Joss Whedon: The Biography (52 page)

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 world—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.”

Universal’s Mary Parent was still determined to be in the Joss Whedon business; as with
Serenity
, she came aboard to produce. The studio had enough faith in Joss’s storytelling to lock him into a seven-figure deal for
Goners
without seeing what the
Serenity
box office would bring. But even with a script in hand, Parent and Universal knew that his commitment to
Wonder Woman
came first.

And it took a long time for that script to be finished. Before he turned in his second
Wonder Woman
draft in July 2006, he took a moment to honor another great feminist icon in his life. On May 15, the day after Mother’s Day, the women’s rights organization Equality Now presented Joss with an award at their “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines” event. Equality Now had been founded by Jessica Neuwirth, a former student of Joss’s mother’s at Riverdale Country School.

Neuwirth had been inspired by the work they did at Riverdale with Amnesty International, in particular when they adopted a prisoner of conscience in East Germany. “When he was released from prison, he wrote back to us, which was an incredible experience for all of us,” Neuwirth says. “In addition to the basic research and writing skills, Lee Stearns tried to develop in her students the ability to think critically, to ask questions, and to be active in the world.”

Neuwirth went on to graduate from Yale and Harvard Law School, then joined the staff of Amnesty International, where she worked from 1985 to 1990. In 1992, along with two other lawyers, Navanethem Pillay of South Africa and Feryal Gharahi of Iran, Neuwirth founded Equality Now to promote the rights of girls and women around the world. She reached out to Lee soon after and was buoyed by Lee’s excitement for the project and her desire to work with it in her Riverdale classes, as she had with Amnesty International.