Joss Whedon: The Biography (26 page)

As someone who wants things done in a very specific way, Joss is predictably idiosyncratic when it comes to the physical act of writing. Pilot Razor Point is the only pen he’s written with for the last twenty years, and notepads are very, very important. “Muji made a wonderful notebook that I’m just in love with—they were thick and just the right size. And they stopped making them because they
hate
me.” It’s all about writeability, Joss explains; the wrong notepad can kill an entire writing session. They’ve got to open easily, stay open, and be smaller than eight by ten but bigger than five by seven. “Too small and you just can’t compose a scene on it. Too big and it’s too intimidating and too hard to carry around. The big, thick, bound, precious ones? They never work out,” he says.

The perfect notebook must be simple; it can’t ever have anything written on it except lines. And it can definitely not have any cute little drawings in the corner. “I make those cute little drawings,” Joss says. “If I doodle anything on the page, I’m not getting anything written that day. I already know that page is useless. Faces, shapes, anything—that means it’s over.” Joss doesn’t toss any notebooks out. He has practically filled an entire filing cabinet with notebooks that he tried writing in—some that he’s filled, some that he wrote three pages in then gave up.

Another warning sign of an unsuccessful writing session: talking to himself. “If I’m writing by pacing, and I start talking out loud, not like dialogue but like to myself—‘Come on, let’s get out of here, let’s concentrate’—it’s over. It’s not gonna happen.”

Yes, the pacing. If you ask anyone about Joss’s writing habits, they all say the same thing: he’s always pacing. Joss likes to have an open space that allows him to pace in a circle. Greenwalt says that he’s always
drinking tea and always pacing. “By the time he sits down to write, he’s already thought of every single possible idea and he’s picked the best one. He’s like a chess master who can think so many steps ahead.” Diego Gutierrez describes another writing habit: “He basically taps his thumb with the rest of the tips of his fingers like as if you were about to snap without really snapping. He would just be constantly doing that as he was walking.”

“
Oh my God
, he would do this thing we called the crab walk,” Noxon laughs. “He would be all hunched over from stress, and he would be like making these little claws with his hands. Sometimes he would like disappear for a day or two—he was in a dark pit of despair and was always like, ‘This sucks, it’s going to be terrible, you know, I’ve really done it this time, you know …’”

Because no matter how well Joss knew he wrote, he would fall into a “K-hole of self-doubt when he was working on a script,” Noxon explains. “It was routine. It was surprising, because he always turned in an amazing script that didn’t need any rewriting. He did all the editing and all the fixing himself, so you would get these perfect first drafts. But he would agonize and he would have to go off campus and take a walk or go to lunch and try to jog it loose and then suddenly kind of the dam would burst and he would be OK.”

Without knowing what turmoil was going on in his head, observers could be intimidated to see Joss sit down and churn out a script and be done with it in one pass. Because he waited until he had the whole story in his head before he put pen to paper, he rarely rewrote himself. “He hates to rewrite,” Greenwalt says. “I’ve never met a writer that hates to rewrite more than Joss. He will break a story, which is the hardest part, obviously, and then he’ll pace for a week. He won’t write a word. He’ll just pace. He’s always pacing.” The technique seemed to work for Joss. “You shoot his first drafts. I’ve never seen anybody else who can do that.”

While his work seldom needed to be rewritten, he often rewrote other writers’ scripts. “You could always tell when a script would come back after it had been to Joss,” Tony Head says. “It was like somebody had sprinkled fairy dust over it. Sometimes it was sparing, but my God, he knew. He always knew it. Just … the jokes were sharper. The moments were heightened. He has great, great writing sensibilities. Bless him, but Joss always got that British reserve, that just Englishness—we are a ridiculous race!”

Joss’s fellow writers would struggle mightily to rise to his level. “I would get up at five in the morning to try to keep up with this guy and use a thesaurus on every line of dialogue,” Greenwalt says. “I really wanted my stuff to be as good as his stuff, you know, or as close as it could be. He’d put checks in the script when he liked a line, and that was always a big, fun deal, to have a check in a script.”

Dean Batali also wrote with Joss’s reactions in mind. He knew Joss liked a smart twist of phrase, and the young writer crafted his dialogue carefully. “Can we make him smile with our writing?” he asks. “Can we twist the phrases in a way that makes him smile?”

Even
Buffy
’s fans developed an extraordinary admiration for Joss’s writing talents. Espenson has mentioned how
Buffy
fans, more than any other fans she’s encountered, indulge in the “cult of the writer.” Many writers from the show continue to be showered with affection from fans due to their work on
Buffy
, which doesn’t tend to happen with scribes from other series. “The Dear Leader of that cult is Joss,” she said. “He’s the one who determined what a
Buffy
episode was, and in fact, shaped every single story.”

Since the end of
Buffy
’s run, Espenson herself has not only served as a writer and producer for
Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood: Miracle Day, Gilmore Girls
, and
Once upon a Time
, but also cocreated the web series
Husbands
, which featured a special guest star in its second season: Joss Whedon. “He sent us all out into our subsequent jobs asking, ‘What’s this story
really
about? Why are we telling this story? What is the emotional impact of this story on the main character? How is our hero taking a heroic action?’ So in that way, certainly, the Buffy Way has spread.”

In its first two seasons,
Buffy
and its cast had enjoyed a certain amount of freedom because the show flew under the mainstream radar on the WB. But by 1999, the network had established hits with its youth-oriented series
Buffy, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity
, and
Charmed
, and was adding soon-to-be teen favorites
Roswell
and
Popular
(an early effort from
Glee
cocreator Ryan Murphy). The WB started producing image campaigns featuring the young casts of these shows in beautiful, highly stylized promos, and magazine editors soon learned that putting them in their photo shoots would quickly translate into high newsstand sales from fans who had graduated from
Tiger Beat
and
Bop
but still had disposable income to burn.

Feature films wooed the WB actors as well. Joss watched the momentum of the teen entertainment machine begin to affect his cast as a pair of 1999 movies not only starred two of Sunnydale’s favorite girls but reinterpreted them as sex symbols.
Cruel Intentions
, a retelling of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
set in a New York private school, showcased Sarah Michelle Gellar as the manipulative Kathryn Merteuil, who sexes, schemes, and manipulates everyone for her own amusement. The scene in which she instructs the very sheltered and inexperienced Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair) in the fine art of kissing became a pop culture phenomenon, and would go on to win the 2000 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss.

Alyson Hannigan had a very different role as the nerdy music student Michelle in
American Pie
, whose “This one time, in band camp” catchphrase throughout the film explodes into infamy with the final punch line about where exactly she had put her flute while on her summer excursion. The shock of seeing sweet Willow—who just a couple years earlier had explained that when she was with a boy she liked, “it’s
hard for me to say anything cool or witty or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away”—declare that she knew how to get herself off and instruct the main character how to sex her up properly made for another big pop culture splash.

With the success of
Cruel Intentions
and
American Pie
, Joss saw that his cast’s focus was shifting from being excited to be on a critically acclaimed series to anticipating the new projects that awaited them in the future. He was happy for their success but was determined to make sure that his set was still as orderly and his series still as strong as they could be.

Jane Espenson noted the relationship he had with his cast in their third season. Long gone was the flexibility of the early days. “My first impression wasn’t that Joss was particularly close with his actors, but that Joss was particularly strict with them, in terms of having to say every syllable as written,” she said.

“There was a lot of tension,” Joss admitted. “Who that bleeds into are the crew, people who come in before—I was the only person coming in before the crew, and staying after the crew, and I get paid better.” Still, he said, “my cast always came to play, always came knowing their stuff, doing the work, doing the best. Whatever bad energy they had before the cameras rolled, they didn’t put it on the screen.” Eventually, “this stuff kind of calmed down, we went seven years, we all kind of grew up.”

Production adjusted more smoothly to another behind-the-scenes change in season three. In the fall of 1998, Joss was looking for a new casting director, and Marcia Shulman, who did the original
Buffy
casting, introduced him to Amy Britt and Anya Colloff. The young casting directors were more familiar with the show’s actors than with the show itself, and they were grateful when Joss took a chance by hiring them, starting a relationship that would take them through four of Joss’s series and two of his feature films.

Early on, however, Britt and Colloff discovered that even with the series’ track record of cult success across multiple seasons, some performers were still reluctant to audition for roles. Britt recalls, “You just had to encourage actors, or more accurately the gatekeepers who were their agents and managers, to see beyond the title of
Buffy
and get to the heart of the written word and mythology that was Joss’s universe.”

They also found that Joss was just as particular about casting as he was about every other aspect of production. “Joss is decisive,” Britt says. “It’s a beautiful thing. It also helps balance out the times when he tells me we’re just not finding the right person and must continue looking. Joss has a great eye for talent and knows the right thing when he sees it. As casting directors, it’s our job to keep looking until the producer or writer or director is happy. And those people almost always have a wicked sense of humor—must be smart and funny.”

Just after the third season premiered, Sandy Grushow, president of 20th Century Fox Television, had a meeting with Jamie Kellner, the head of the WB. Grushow wanted to discuss the future of
Buffy
at the network past its current contract, which took it through the 2000–01 season. Both men had been champions of the series; the matter here was purely financial. Costs had risen greatly from the first season, but it was all due to
Buffy
’s success: the studio had given Sarah Michelle Gellar and the cast big raises and paid to upgrade the film quality from 16 mm to 35 mm at Joss’s request. By the third season, the WB was paying $1.1 million per episode to license the series, while Fox was spending $450,000 to $800,000 more than that to produce it. While those were considerable deficits for Fox to absorb, they were in line with overruns that Fox assumed on other series; they would make their money back once the shows were sold into syndicated reruns. Syndication, however, traditionally came once a series hit one hundred episodes, and with
Buffy
’s short first season of twelve episodes, it would run $85 million into debt before the studio could recoup the money in the show’s fifth season.

Grushow offered the WB a deal that would extend the hit series for at least two more seasons in exchange for more money per episode from the network. Kellner quickly said no, explaining that the network’s greatest interest was profitability, and an early contract renegotiation that would put them more in debt was not the way to go. Since they were still two years out from the end of the current contract, it didn’t seem like an urgent issue. Certainly not as urgent as the new projects Joss had in the Mutant Enemy pipeline.