Joss Whedon: The Biography (48 page)

“Smile Time,” the first episode to air after
Angel
’s cancellation was announced, prompted a new outpouring of criticism that WB was axing such a clever and innovative series. In this episode, Angel gets turned into a puppet—an idea that arose from Joss’s longtime desire to do an evil
Sesame Street
episode. He’d had Muppets and “Muppet people” in his life from the time that his father worked with the Children’s Television Workshop, and he had some very intense convictions about them: “I thought Muppets were cool. Now, I’m not talking about the ones that had their own show, I’m talking the
Sesame Street
ones. I was one of the people that felt that Kermit was a sell-out when he started his own show. I was never really into it. Fozzie Bear is just a wannabe Grover,” he said. “I always thought there should have been war between the East Coast and West Coast Muppets…. They were a serious part of what I remember from my youth…. Does my son have a Grover? Yes he does. Because Grover is the finest of all of them.”

In “Smile Time,” Angel investigates a popular children’s TV show after learning that its puppet stars are stealing the life force of their young viewers. While poking around the studio, he inadvertently activates a spell that turns him into a puppet. The episode was written by Joss and Ben Edlund (
The Tick, Firefly, Supernatural
) and directed by Edlund. It is replete with slapstick puppet humor, fight scenes, and catchy songs.

“That was great, entertaining television that, like all good Joss Whedon things, has this great emotional core to it,” Fury said. “As silly as it is, it’s got this great little story about self-esteem in there.” “Smile Time” was later nominated for a 2005 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

Just over a month after learning that
Angel
would be no more, Joss got some of the best news of his life. Universal Pictures had managed to secure the necessary rights to a
Firefly
movie from 20th Century Fox. Fox did retain the rights to the title
Firefly
, however, so on March 3, 2004, the studio announced that it had greenlit
Serenity
, named for Mal’s ship in the original series. Joss himself would direct. Considering he had no previous experience directing feature films, Universal demonstrated great faith in Joss by giving him the job of helming a multimillion-dollar action movie. It was a bounty of riches: Joss got to continue telling tales for a universe that he loved dearly, and as a director, he would have an autonomy not offered with his previous feature film scripts.

“I’ve been in Hollywood a long time, and it’s a highly, highly, highly unusual story,” Chris Buchanan notes. “The fact that
Serenity
ever got made is amazing.”

The riches did not include a generous budget. At the time, many space adventures and fantasy films were budgeted for $100 million or more. Universal had followed that pattern and lost money in 2003 with its live-action version of
The Cat in the Hat
, which had recouped just over $133 million worldwide against its $160 million budget. Its adaptation of
Peter Pan
that same year fared a little better, bringing in over $121 million to cover its $100 million budget, but the studio’s 2004 sci-fi flick
The Chronicles of Riddick
would be a big box office disappointment. With
such a spotty track record with genre films, Universal found
Serenity
to be an attractive proposition—because Joss was sure that he could finish all of principal photography in less than two months and way under the budget Universal usually gave to such films. With a budget of less than $40 million and a shooting schedule of fifty days, production was set to begin in Los Angeles on June 3, 2004.

Jewel Staite was working on Tim Minear’s
Wonderfalls
when she learned of
Firefly
’s return. “I was in the car on my way to the airport to shoot another episode. My phone rang, and it was Joss. He said, ‘I just want to tell you that we’ve been greenlit for our very own movie.’ I was totally shocked. I didn’t dare hope that it would ever really happen. I think I was just stunned for the entire plane ride to Toronto.”

Adam Baldwin had been skeptical that this day would ever come. “There had been rumors and rumblings about it, but until it’s official, it’s not official,” he says. He had picked up a few guest-starring roles since
Firefly
ended, but he was looking for more work; he admits that “2003 was a tough year for me. I didn’t land a pilot, and did a couple of small things. I pretty darn near close ran out of money. So when he finally did get the green light, I said ‘Joss, I gotta do some things, you know, to get ready for you, but, um … I need a job.’ And he said, ‘Well, funny you should call, because we got a guy on
Angel
that you’d be perfect for. He’s kind of like Jayne but smarter and in a nice suit.’”

With that, Baldwin walked into a recurring role in the final episodes of
Angel:
Marcus Hamilton, liaison to the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart. “That was a lifesaver. There are a few jobs over the course of a long career in Hollywood that are career lifesavers. Whether they’re high profile or not, they put food on the table, they pay the rent, and that was one of them. He really stepped up and helped me out. He’s met my family and I’ve met his and we appreciate what it’s like to be fathers,” he laughs. “Big responsibilities.”

When Morena Baccarin got the call from Joss saying that
Firefly
was back, she couldn’t believe it. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” she says. “I just thought … wow. We get to come back, all of us. And that was in his contract—that we all had to be back, we all had to do this movie and play again. And this time we knew that it was going to be over, so we savored every second of those three months we were shooting.”

Perhaps inspired by the success of the
Firefly
campaign,
Angel
fans didn’t give up on their show so easily. They organized letter-writing campaigns and online petitions, bought advertisements in trade magazines, and even held a “Save
Angel
” blood drive for the Red Cross in the United States and Great Britain. They lobbied other networks to pick up the show, especially UPN—despite the fact that it had canceled
Buffy
the previous year. It was a passionate outpouring, but the WB’s decision stayed the same, and no other network came to the rescue.

Star David Boreanaz was relieved by the show’s impending end. “I don’t wanna sound like I was cheering, but when Joss broke the news, it was almost more like the burden of pressure came off me after five years,” he said. “It’s a lot of responsibility [carrying a show], and you don’t realize how much that is until they say it’s done and then you can breathe…. Look, it’s a f—in’ show, and it was a great experience. I think we can be very proud of what we’ve accomplished. Now, you just move forward.” No doubt the passage of time had a much bigger effect on his human self than it did on his immortal vampire character, and he said that he had no interest in returning to the character once the final credits ran. Many fans, however, were a bit stung by how gleeful he seemed about leaving a show they’d loved and supported so much.

Garth Ancier, then-chairman of the WB, laid the blame for the cancellation on 20th Century Fox. “They had pushed for an early decision on whether the show should come back or not,” he said. “I think the mistake that was made is that between us and 20th, we didn’t wait until May. We just made the decision early based upon their request.”

On May 19, 2004,
Angel
aired its final episode, “Not Fade Away.” Unlike
Buffy
’s finale, in which Angel made a brief appearance, Buffy does not show up. Sarah Michelle Gellar had declined to guest-star earlier in the season, and while she was open to returning once it was announced to be the final season, she was available only for the final episode. Joss didn’t want the finale to focus on a guest star; he wanted to celebrate
Angel
’s own cast and characters. “I want to end the show with the people who’ve been in the trenches together,” he explained.

“The original goal [with
Angel
] was to do a story about redemption as an adult looking back on a bad decision and atoning for that,” Joss said.
“But we ended up doing even more than anticipated. It was first designed as a stand-alone mystery show, but the characters were the most interesting. So we explored them in great depth and complexity and it exceeded my expectations.”

There was no question what the next step in Angel’s redemption story was going to be had the series continued. “We knew [season six] was going to launch into [a] post-apocalyptic show,” Fury explained. “It was going to be Angel in
The Road Warrior
, which I thought would be awesome. In the ruined city of LA or out in the desert or something, it was just going to be kind of a really cool, different, show.”

The writers had many discussions about the upcoming apocalypse, who would survive it, and which characters could return in season six. But without that next season, the writers had to find a way to bring closure to the series and its characters. The idea of a world-changing apocalypse remained. The final scene revealed Angel and his remaining friends in an alley, preparing to fight an army of demons big enough to overtake L.A. The ambiguity of their last moments gave hope to fans that this would not be the final chapter in Angel’s story. “The last thing you will see of Angel is the last thing you should see,” Joss said. “ ‘Angel’ is about redemption, and redemption is ongoing.”

Eighteen months earlier, Joss had had three series on television. Now he had none. But he was about to take his storytelling skills back to the big screen—and this time, he would be in control of how the tale would be told.

Crafting
Serenity
was a challenging proposition even for an experienced screenwriter like Joss Whedon. Joss had to keep two audiences in mind as he wrote:
Firefly
fans who already had watched and rewatched the entire fourteen-episode series and moviegoers who had never seen the show. Too much dependence on the established mythology and the new viewers would be lost and alienated; too few connections to the series and the diehard fans who supported
Firefly
and campaigned for a film continuation would feel cheated and bored.

The task was made even more difficult by the fact that
Firefly
had a particularly complex backstory. Joss had to work with ten very different characters who all had a history together; he couldn’t use the standard screenwriting technique of introducing the characters to each other as a way of introducing them to the audience. He also found it difficult to put the rather western Mal and the noirish River in the same story and make it work. He discussed his concerns with Jeanine Basinger, who guided him back to two films he had studied at Wesleyan:
The Furies
and
Johnny Guitar
.

Initially, Joss cribbed together a story for the film based on some ideas that he’d had for a second season of
Firefly
. The original draft was a “kitchen sink” version, in which he tried to touch on all of the major plot points from the series. All of the characters are on the ship (save for Inara, who left
Serenity
at the end of the series), and Joss struggled to give them all meaningful storylines. This draft came in at 190 pages, well above the average screenplay length of 90 to 120 pages. Universal was supportive of Joss but was not prepared to bankroll a three-plus-hour movie based on a little-seen television series; the studio asked him to cut the script down to a more manageable length. He trimmed more than
sixty pages—removing, in particular, a lot of extensive exposition, often replacing it with simply a line or two, or sometimes just a simple look between characters. These revisions made for more powerful moments and a much cleaner and more concise film.

The final draft of
Serenity
focuses primarily on one particular element of the series’ mythology: the story of River Tam, the young prodigy who was subjected to traumatic government experiments before being rescued by her brother, Simon, and brought aboard
Serenity
. Set a few months after the
Firefly
finale, the film pits the crew against the Operative, a shadowy assassin for the Alliance government who is sent to kill River before she can access and share the government secrets buried in her head. Captain Mal Reynolds is faced with the daily question of how far he’ll go to protect River and her brother, who are now part of his crew.