Joss Whedon: The Biography (56 page)

What emerged from the marathon hotel session was
The Cabin in the Woods
, a comedic horror tale following a group of young people who head to a remote cabin for a quick weekend getaway. One by one, they’re each killed off in typical horror movie fashion. In this case, though, it’s not just the usual knife-wielding maniac behind the mayhem. The youths have been lured into a secret facility, where unseen technicians manipulate them into succumbing to horror clichés (“We should split up—we can cover more ground that way”), then serve them up as part of a ritual sacrifice.

With the bones of the story formed into a workable skeleton, Joss and Goddard checked out of the hotel knowing that there would be more rewriting to come. But the project they’d wanted to move forward with
as quickly as possible soon came to a complete stop—along with the rest of the storytelling in Hollywood.

When Joss joined
Roseanne
in 1989, he’d missed by a year being caught up in a contentious strike by the Writers Guild of America. The 1988 WGA strike had focused on expanding writers’ creative rights in television and, more important, providing them with enhanced residuals when an hour-long program aired in syndication. Networks, studios, and production companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), wanted to put the writers on a sliding scale for residuals, citing lower ratings for syndicated repeats. The WGA pushed back, angling for a larger percentage when a series’ foreign rights were sold. This was a new arena in 1988—no one knew exactly how American series would fare abroad—but writers didn’t want to be cut out of valuable royalties if the emerging market started to soar.

The 1988 strike was the longest in the guild’s history. Starting March 7 and running through August 7, it revved up just as production on the 1987–88 television season was coming to an end. While it didn’t affect that season greatly, it delayed the start of the fall 1988–89 season by about six weeks, at a time when networks were chained to the cycle of show premieres and viewers had little option other than to view episodes live if they wanted to see them. The broadcast networks filled their WGA-writer-less slates with more newsmagazines in the style of CBS’s
60 Minutes
and ABC’s
2
0/2
0
. The lack of scripted series ushered in the beginnings of today’s reality programming boom, as NBC upgraded
Unsolved Mysteries
from an occasional special to a weekly series, and Fox premiered its unscripted, voyeuristic
Cops
series. The more immediate result, however, was that ABC, CBS, and NBC saw their prime-time ratings drop 4.6 percent that fall.

After five months, both sides came to an agreement and the WGA won a better percentage on foreign sales, while the AMPTP convinced the writers to accept its sliding residual scale. That was the last Hollywood strike for almost twenty years.

In July 2007, regular negotiations between the WGA and AMPTP had already begun. On the table was the three-year Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA)—the contract that covers writers’ “salaries, benefits,
pensions, working conditions, residual payments, and creative rights” in television, film, and new media. Advances in digital technology had only recently made it practical for viewers to download or stream TV episodes online, and the practice was still in its infancy. But the networks were already using new media as a way to grow their broadcast audiences, requesting supplemental video content from their series’ writers to distribute as online exclusives. And as with foreign rights in the 1988 strike, the WGA knew that online access was an outlet with the potential to become quite profitable as soon as networks and studios developed deals to monetize viewing directly.

In the negotiations, the AMPTP acknowledged that online viewing was increasing, but insisted that it was too early to judge how profitable it would be. As it stood, writers were only paid when a show was streamed, with their compensation being 1.2 percent of the sales revenue. If someone downloaded an episode from iTunes with an exact price point, they received nothing from that sale. For three months, negotiations were at an impasse over the issue.

When the WGA’s contracts expired at the end of October 2007, the negotiating committee formally recommended that the writers go on strike. Committee chairman John Bowman told the members that “the Internet has to be one of our most important issues. That’s our future.” On November 5, picketing WGA members focused on fourteen Los Angeles studios and several locations in New York (including NBC’s headquarters, Rockefeller Center), and many SAG members and Teamsters refused to cross the picket lines in solidarity with the striking writers.

Just days earlier, on November 1, it was announced that Joss would soon be returning to television, with a face quite familiar to Whedon fans.
Dollhouse
, a series about a group of “dolls”—young people who exist as bland, blank slates in a spa-like laboratory until they are “imprinted with personality packages” and sent out on all kinds of morally ambiguous missions—would star former Buffyverse guest star Eliza Dushku as Echo, a doll who begins to see beyond her programming. “We call it a suspense-drama-mythology-comedy-action-horror musical,” Joss joked. “The main thrust is the thruline of Echo as a sort of newly born character who goes, ‘Wait a minute—I exist. Wow. So who would I be? And
how dangerous is it for me to let anybody know that I know that I exist?’ Not unlike the Frankenstein myth, it’s, ‘Who made me, who am I, and why am I?’”

Joss’s return to television had come about unexpectedly, thanks to a lunch meeting a few months earlier between him and Dushku. Joss thought it would be just another one of their check-in meetings; they had met to talk about her career path a few times over the years, ever since Joss reached out to her after her run of “crappy horror movies” in the early 2000s. He’d asked to meet for tea and then started in with the mentoring: “I said, ‘I love you. I think you have something that no other actor that I’ve worked with has. What the f**k are you making these movies for? Why are you doing this to me? You’re killing me. I just think you’re better than this.’” At the time, Dushku had been in a state of self-examination, trying to figure out what she wanted and where she wanted to go in her career. It was soon thereafter that she scored the lead in Fox’s
Tru Calling
, and when it ended after two seasons in 2005, she took a role in an off-Broadway play. They would reconnect from time to time, including one night after a performance. The two sat up until 2
AM
discussing a new opportunity that she had.

Now, however, as Joss and Dushku met to discuss what her next career steps should be, especially in light of a development deal she had with Fox, he was suddenly struck with an idea for a new show. “It was a mistake!” Joss told
Variety
. “I sat down with her to talk about her options, and acted all sage, saying things backwards like Yoda and laying out what I thought she should do. But in the course of doing it, I accidentally made one up. I told it to her, and she said, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’” Inspired by Dushku’s life as an actress, Joss came up with the premise of people who were hired out to be someone else’s fantasy. He described the show to her over their four-hour lunch and delivered her an outline two weeks later.

“He had my back,” Dushku says. “We pitched it to Fox, and it was a complicated, controversial, and deep project. Through all of the press, criticism, and acclaim, he was my partner.” The network gave them a seven-episode order without even seeing a pilot.

But Joss’s latest exploration into the questions that propel humanity would have to wait. The strike imposed a pencils-and-laptops-down mandate on WGA members, and he had to stop all work on
Dollhouse
. Instead of using it as an opportunity to take a break and relax, Joss poured his
energy into a collaborative project of another sort: becoming a voice for the striking WGA writers.

The first day of the strike, Joss was ready to spend the day on the picket line. His body, however, had other plans. “I came out and I was lying down on the grass with my picket sign,” Joss recalls. “Aly [Hannigan] and Alexis [Denisof] were like, ‘You have to go back home.’” The next day, he was too ill to leave the house, and two days after that, he could barely get out of bed.

He and Kai both were sick and getting sicker, and their symptoms could not be written off as the inevitable result of having two kids in preschool. Eventually they learned that they were having a reaction to mold in their home, which was concentrated in their bedroom. Until Joss could recover and show his support on the picket line, he took to
Whedonesque.com
to share his favorite strike movies (
Matewan, Newsies, Norma Rae, Day of the Dead, Billy Elliot
) and otherwise “vent his spleen for the cause”:

November 7, 2007

… The easiest tactic is for people to paint writers as namby pamby arty scarfy posers, because it’s what most people think even when we’re not striking. Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute….

And as work? Well, in the first place, it IS fun. When it’s going well, it’s the most fun I can imagine having…. Writing is enjoyable and ephemeral. And it’s hard work.

It’s always hard … the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say “Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?” I’ll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it’s all been done). It’s just never simple….

December 6, 2007

… Marti Noxon has tried to HIJACK this entire site for some “cause.” She forwarded this letter she wanted me to print:

“We think it would be unbelievably amazing if Joss were able to tell whomever might be reading his blog for info on the Friday picket that … the WGA is doing a Holiday Harvest Food drive for local food banks (that have reached an all-time low in donations, recently) and we’re asking everyone who can to bring jars of peanut butter, cans of tuna, and tons of powdered milk. In this way, besides just making a statement in solidarity and support of the WGA strike, we can also be re-stocking the shelves of the local food banks and feeding the poor and hungry of our community.”

Like I’d print something so depressing! This event is about one thing: my famousnessness. First everyone’s all about “the strike,” now it’s “helping people” … let’s not lose sight of the point, people! You can’t spell M.E. without, well, me.

Like screenwriting itself, championing the writers’ strike was a role Joss was born and bred to play. “I was a ’70s Upper West Side, protosocialist radical lefty, so it was kind of nice to be able to flex that again,” Joss says. “My dad said that I was named for Joe Hill [labor activist and songwriter]—I don’t know if it’s true—but I did have a real feeling about that stuff. So it’s nice to be able to fight the good fight on any level.” Joss even penned a Hill-esque protest song for Whedonesque: