Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy Read online

  Even though he was still determined to go into film, it wasn’t long after quitting Roseanne that Whedon ended up on the short-lived television series Parenthood. While the show had some critical acclaim, it never did well in the ratings. For Whedon it was a chance to work with a talented writing staff and he made the most of the experience during his short time with the show.

  “That was where I learned a lot about the creative side of writing for TV It was another good experience for me and there were some great people who worked on that show.”

  His Buffy script complete, Whedon began pitching it to the studios. He received favorable comments but no one was willing to take a chance on such an unusual script by an unknown screenwriter. Most of the executives who rejected the script thought it was entertaining but didn’t think there would be an audience.

  “Everyone liked the script and I had a lot of encouragement, but no one wanted to pick it up,” says Whedon. But the quality of the script, and the work he had done on Roseanne and Parenthood, earned him a modest reputation as a fast, reliable, and high-quality writer. He began getting small writing assignments.

  One of Whedon’s early film jobs was writing loop lines for movies that had already been made. The job entailed creating a joke or some type of conversation that would help the viewer make a connection between the scenes. Whedon wrote for the Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin film The Getaway and the Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman film The Quick and the Dead, among others. Soon he would get larger and more lucrative script assignments, and ultimately become one of the most important script doctors in Hollywood. But early in his script-doctor career came his big break—Buffy was picked up.

  Joss had a powerful vision for Buffy. It was a concept he’d been thinking about for a long time. It began with a revisionist perspective on the countless horrorfilm scenes in which a young blond girl is pursued and ultimately killed by some hideous creature. In Joss’s film the young woman would not be helpless. She would be the hunter instead of the victim.

  I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass.—Joss

  “The idea for the film came from seeing too many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed,” says Whedon. “I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass. It was a simple thing for me to write because I knew exactly how I wanted things to work. I wanted her to have special powers and I thought it would be great to have vampires as the villains. She wouldn’t be able to fit into normal society because she had these powers and this job that kept her from being what she wanted to be.”

  Joss’s vision included the integration of elements rarely seen together—horror, action, comedy, and heart-wrenching emotion. In 1988 Joss optioned the script to Sandollar Productions, a production company founded by Dolly Parton and her manager, Sandy Gallin. Almost three years later, in 1991, Sandollar offered the script to Kaz and Fran Rubel Kuzui. They agreed to take on the film, provided Fran Kuzui could direct .

  “The instant I saw the title, I knew this was a film I had to make,” Fran says. “Five pages into the script and I was hooked. The more I read, the more I was attracted to the world that Joss Whedon had created. Here’s a girl, a high school cheerleader, who’s suddenly being told she’s part of something else.”

  The Kuzuis were able to sell the concept to 20th Century-Fox, who funded the $9 million picture in exchange for worldwide rights. Buffy would become a reality and would be distributed by a major studio. Joss was thrilled. But his excitement soon turned to vexation and then horror as the production proceeded. What Joss discovered was how painful it was to have other people meddling with, and, from his perspective, destroying, his creations.

  Buffy isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.

  —Fran Kuzui

  In fairness to Joss, it’s pretty clear that Fran Kuzui had an unusual interpretation of Joss’s script. As she tells it, Buffy “isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.” Emphasizing the comedy at the expense of horror or genuine emotion, Kuzui created a very mediocre film. But observant critics noted the first-rate script that underlay the third-rate film. James Brundage of filmcritic.com noted that “the performances, admittedly, are lacking. The direction is downright bad . . . but all of this is made up in spades with one of the most finely crafted formula scripts courtesy of Joss Whedon.” The Fort Worth Star Telegram stated that Whedon’s “script [was] too witty for director Kuzui’s dreary handling.” Time magazine declared that Kuzui’s “frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total.”

  Whedon’s script [was] too witty for director Kuzui’s dreary for director Kuzui’s

  —Fort Worth Star Telegram

  Like a slowly developing horror movie, Joss observed the gradual degradation of his script over the course of the filming. There were days when Whedon didn’t want to go near the set because he feared the worst. His hip, scary script had been turned into a silly, campy film. There was nothing he could do about the miscasting or the rewriting.

  The film starred Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Luke Perry, Rutger Hauer, and Paul Reubens. The casting was problematic. The two most experienced actors in the film, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer, were extremely difficult. Sutherland played Merrick Jamison Smythe, the watcher in the film. He walked through his role with apparent contempt for the production and the script, often coming in with his lines rewritten. He was rude to the rest of the cast and certainly wanted nothing to do with the writer. Whedon said several times that working with Sutherland was one of the worst experiences of his life.

  Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy.

  Rutger Hauer, the vampire Lothos, was difficult and bizarre. He insisted, for example, that he play a bedroom scene with Kristy Swanson in the nude (he ultimately relented, at Swanson’s request). But there were some bright moments. Whedon had a great appreciation for Paul Reubens (Amilyn) before the film, but even more so after.

  Paul Reubens was probably Whedon’s favorite of the cast of the Buffy movie.

  “He knew instinctively what needed to be done with his character and it stands out in the film,” says Whedon. “He’s such a great guy and at the same time he’s never afraid to push through boundaries. I appreciated him a great deal at that time as a performer and as a human being. He was nice to everyone and professional. But he never took himself too seriously.”

  But Reubens’s performance, which was critically praised, was not enough to save the film. Most damaging of all was Kuzui’s “pop culture” interpretation of the script. At the time Whedon simply said, “I don’t understand that approach.” Years later he was more blunt: “The director ruined it.”

  “What I started with was a horror action comedy. It had fright, it had camera movement, it had acting—all kinds of interesting things that weren’t in the final film. Apart from the jokes—and there were a lot more of them [in my script] and all of my favorite ones got cut—it was supposed to have a little more edge to it. It was supposed to be a visceral entertainment rather than a glorified sitcom where everyone pretty much stands in front of the camera, says their joke, and exits. I wasn’t happy about anything. I had one advantage from it: the direction was so bland that the jokes kind of stood out, because they were the only things to latch on to. In a way, that kind of worked for me because it got people to notice it. But that was a big disappointment to me.

  “It was crushing,” adds Whedon. “I had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy. It was terrible and a great lesson for me. I knew in the future that I would find a way to do things in a different way.”

  I knew in the future that I would find a way to do things in a different way.—Joss

  As it turns out, Joss was to learn this lesson many times over.

  Disappointed and upset by Buffy, Whedon returned to his scriptwriting career. The quality of the Buff
y script had not escaped Hollywood producers, and his ability to rapidly produce high-quality work impressed the studios. So Joss entered the world of the elite script doctor. He was soon working on Speed, Toy Story, Waterworld, Twister, and Alien Resurrection. The work was extremely lucrative, with Joss making $100,000 per week on certain assignments. But for Joss, who measured his worth by the quality of his writing and how well it was translated to the screen, it was frustrating and unsatisfying.

  According to Joss, “[Script doctoring is] fun and lucrative. But it’s like eating candy all day. It tastes great but it is not very filling. You want to create something from beginning to end, but working on these movies is like solving a puzzle. We have all pieces—here’s the stunts and all the story, now make it make sense. Make the people’s emotions make sense. Make it funny, real, and like it’s actually happening. It’s fun but not creative.”

  “You know what it is,” says producer and creator David E. Kelley (The Practice, Boston Public, Ally McBeal, Lake Placid), “you have this great vision when you write a script and then by the time you see it on screen it is about as far from that vision as it can get. When I wrote Mystery, Alaska, from the time I turned it in, it probably went through a hundred rewrites, and that’s not an exaggeration. Everyone has their ideas of what it should be and your vision is lost in the process. That’s why I’m sticking with television for now. I don’t have to listen to anyone but the network, and they let me do my own thing most of the time.”

  Despite the excellent compensation, a Hollywood scriptwriter is a low man on the totem pole, and much of his work—sometimes all of his work—is not used. “Sometimes they bring you in to fix a few lines or sometimes it’s the entire film. People give me credit for writing these scripts and the truth is, most of what I wrote never made it to the screen,” says Whedon. “It’s a strange business, and in many ways, though I didn’t know it at the time, television was a much more forgiving world to work in. When you write a film, there are too many people who can take what you do and make it into something which is the opposite of what you wrote.”

  Joss’s appreciation of his script-doctor role was directly related to his opinion of the underlying story and how much creative freedom he had in writing the final script. The most frustrating situation was when the underlying story was weak. “I’ve been pitched ideas, or seen scripts, where I’ve been like, ‘You don’t need me. You need to [shouting] not make this.’ There have been some terrible ones. But the thing is, for a script doctor, the best thing in the world is a good idea with a terrible script. Assuming they’ll let you play with it, which they did on Toy Story. Because you have the solid structure, and you can work the story into it.”

  Joss moved to the next level in his career when his agent, Chris Harbert of United Talent Agency, landed him the job of rewriting the script for Speed. Whedon got the assignment, in part, by agreeing to take on the ten-week project for a mere $150,000. While not much by the standards of the top script doctors, this was serious money for Joss.

  Working on Speed was one of Joss’s best experiences as a script doctor. He loved the story and he had full freedom to rewrite the dialogue, although he couldn’t change any stunts. “Apart from rewriting about 90 percent of the dialogue on Speed, the best work was the stuff that nobody would ever notice : just trying to make the whole thing track logically and emotionally so that all of those insane and over-the-top stunts—one after the other—would make sense,” says Joss. “That’s the part of script doctoring that’s actually interesting to me. When somebody says, ‘We’ve got a guy and he’s falling off a cliff, and later he’s hanging from a helicopter and we need you to tell us why. We need you to make the audience believe he’s doing it.’ That’s what Speed was.”

  Joss lets Keanu Reeves shine in Speed.

  You don’t need me. You need to not make this.

  —Joss

  Speed was a tremendous commercial success. It was an adrenaline rush and was dubbed “Die Hard on a Bus” and “Die Hard Without the Slow Parts.” But a few critics noticed, amidst the action, the clever dialogue and wonderfully developed relationship between the characters played by Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times noted that “[Reeves] and Bullock have good chemistry; they appreciate the humor that is always flickering just beneath the surface of the preposterous plot. And Hopper’s dialogue has been twisted into savagely ironic understatements that provide their own form of comic relief.” Peter Travis of Rolling Stone observed that “the fireworks wouldn’t count for much if the hardware overwhelmed the humanity. Speed cinches its spot as the thrill ride of summer by providing characters to hiss at and root for. Jack and Annie actually manage to strike up a convincing romance even at hyperspeed and without taking their eyes off the road. It’s an impressive feat . . .”

  Whedon landed another plum job on Toy Story, where he was one of seven writers. It was the perfect opportunity for Joss because “it was a great idea, with a script I didn’t like at all.” It was Whedon’s hand at the script that brought many of the funniest jokes, and the toys that told them, to life. At the end of the movie the audience was emotionally invested in the characters and the story and that was what the young writer had hoped would happen.

  Toy Story wasn’t without its troubles. Being one of seven credited writers (one of whom was the director) was not a recipe for creative freedom. And some of Joss’s funniest jokes didn’t get past the Disney bureaucracy, including one in which Mr. Potato Head takes off one of his eyes and discretely rolls it under Bo Peep’s skirt.

  Toy Story was a commercial and critical success. Once again, observant critics noted the quality of the writing. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times declared that “when a film has seven writers, it’s not a positive sign, but Toy Story turns out to be smart fun on a verbal as well as visual level.” Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Examiner declared that “what makes this movie so delightful is a solid story line (which has always been Disney’s strength) and terrific dialogue written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow.”

  Toy Story was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. “I’m not sure it’s something you ever get used to,” says Whedon of being nominated. “I was happy that the film did well, and it showed that we could do something a little different and get away with it. I thought it was a really sweet film and it definitely showed a different side of me. There were some darker aspects to it, but for the most part it was a light, enjoyable film.”

  Joss soon landed a six-figure-per-week assignment as a script doctor for Waterworld. It was an unqualified disaster. Beyond the embarrassment of his association with a well-publicized failure, he felt the creative frustration of failing to create a script he felt good about. “On Waterworld, I lost the patient,” Whedon confesses. “By the time I got there, there was too much going on for me to make a real difference. They were too far into it . . . there were only tiny cracks I could get in between. I will tell you that Waterworld is one of the projects that proved to me that the higher you climb, the worse the view.”

  On Waterworld, I lost the patient.—Joss

  Joss’s frustration with Waterworld soon faded as he received the chance of a lifetime. He was asked to write the script for Alien 4, an opportunity he had dreamed about since he first saw Alien when he was fourteen. But once again, what should have been a happy experience became a nightmare and almost soured him forever on the movie business.

  When he was first asked to write the next Alien saga, Joss didn’t hesitate. Alien was “sacred text” and Joss couldn’t turn it down. Enthralled with Alien and Aliens, Whedon felt (as many did) that Alien 3 was a disappointment. “I think the fans were robbed in the third one. They actually had a scene where people we didn’t know were killed by the alien. That’s Jason, that’s bullshit, because nothing is more boring than people you don’t know being killed. [Alien 3] was beautiful but it was neither exciting nor scary, which is a travesty ... I ju
st want every scene to contain something amazing. I want to do Evil Dead where it’s menacing, and then about twenty minutes into it the action starts and never stops.”

  [Alien 3] was beautiful but it was neither exciting nor scary, which is a travesty. . . . which is a travesty. . . .

  —Joss

  Joss was given a golden opportunity to change the future of the Alien franchise by writing a script that would put it on the path to glory once again. Initially, 20th Century-Fox wasn’t sure they could get Sigourney Weaver to play the role of Ripley again. So Joss was asked to write the script without Ripley who, after all, had died at the end of Alien 3. He banged out a script without Ripley and was pleased with the result.

  A few months later the studio panicked, worrying that they wouldn’t be able to generate the box-office success they needed without Weaver. They made her a deal she couldn’t refuse and asked Joss to go back to the drawing board. Joss initially rebelled, thinking, “bullshit, she’s dead,” but came around to thinking that reviving Ripley could be very powerful. But, much as he tried to do in season six of Buffy, Joss wanted to make her resurrection real, and not without a price.

  “We’re not just saying, ‘We’ve brought her back, let’s make the movie.’ It’s the central issue of the movie, the fact that we bring her back. We know that once you do that, everything must be different. When somebody comes back from the dead, especially in a movie where death is the ultimate threat, you can’t just say ‘It’s okay, anybody can die and come back.’ It’s very important to me that it’s a very tortuous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it’s like to be horribly reborn in a lab. And then the whole question of what is she is raised. Is she human? Has she changed? There is the factor that she was pregnant with an alien. Is she all woman? Is there a little something wrong there? There are a lot of issues.”