know what we should do? Let’s have Shakespeare readings!”

  Joss, of course, had studied the Bard in depth while at Winchester, and he had fond memories of his mother’s Shakespeare readings. When the BBC produced Shakespeare’s entire canon of plays in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had also made a lasting impression on him. “It’s hilarious, how little money they had,” Joss said. “But at the same time I still think some really good stuff went on there.” To Joss, successful productions didn’t necessarily require a lot of bells and whistles. “I think Shakespeare works when it’s emotionally true,” he said. “It can be done on a bare stage … [or] it can work completely gussied up, as long as everything is working towards emotional truth.”

  What’s more, circumstances had left him with time on his hands and nothing to do: Kai, a master’s student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was studying in Japan, so Joss was lonely on Sundays. Thus, in the fall of 2000, Joss invited many of the cast and writers of his shows to join him at his home for a reading. There was a great buzz right off the bat, particularly after Joss assuaged some initial nervousness. If people balked because they felt that they couldn’t read Shakespeare, Joss told them, “No one cares. Just come and have fun. We’ll have a few drinks and get some food in.”

  Those drinks were quite indispensable at first, as everyone was rather nervous, particularly those who were not actors. Once alcohol was introduced, things seemed to loosen up. Everyone eventually got pretty drunk, and that emboldened Joss to sit down at the piano. He told Tony Head that he could play some chords if Head would sing along. Head’s vocal skills were not a surprise, as he had a background in musical theater (at one time playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a stage production of The Rocky Horror Show) and had sung in several Buffy episodes during season four. James Marsters, who had been in several bands and performed his own original music, and Amber Benson joined in first—leading to Joss’s realization that much of his cast could sing. It was a discovery that would jump-start Joss’s long-simmering plans for a very special episode of Buffy.

  In the meantime, the readings at Joss’s home continued. About two or three plays in, Joss, Head, and Marsters were discussing Shakespeare in depth and made a pact to read their respective favorites. “James had always had a real thing about playing Macbeth, and I had recently done a couple of scenes from Richard III in acting class,” Head says. “I had been given the brief of ‘make him sexy,’ and I loved it—it was a really interesting way of looking at him.” As for Joss, he had always wanted to perform the lead in Hamlet, the play he had worked hardest on and studied most deeply at Winchester.

  “I waited, waited” to play the role, Joss confesses. And then their readings finally gave him the chance. “That was my dream and that was doooope,” he says. “I learned so much about it just from that experience.” How was his performance? Head said that Joss’s Hamlet was one of the best he’s ever heard. “He found nuances in it that I’ve never heard before. I mean, he’s too old for it, but he had a hang of the lines that just made it really personal and really, really powerful,” he explains. “It’s not an easy part; it’s one of those parts that even when it’s somebody who’s really good, it just misses either at the beginning or at the end.” But Joss’s take “was uniformly brilliant.”

  When Kai returned home from Japan, Joss told her what he’d been up to while she was gone. He was very defensive about it, perhaps worried that she would make fun of him, and he told her that he wasn’t going to stop. She wouldn’t have made him stop, but she was surprised; she knew it was not something she and Joss would have decided to do jointly, since she was very shy. “When you’re in a couple, you adjust yourself a bit for what is comfortable for the other person,” she explains. “You don’t go out [together] and do something that the other person really isn’t going to like. [Sometimes] it does take being separated in order to try something that you’ve always kind of wanted to do and you didn’t even know it.”

  Kai wanted to support Joss in his new endeavor, but she did not want to read herself. A rule of the Shakespeare readings was that everyone in attendance had to perform, whether by reading or holding a spear. Kai was one of the few who were allowed to attend without performing. She would, however, agree to take part in one reading in which she got to pick the play: she suggested that they do “a happy one,” The Merry Wives of Windsor. She read alongside Alyson Hannigan, who was also not comfortable performing Shakespeare, and Nicholas Brendon’s then-wife, actress Tressa DiFiglia.

  Joss’s readings were designed to be fun get-togethers, but Joss was very particular about how he cast each one. He had his standard players, such as Angel’s Alexis Denisof (“He knows I love it, so I’ll always say yes”), but it wouldn’t be the same group every time. According to Denisof, Joss would cast his next play by considering who was available and deciding who might be especially suited to a particular role—or especially amusing in it. “It’s not always the part that you would be good at that you get given, which is part of the fun of it,” Denisof says. “There’s no holds barred; nobody’s there to give a Royal Shakespeare Company performance.”

  When Joss reached out to Julie Benz, she was
initially concerned about her role on Angel. “He called me at home and I thought I was in trouble—anytime a producer calls me at home, I’m in trouble. He said, ‘I’m having people over on Sunday and we’re reading Shakespeare,’” she recalls. He explained the idea of the readings, and she was immediately on board. “He had me read Lady Macbeth, which I thought was fitting, playing Darla. I was a New York theater-trained actress, so I’ve been exposed to it, but a lot of the other actors there hadn’t been, and he included the writing staff too, and this was just how he socialized with everybody. It just revealed so much about who he is.”

  “If you’re working with him and you express any interest or he knows that you’ve done Shakespeare or have a desire to, then he would [invite you],” says Amy Acker, who joined the Angel cast as Fred in the second season. “The first time, I didn’t realize there was as much drinking involved. My wine glass kept getting filled up, and by the end of it, I’m not sure I was reading [too clearly].”

  “We had amazing, amazing readings,” Joss says. “I learned as much [from them] about acting and theater and Shakespeare as I had studied in school.” Head agrees: “Suddenly you saw a whole different side of people.” In fact, Kai was disturbed by the side of Joss she saw in his turn as the Othello villain Iago. She found herself creeped out a bit and couldn’t even look at him for a little while after. “I told him ‘I can’t talk to you right now,’” she recalls. “I needed a little time off, because he just so became that person.”

  Denisof had a distinctly different turn in The Merchant of Venice. “I was ‘nonspecific duke with a long speech,’ and that was kind of it for the whole play,” he says. “A very high-pitched, strong lisp seemed to be the order of the day for that, which was probably shocking for any Shakespeare academics. But it got some laughs, which is what the readings are really about.