Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  There’s one other thing I would mention, which is from Angel, actually. One of the few times I really got to sort of say exactly what I think about the world was in the second season of Angel, episode sixteen [“Epiphany”], when [Angel had] gone all dark, because he does that, and that he was getting better, and he basically decided—he’d been told—“The world is meaningless, nothing matters.” And he said, “Well then, this is my statement: nothing matters, so the only thing that matters is what we do.” Which is what I believe: I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme…. So the answer is: “Nothing, unless you’ve got something against me.”

  Back home, Serenity had a red-carpet premiere on September 22. Universal invited some of the fans who had done exceptional work to promote the film and gave them the chance to walk the red carpet as special guests. Those fans were probably among the many who purchased tickets for midnight screenings on the night of the film’s September 30 release.

  The reviews for Serenity were generally positive, even from critics that hadn’t been deeply entrenched in Firefly fandom. With the encouraging critical reception and the roaring fandom support, box office expectations were high—especially for a weekend with little competition. However, the final numbers were disappointing. Serenity took in $10.1 million on its first weekend, eventually earning just $25.5 million domestically. The worldwide total was $38.9 million, which barely met the film’s $39 million production budget and didn’t begin to cover the marketing costs, which were upward of $30 million. Any hope of a big-screen sequel was dashed.

  It seemed as though the film, while a storytelling success for Joss, failed to pull in non–Firefly fans, just as he’d feared. Universal had granted him creative control, his biggest budget ever, and a strong marketing push, but again he’d created a work that spoke mostly to a devoted niche audience. What would it take for the cult auteur to find mainstream success?

  26

  STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS

  As Joss was shepherding his beloved Firefly toward its rebirth on the big screen, he fell hard for a new TV drama: Veronica Mars. UPN’s neo-noir mystery series follows the eponymous teenage sleuth (played by Kristen Bell) who faces the daily pressures of high school life while simultaneously investigating cases for her private investigator father and her fellow students and attempting to solve her best friend’s murder. The series, though low-rated (ranking 148th out of the 156 series of the 2004–05 season), was highly acclaimed, landing on a number of “best fall television” lists. Joss had been wrapped up in production for Serenity, so he came late to the series, but once he discovered it he was almost immediately consumed by it. By August 2005 he’d watched the whole twenty-two-episode first season in a “crazed Veronica Marsathon,” and he took to Whedonesque to declare his love:

  Joss Luvs Veronica….

  Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I’ve never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn’t making, and maybe even more than those. Crazy crisp dialogue. Incredibly tight plotting. Big emotion, I mean BIG, and charismatic actors and I was just DYING from the mystery and the relationships and PAIN, this show knows from pain and no, I don’t care, laugh all you want, I had to share this. These guys know what they’re doing on a level that intimidates me. It’s the Harry Potter of shows. There. I said it….

  Some of you may already be all up on this, and some may disagree, but I’m urging peeps to check it out, ’cause there is great TV afoot, and who doesn’t want that? Thank you for your time.

  The news quickly spread to the Veronica Mars writers’ room, where the staff was working on the show’s second season. Series creator Rob Thomas remembers the excitement everyone felt as they gathered around to read Joss’s post; it was a benediction of sorts from one cult phenomenon to the next. “We’re both sort of writing in the ‘Heathers’ school of stylized teen dialogue, pretty quippy and bantery,” Thomas said. “We both imposed metaphors on a high school setting. He did high school as a horror show, and we’re doing high school as a noir piece. In our own ways, we re-imagined high school to fit a distinct style of storytelling.”

  And like Buffy, Veronica Mars was a phoenix rising from the ashes of another acclaimed series that had been canceled way too soon. Just as Joss was still reeling from the cancellation of My So-Called Life when he developed his iconic show, Thomas felt the need to create his own teen show to ease the pain of the swift cancellation of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000). “The most beautiful final episode of a show ever,” he says. “That one killed me. When [the show] got canceled, I felt like it was the death of a small-story television. I can get a sexy soap opera like Gossip Girl on—but to just get a show about normal teens with small stories like Freaks and Geeks? It wasn’t going to last. And they weren’t going to take their chances with another one.” The fact that Veronica, like Buffy before her, found a home not on one of the big four networks but on one of the smaller netlets speaks to the truth of Thomas’s statement.

  Even by the more modest standards of UPN, Veronica Mars was hardly a breakout hit, so the Whedon love was much appreciated. Joss continued to bestow praise on the series, writing a review of the season-one DVD set for Entertainment Weekly, in which he characterized the show as much more than just a modern update of the treasured Nancy Drew tales that he’d shared with Kai on their cross-country trip:

  Last year, Veronica Mars’ best friend was murdered. Some months later, she was drugged at a party and raped in her sleep. Welcome to the funniest and most romantic show on TV…. The teen-soap element of the show is just as compelling as the season-long murder mystery. Nobody is who you think they are. Everyone shifts, betrays, reveals—through their surprising humor as well as their flaws. The show is filled with deft, glorious wit. Creator Rob Thomas and his scribblers give VM more laughs than many sitcoms, and they never grate against the emotional brutality…. What elevates it is that in a TV-scape creepily obsessed with crime-solving, VM actually asks why. It knows we need our dose of solution as a panacea against the uncontrollable chaos of life’s real mysteries. And it shows, feelingly, that having the answers is never enough.

  Joss also called out Enrico Colantoni’s role as Veronica’s father, disgraced former sheriff turned private investigator Keith Mars, dubbing him “the world’s greatest dad. (Seriously. Greatest. There should be a mug.)” Keith is indeed Veronica’s rock throughout the series, and their bond is one of the best father-daughter relationships ever realized on screen. Keith also stands out against the long line of unsupportive fathers in Joss’s own work; even as his series celebrate the value of chosen family, blood relatives and particularly fathers are more likely to be portrayed as absent or abusive.

  Even so, the similarities between Buffy and Veronica Mars were striking, including witty writing and a smart girl hero. Rob Thomas’s show seemed sure to appeal to many fans of the earlier series, if only they would give it a try. By the beginning of its second season, the show had already cast former Whedonverse actors Alyson Hannigan and Charisma Carpenter in recurring roles, but it wasn’t until Joss went public with his love that Thomas thought of the ultimate way to reach more of the Whedonverse audience. Through his friend Marti Noxon, Thomas had met Joss a couple of times, and he knew that he had a background in theater. Thomas figured that it wouldn’t be totally strange to ask Joss to take on an acting role in the show.

  Joss took him up on the offer. In November, he played a car rental agent in the episode “Rat Saw God.” Thomas was impressed with his skills in front of the camera. “Trust me, I cast guest star actors all the time who I find myself having to cut around. It’s a little nerve-racking to cast a writer in a role and think, ‘Oh, we can’t have a real scene,’” he says. “It was really remarkable—he was great.” Star Kristen Bell agreed: “Joss is such an intelligent guy and he gets the show completely and he was just very funny. It was so cool to have him on set because we’re hopefully followi
ng in his footsteps, and he really knows how to write for cult fans.”

  In addition to drawing his fans’ attention to Veronica Mars, Joss had another lasting effect on Thomas. He took note of how Joss stood out as “a face of a series” at a time when most writers and producers were unknown, and he was inspired by how willing Joss was to engage in conversation with his fans. It’s an example he would still be following almost a decade later, when he reached out to the Veronica Mars fan base to help resurrect the long-canceled series in another medium.

  Joss had embraced Veronica Mars largely as a fan, eager for another writer’s creation to find the success he thought it deserved. But 2005 also saw him become more than a fan of another female-centric franchise, one that had inspired him just as he was now inspiring others.

  DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, like Marvel’s Kitty Pryde, was one of the comic book heroines on whom Joss had drawn when he crafted the character of Buffy. The famous Amazon princess from Paradise Island, who was created by William Moulton Marston during World War II, first comes to our world when US pilot Steve Trevor crashes nearby and she rescues him. When she finds out about the Nazis, Wonder Woman leaves Paradise Island with Trevor to help take down Hitler. She brings with her a set of magical golden accessories that give her superhuman strength in man’s world: bracelets that deflect bullets, a tiara that she uses as a boomerang, and a golden lariat that forces people to tell the truth. And she flies an invisible plane. Wonder Woman was the first female superhero to score her own comic book, and for a long time she was the only female member of DC’s top-tier superhero team, the Justice League.

  Of all the superheroes to make the jump from the comic book page to live-action media, Wonder Woman has had the most difficulty. While she has starred in countless cartoons, attempts to create a flesh-and-blood retelling of her story have resulted in only a single television series: the iconic Lynda Carter version that ran in the mid-to-late 1970s. “Wonder Woman was the first great female superhero to emerge from comic books and later inspire millions of fans in her television incarnation, but unlike her counterparts Batman and Superman, this groundbreaking heroine has yet to be reinvented for the feature film arena,” producer Joel Silver (Die Hard, The Matrix) said in a 2005 press release. Silver was determined to finally bring the character to the big screen.

  “It was after I made ‘The Matrix’ when I saw the response of the first tests and I realized the Trinity character was the highest-tested character,” he recalled. “This was before they had done ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or ‘Elektra’ or any of these movies, and I thought, ‘Let’s just go out and try to make Wonder Woman work.” The project had gone through several writers from 2001 to 2005, but Silver was never satisfied with any of them. So next he went after the creator of another iconic female superhero. “I just thought [Joss] would be the perfect guy to write it. I love Buffy and he’s a great writer,” Silver said. “I sat down with him and asked if he’d do it.”

  Joss was hesitant. Not only was he in postproduction for Serenity, but he knew that Wonder Woman was a difficult project that had been in development for years. Still, he felt that Silver had a vision for the film, and although the idea was unformed, as with Toy Story years before, he thought it was an idea he could work with. “He wrote me a note where he passed, and in the note, he explained what the movie had to be,” Silver remembered. “There was no way I was going to let him pass, so I hammered him until he said, ‘Yes.’”

  This wouldn’t be Joss’s first attempt to bring a comic book to the big screen. Though he’d been discouraged when his script doctoring work on X-Men was largely rejected, he’d jumped back into the superhero world in 2002, when Chris Harbert told him that Warner Bros. was thinking about doing another Batman movie. Harbert knew that Joss wanted to concentrate on his own original work, so he mentioned it only as a formality. Joss was ready to brush it off until Kai, very much not a comic book fan, said, “Are you kidding? It’s Batman!”

  Joss thought about it for a while and fell in love with the idea he had for an origin movie to reboot the Batman tale. “In my version, there was actually a new [villain], it wasn’t one of the classics,” he said. “It was more of a ‘Hannibal Lecter’ type—he was somebody already in Arkham Asylum that Bruce went and sort of studied with. It was a whole thing—I get very emotional about it, I still love the story.” A crucial moment was based on the beat-down he’d suffered on the way to the newsstand at age thirteen: a young Bruce Wayne battles a group of older kids and wins. “It was the key to the whole movie,” he said. “Where he goes from being ‘I’m just morbidly obsessed with death’ to ‘I can work the problem; I can actually do something about it.’”

  The studio, however, seemed less interested in a small film focused on personal epiphanies than in a summer blockbuster to kick off a new franchise. “I was clearly not on the same wavelength,” Joss said. “So I got in my car and headed back to the office and I literally said to myself, ‘How many more times do I need to be told that the machine doesn’t care. The machine is not aware of what is in your heart as a storyteller.’ I got back to the office and they cancelled ‘Firefly’. So I was like, ‘Oh! So, uh, just once more. OK!’ That was not a happy day.”

  With two failed superhero experiences behind him, would the third time be the charm? Or would Joss find that defeat comes in threes? His main concern was making Wonder Woman a relatable character. Joss felt that DC superheroes like Wonder Woman and Superman tended to be written as old-fashioned heroes, perfect and bigger than life. “There are great DC books and they write about human things in the [Justice] League, and they get into the big iconic characters, but they don’t have the connection that ‘I’m a nerd in high school who has the powers of a spider’ gives you,” Joss says. Marvel superhero stores, by contrast, are “based on ‘Oh my God, we’re all so fucked up!’” which he felt was more relatable.

  “Batman is the only Marvel character in the DC universe,” Joss explained. “He’s got the greatest rogues gallery ever, he’s got Gotham City. The Bat writes himself. With Wonder Woman, you’re writing from whole cloth, but trying to make it feel like you didn’t.” And while other members of the Justice League have enemies that have become part of the pop culture lexicon—Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, the Riddler—none of Wonder Woman’s nemeses (Circe, Cheetah, Ares) are well known. “She doesn’t have good villains,” Joss says. “So you pretty much have to start from scratch there.”

  One of the things that convinced Joss to finally take on the project was his own unfamiliarity with Wonder Woman’s extensive backstory. Except for her origin story, most of the Wonder Woman tales he was familiar with centered not on the individual character but on the Justice League as a whole. He also felt that there had been a lack of development to show how she came to be such a force for good. “I think she sort of sprang out fully formed, much like Athena herself,” he said. “In the ’40s, when it was first done, she came to the world from Paradise Island and then went about her business, and so that experience, which is really a rite of passage, which is the same as any hero has to go through, has never really been investigated the way I want.” In discussing Wonder Woman with Silver, he realized that the woman behind the legend was just as important as the legend herself. She’s “fascinating, very uncompromising and in her own way almost vulnerable. She’s someone who doesn’t belong in this world, and since everyone I know feels that way about themselves, the character clicked for me.”

  His plan was to write an updated origin story about how Wonder Woman moves from the female-centered society on Paradise Island and into man’s world. “She comes from a civilization where she’s rather perfect, so she’s the opposite to Buffy in many ways,” Joss said. “She’s going through an adolescent rite of passage because she’s new to the world.” For him, Wonder Woman’s vulnerability is her “outdatedness,” and her inability to understand why human beings are “so lame.” In his version, he explained, Wonder Woman is very powerful and travels the wor
ld—but remains very naive about people. “The fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability,” Joss said, “because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane. And ultimately her romance with Steve was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.”

  While Joss was hammering out the story, actresses were lining up to throw their golden tiara into the ring. Buffy vets Charisma Carpenter and Eliza Dushku expressed interest, and A-list names like Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé Knowles, Sandra Bullock, and Megan Fox would be linked to the project at different times. Firefly’s Gina Torres called Joss to tell him, “If they will allow for you to have a middle-aged, ethnically ambiguous Wonder Woman—I’m your girl. Most importantly, I’m the only damn Amazon you really know.” The question of who would don the bulletproof bracelets was possibly more popular than the question of what the film would be about. Joss and Silver insisted that no one would be considered until the script was finished.

  Wonder Woman and Veronica Mars weren’t the only ladies Joss was thinking about. One week before Serenity officially opened in the United States, Universal Pictures announced that it had bought a Joss Whedon spec script, Goners, which he would also direct. Joss provided Variety with a description that was purposely cryptic, unsurprising for the spoiler-wary writer, but it seemed to promise that the film would tread familiar ground: it was, he said, a very dark rite-of-passage tale, a “young woman’s journey” that featured a “great deal of horror and some heroics.”