Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  Helberg was utterly unprepared for the event and surprised to discover that excited Dr. Horrible fans had even infiltrated his Big Bang panels. “I didn’t know that this kind of thing existed,” he says. “I thought you do a television show, and if you’re popular maybe some people will come up to you during the day or you hang out and there’s press there, and that’s as intense as it gets.” The fact that Comic-Con was a place where thousands of people sleep out and wait to listen to actors and producers share anecdotes was overwhelming. “That was a crazy day, and I just realized at that point, ‘OK, there’s something in the zeitgeist here that hasn’t been fully recognized by me.’”

  That night, there was a scheduled Dr. Horrible screening. Fans were ready in homemade Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer costumes. Early on, the line of people waiting had already well exceeded the capacity of the space. One of the producers was running around trying to find another copy of the musical and an additional room in which to screen it. Ultimately, they were able to set up several theaters to play Dr. Horrible all at the same time. The cast snuck into the back of one of the rooms and watched along. It was the first time that they all got to watch it with an audience, who were already singing along and shouting back at the screen. “It was very surreal,” Harris says. “We had clearly succeeded in our core goal, which was to create something that would amuse. And it was amusing. There was great ferocity that night.

  “It was just very out-of-body to watch,” he adds. “A lot of people laughing so actively, and deeply into the experience. I hadn’t really experienced that before. Joss has a hardcore adoration that follows him around, and when people laugh at Joss Whedon’s jokes, it’s a big-ass belly laugh, and that was kind of crazy to witness.”

  Critically, the series was a hit as well, praised for its witty writing and musical numbers. Ironically, the weakest part of Dr. Horrible was the one thing that Joss had been lauded for through most of his career: his female characters. Penny is a disappointment, a one-note “nice girl” who serves as little more than a prize for which Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer compete. She comes across as naive and bland, especially when compared to her vibrant and over-the-top suitors. At the very end of the series, Dr. Horrible accidentally kills her with a death ray meant for Captain Hammer. Her last words are “Captain Hammer will save us,” and her death gives Horrible the villainous cred he needs to be accepted by the Evil League of Evil. Thus, Penny plays an important role in the main character’s emotional arc, but she fails as a well-developed, independent character.

  Where Dr. Horrible fares better is in a realm that Joss doesn’t often do well. For a person who has developed and nurtured such a large group of friends, Joss has a surprisingly soft track record when it comes to depicting male friendships. Most of the men in Joss’s stories have prickly or begrudgingly respectful relationships with one another, and they almost never unabashedly express their love—in opposition to the believable and inspiring female friendships (Buffy/Willow, Inara/Kaylee) and male/ female friendships (Malcolm/Zoe, Cordelia/Angel). Dr. Horrible and Moist are an example of one of the few easy and plausible male friendships in the Whedonverse.

  Joss showed the finished series to one of the most important men in his own life: his father, Tom. As a musicals fanatic who’d written lyrics for off-Broadway shows, Tom was thrilled. “But what he loved more than anything,” Joss said, was “when the credits came up at the end and he just saw so many Whedons. I watched him just tearing up with joy that so many of us were involved in it. He just cares that he had so much fun and that it was such a family endeavor.”

  Once Dr. Horrible moved to iTunes, it remained the number-one download for five weeks. Joss’s skeptical accountant changed his tune and asked if a Dr. Horrible 2 was in the works. “It’s not like a huge moneymaker, but it’s something everyone believed in and everyone trusted and everyone put their egos aside,” Kai says. “That could be the future, you know. That could be how we make movies.”

  There was no denying that the Whedons had found an innovative way to both engage viewers and make some money in an untested medium. Even the Hollywood trade papers took notice: Variety published a piece on how writers were creating series for the web, featuring Joss and the story of Dr. Horrible’s development—both financial and creative—and its ultimate success. Joss was gratified by the headline: SCRIBES STRIKE BACK. “There was a picture of Dr. Horrible, a picture of me with a picket sign, and nothing else on the front page. Just that article,” he recalled. “All of a sudden the politics came back into play, in a good way. People started going, ‘Okay, we did accomplish something, we didn’t do it during the strike, but we did it and now it means something.’ Because it went from this is a political action to this is us making jokes about a horse, to this is a political action again. That was very gratifying.”

  The next step was to release Dr. Horrible on DVD. Joss and his collaborators decided that it should be a special experience, like the Internet release had been. Joss suggested that in addition to the standard DVD commentary in which the cast and crew talk about what is happening on screen, they could record an extra commentary track in which scripted versions of the writers and actors sing their thoughts about the project. And so Commentary! The Musical was born. It serves as a bonus soundtrack to the series, if not an entirely new musical on its own. “I’ll probably regret [that idea] forever … or at least Jed will, because he had to produce everything,” Joss said. “It took us about twice as long to write and produce as the actual film. It has to contain about twice as much music, because you can’t just sort of have people talking in a musical commentary because then it just sounds like a commentary.”

  Commentary! has been called “ambitious and funny while still being cleverly lyrical.” It adds an entirely new level to Dr. Horrible and the idea of going “behind the scenes.” “Those songs are as equally entertaining to me as the songs from Dr. Horrible itself,” Harris says. “It never really felt like, ‘Great, we did it, now let’s sell out and make money back.’ If they’re going to whore themselves out, it’s going to be a fantastic—where do prostitutes live? Bordello. It’s going to be a fantastic bordello.”

  Joss performed “Heart (Broken),” a song about having to do DVD commentary as a writer and producer (something he’d done many times by this point, over a total of thirteen DVD sets for Buffy, Angel, and Firefly). “I always want to get behind or inside everything I’m doing,” Joss said. “I want to dig underneath it and say, what’s the point of this, of this medium, of this experience? Why did you sit down with me for an hour? Why did you do it? Why did I do it? Why did I write this?”

  Homer’s Odyssey was swell.

  A bunch of guys that went through hell.

  He told the tale, but didn’t tell

  The audience why.

  He didn’t say, here’s what it means.

  And here’s a few deleted scenes.

  Charybdis tested well with teens….

  But now we pick, pick, pick, pick, pick it apart.

  Open it up to find the tick, tick, tick of a heart.

  Over the next year, the critical accolades and awards continued to roll in. Dr. Horrible ranked number fifteen in Time magazine’s list of the top fifty inventions of 2008. It took home the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, beating out the smash hit Lost and Hugo favorites Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. In September 2009, Dr. Horrible scored Joss his first Emmy win, for Outstanding Special Class—Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs.

  30

  DOLLHOUSE

  As the writers’ strike ended and Dr. Horrible went into postproduction, Joss also went back to work on his upcoming series for Eliza Dushku. Although Fox had already committed to seven episodes of Dollhouse, network executives still wanted to see a pilot. So Joss began writing the introductory episode “Echo,” fleshing out his noirish tale of the mysterious lab where “dolls,” or Actives, having been stripped of their original memories and persona
lities, are temporarily implanted with new personal backgrounds and skills, to be hired out for particular jobs—most often committing crimes or fulfilling customers’ sexual fantasies. As the series begins, Dushku’s character, the Active codenamed Echo, starts to recover pieces of her native personality, forcing her to deal with the questions of who she really is and what her identity means to herself and the world around her. Meanwhile, the FBI has gotten wind of the Dollhouse’s very illegal operations and is investigating the facility and its owner, the Rossum Corporation.

  Next, Joss assembled the supporting cast. The writer with the passionate fan following became a fanboy himself when Tahmoh Penikett of Battlestar Galactica was cast as Paul Ballard, the FBI agent making trouble for the Dollhouse. Joss was a very vocal fan of the Sci Fi Channel remake and had done his best not to be “too embarrassing” when chatting up series creator Ron Moore on the WGA picket lines. “Joss and I found common ground with Battlestar,” Penikett says. “Initially, that was the main thing that really brought us together. We would talk and talk about the show, talk about specific episodes—telling stories about the actors and the episodes. He had the opportunity to meet a lot of them, and if the show went on, you would have had seen a lot of Battlestar actors on Dollhouse.”

  In the role of Adelle, the ruthless and cold head of the Dollhouse, Joss cast British actress Olivia Williams. Like Anthony Stewart Head, Williams was impressed by Joss’s ability to write for an English accent. Lesser attempts can often result in “painfully convoluted sentences and ridiculous circumlocution,” she says. “In order to make sense of badly executed English baddie-speak it is necessary to put a rod up your arse, and nobody likes to work in those conditions.” The best British villains, on the other hand, “have a kind of cool and succinct way of speaking” that Joss completely nailed.

  Fran Kranz was cast as Topher, the snarky and morally challenged programmer who is in charge of implanting the dolls’ temporary personalities. Angel’s Amy Acker returned to the Whedonverse as Dr. Saunders, who tends to the physical health of the dolls, while Harry Lennix assumed the role of Boyd, Echo’s newbie handler, who looks after her when she goes on missions. Young actors Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, and Miracle Laurie would play Echo’s fellow Actives Sierra, Victor, and November.

  With a premise that centered on attractive young people being programmed to serve a corporation’s paying customers, Joss anticipated some uneasy public reactions: “Did human trafficking just get pretty?” He knew that the concept was very edgy, even dangerous—one hair out of place and it could be untenable. He went so far as to pitch Dollhouse to the staff members of Equality Now in New York. “Some of them said, ‘I get it, that’s cool, that’s something to explore,’ and some of them were like, ‘You better be very careful!’” Joss says. “And then that rug kind of got pulled out from under us.”

  Even though the series had been greenlit without a pilot, and Fox had recently upped their order from seven episodes to thirteen, once Joss filmed “Echo” and presented it to Fox, the network requested some changes. “The Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be,” Joss wrote on Whedonesque. “They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase.”

  It was feeling like Firefly all over again, when the network demanded a more action-oriented premiere episode to replace Joss’s dark and moody pilot. But whereas Fox made a good call on the Firefly premiere, it missed the mark on reworking “Echo.” As originally written and shot, the pilot provides a cohesive introduction to the concept of the Dollhouse and the FBI’s investigation of it. It succeeds in making the Actives seem empowered and in control as they carry out their programmed assignments, something that is often lacking in the finished episodes. Subsequent episodes would also lose the pilot’s noirish commentary on sex trafficking, which was lightened up at Fox’s request.

  After several rounds of rewriting and editing, this time it was Joss who decided to scrap the pilot script and write a new premiere episode, “Ghost.” The new story begins with a strung-out young woman—Echo’s former self—agreeing to join the Dollhouse. It then quickly segues into Echo out on a job: a whirlwind date filled with such chemistry that anyone would believe that she and her gentleman friend are a real couple. When that’s over, she’s programmed to be a hostage negotiator to save a little girl from kidnappers.

  Much of the nuance and humor of “Echo” is missing here, and several plot points, like the return of Echo’s memories and the Dollhouse’s awareness of Ballard’s investigation, are removed or stripped way down. Ballard, the confident and competent FBI agent who had met and ended up in a gun-battle standoff with Echo in his apartment in the original pilot, is a now a wild-card loner obsessively pursuing a conspiracy theory about an evil corporation. The character was one of several that had to be significantly rewritten to accommodate the network-mandated changes—which meant that Tahmoh Penikett and a few of his costars needed to relearn their places in the series as well.

  Penikett was reassured by something that his mentor and Battlestar Galactica costar Edward James Olmos had said: “It takes a long time to find the music of a show, the music of a character.” His Dollhouse costar Harry Lennix told him something similar, that “every show has its own music and its own tone. It takes you a while to figure that out, but once you do, you really get the rhythm of your character and what’s going on.” The problem was that Dollhouse had found its music in the pilot, but like an old vinyl record, it had been scratched and warped by all of the changes that Fox requested. Joss would have to find a new tone, a new rhythm—and that would take time.

  “A good deal of Dollhouse had to do with sex. Sexuality and perversion and our sexual and relationship needs and how they define us and what’s different about us, what’s similar,” Joss explains. “[Fox said] ‘This show’s great! The sex is not so good. We can’t have that. It seems like prostitution. So don’t do that.’ So in the premise, we had to sort of gloss over it or joke about it, and it became kind of offensive.”

  Fox approved “Ghost” to kick off the series, but on September 10, 2008, after four scripts had been completed, Fox shut down production. The network wanted tweaks to the fourth episode, and the two-week shooting break would give Joss and his writing staff time to get ahead on scripts. Joss was getting deep into producing duties for The Cabin in the Woods, so he’d brought back some major Mutant Enemy players to help him with Dollhouse. Tim Minear and David Solomon returned as executive producers; Jane Espenson and Steve DeKnight also came in to pen scripts. And Joss made this project another family affair with the addition of writers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen.

  Dollhouse was initially announced as a midseason series that would be paired with Fox’s hit series 24 on Monday nights. But in November, Fox announced that it had been moved to Friday night, along with former Monday-night series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which had suffered from a ratings drop in its second season. Joss’s fans, many of whom were still mourning Firefly’s demise, were greatly concerned that the move to the Friday-night death slot again showed a lack of support from Fox. When Dollhouse premiered on Friday, February 13, 2009, it pulled in 4.72 million Nielsen viewers, comparable to Firefly’s bow. In the seven years in between premieres, DVRs had become more commonplace and live viewing numbers had taken a hit, so Dollhouse’s ratings, while not stellar, weren’t considered as much of a disappointment as Firefly’s had been. Dollhouse was also the night’s second-most-viewed series in the important eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic and did particularly well with male viewers.

  Excitement was high for Joss’s return to television after five years, but the reviews were mixed. At a time when so much on TV was generic, this was anything but. But that uniqueness shook up what fans had come to expect from the Whedonverse
. Despite Fox’s adjustments, Dollhouse was distinctly darker than Joss’s other series. And maybe because of those adjustments, it became possibly the hardest of his series to connect with as a viewer. Even in the darkest episodes of Buffy, viewers felt incredibly attached to the characters and their struggles. Dollhouse, on the other hand, was filled with characters who were either unlikeable or deliberately undefined. It was difficult to care about a main character whose personality was going to change dramatically from week to week depending on her assignment.

  Joss could see all too clearly that the changes to the show had diluted his original premise of an objectified woman breaking free of her programming. This, in turn, was making it more and more difficult to find the “Echo of it” in each episode. “Dollhouse was the one time I looked around and said, ‘I don’t know what show I’m making.’ It had sort of been eaten away from the center,” he said. “It was the only time I felt like, ‘Am I steering this ship? Our ship? Are we the iceberg?’”

  Reviews improved as the season went on and the series, like Angel before it, shifted its focus from the main character and her mission of the week to become a larger ensemble piece grounded in the characters and their complex relationships. Alan Tudyk made several appearances as Alpha, a psychotic former Active who’s obsessed with Echo.

  While shooting an episode, Tudyk noticed a change in Joss since their Firefly days. During rehearsal, the actor improvised a line at the end of a scene. Tudyk was shocked when he was told to keep it in the final scene. “I said, ‘Whoa, no way! Are you serious? I cannot believe I’m getting my own line in a Joss Whedon thing.’ Joss was there, and he goes, ‘Really? Oh. I’ve relaxed,’” Tudyk said. “And he meant it like he was surprised to hear me say that.” Joss may have been more open to the occasional ad-lib, but his own words remained of paramount importance to him—something costar Olivia Williams has said she realized in her earliest conversations with him. Tahmoh Penikett agrees, saying, “There’s no mediation for the way he’s written—he’s such a specific writer. For some shows, an actor can change this word or do this a little differently. You can’t do that with Joss’s material. You have to deliver it the way it’s written. Which, he has every right [to demand], because there’s specific timing that has to be honored or else it won’t work. It’ll flop.”