Joss Whedon: The Biography (61 page)

Unfortunately, by the time
Dollhouse
started to find a new focus, many viewers had moved on; viewership bounced between 4.3 and
2.75 million for the rest of the thirteen episodes. Fran Kranz says that they were always just waiting to get canceled, so it made the cast very close. “Maybe with a different creator, director, guy at the top, it might have made us all hate each other and want to get home that much faster each day. Instead, on
Dollhouse
, we loved each other that much more. Each day we were grateful to be working, and we kind of felt like we were in our own little pocket of the Fox lot, doing weird little things. It brought us closer together, knowing that at any moment it could all be over.”

When comedian-actor Patton Oswalt guest-starred in the sixth episode of
Dollhouse
, he and Joss bonded over the frustration of becoming a fan of a series that only exists for a brief time and then is gone. Oswalt, a fellow comic book and sci-fi nerd, brought up the
Firefly
universe, which he’d followed from series to movie to comics. After the 2005
Serenity
tie-in comic
Those Left Behind
became the bestselling Dark Horse title up to that point, more volumes had followed, and Oswalt told Joss that these comics had made him want to learn more about the
Firefly
characters. Joss said to let him know if he had any ideas for other stories in that world.

Oswalt, who would later improvise an eight-minute rant detailing an epic crossover between
Star Wars
and
The Avengers
for a 2013 episode of
Parks and Recreation
, did some thinking and pitched Joss three
Firefly
ideas. The first was about the cannibalistic Reavers and what their society might look like; the second focused on troubled psychic River Tam and what it would be like to get impressions of the future but not necessarily understand what they mean. Finally, Oswalt suggested a story exploring the history of pilot Wash and the impact of his death, which occurred at the end of
Serenity
. This last idea hit a nerve for Joss, and he enlisted Oswalt to write it as a comic,
Float Out
, which Dark Horse would release in 2010.

“It’s kind of an elegy for the character of Wash,” Oswalt told
Time
. “It’s three of his friends, who haven’t met before, old friends from before he was piloting the
Firefly
, and they’ve bought a new boat and they’re christening it
Jetwash
, and they’re telling stories about him before they christen it and float it out.”

In April, a minor controversy flared regarding the thirteenth episode of
Dollhouse
, “Epitaph One.” Felicia Day, who had played Penny in
Dr. Horrible
and was guest-starring in the episode, told fans that it wouldn’t air on Fox, which caused many to think that the network had again canceled one of Joss’s shows. Tim Minear allayed their concerns on Whedonesque, explaining that the episode was shot to fulfill contractual obligations to 20th Century Fox Television to deliver thirteen episodes for international sales and the DVD release. But it was not to be part of the Fox network’s thirteen-episode order, which was already covered with the scrapped “Echo” episode.

On May 8, 2009, Fox aired the twelfth episode as the season finale. It pulled in the fewest viewers of the entire season—about half as many as the premiere. But mere days later, the network picked up
Dollhouse
for a second season—albeit with a reduced budget. “Epitaph One” never aired in the United States, but in July, Joss screened it at San Diego Comic-Con, and later that month it was included on the
Dollhouse
DVD set.

The unaired episode is a departure for the series, set ten years in the future. Los Angeles has become a postapocalyptic ruin, and a new group of characters breaks into the Dollhouse for refuge and finds videos of the Dollhouse team. Flashbacks reveal what became of the dolls and their overseers in the Rossum Corporation. Joss explained that the second season would continue with the flash-forward device and that several characters who first appeared in “Epitaph One” would have recurring roles in the series.

The flash-forward technique was in the zeitgeist at the time, as ABC’s
Lost
, famous for its flashback scenes, had changed up its formula in its 2007–08 season to show the bleak futures of its rescued castaways. And perhaps the dual-world concept was in Joss’s consciousness as he readied for production on his latest movie, a fractured take on the beloved tropes of the horror genre.

After being acquired by MGM,
The Cabin in the Woods
moved to its subsidiary United Artists for further development. At the time, United Artists was being partly overseen by Tom Cruise, who gave script and story notes to Joss and Goddard. “That was definitely one of those surreal experiences,” says Goddard. “It was wonderful…. I’ve never met a more enthusiastic, creative, and supportive person [than Tom Cruise]. He has that energy, and to feel that energy directed toward you,
about
you, it’s like a drug. It’s wonderful. He was so excited about the script and so complimentary and really just pointed out scenes in the movie that he felt we should bring out more. And he was totally right.”

At its core, however, the final version of the screenplay remained pretty close to the draft they’d hammered out during their three-day hotel stay back in 2007. Five college students are lured to the titular cabin, where they become the latest victims of a family of zombie sadists. Unbeknownst to the unfortunate visitors, however, the entire scenario is in fact a high-tech setup. Though at first it seems to resemble some sort of twisted lab experiment, it’s ultimately revealed to be an elaborate ritual to appease a group of malevolent gods who would otherwise destroy the world. The scenario’s creators force each of their victims to conform to one of five predetermined roles before offering his or her life to the Ancient Ones. With the deaths of the Athlete, the Whore, the Scholar, and the Fool (the Virgin’s death is optional, as long as she suffers greatly), the gods will be sated and all of humanity can go living another day, none the wiser.

It was important to Joss and Goddard that the technicians who engineer the ritual be believable and realistic characters. They’re certainly the villains of the film, but they’re villains with an understandable belief
system. They think that causing the deaths of five young people is a rational and proper action if it saves the rest of the human race from annihilation—even if they do take a kind of pride in watching the results of their handiwork. Goddard based them on people he knew growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the men and women who developed and built atomic weapons. “They’re wonderful, decent people and yet their job is to create weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “They’re all just people. They believe what they believe for a reason, and their reason is not ridiculous.”

Joss mined his own childhood memories to further develop the technician characters, once again calling on the perspective of an educator’s son who knew better than most how his teachers saw the school and the kids. When the
Cabin in the Woods
techs aren’t knee-deep in manipulation, they’re grumbling about other departments in the compound failing to do their part to ensure a successful slaughter. “This is basically the same thing,” Joss said. “They’re in the faculty lounge complaining about the kids.”

While writing the script, Joss and Goddard had one actor in mind for the role of lead technician Gary Sitterson. They thought that Richard Jenkins (
Six Feet Under
) had the gravitas the role required and the fearlessness to jump into such an unconventional project. Joss, however, warned Goddard against getting his hopes up, because at the time Jenkins was in contention for an Oscar for his turn in
The Visitor
(2008). “Here’s an example of me really showing what a great producer I am—I told Drew, ‘Don’t even try, it’s not worth it…. We don’t have a chance,” Joss said. “Good call, pretty proud of that.”

But Jenkins was their dream choice, and they decided that it couldn’t hurt to send the script to his agent. That was on a Friday night. She read it, and even though she knew her client was skeptical about appearing in a horror project, she insisted that Jenkins check it out. Once he finished the script, it took him two seconds to decide to sign on. He was won over by the “very good, funny and smart” writing of a story concept that he’d never come across before. Monday morning, Jenkins called and said that he was in.

On their first try, Joss and Goddard had scored big. Not only did they get their ideal actor for the role, but they also got the enhanced
cachet that came with having an Oscar-nominated actor signed to their project. People started to take the film more seriously than a run-of-the-mill slasher film, and it attracted a higher caliber of talent. Bradley Whitford (
The West Wing
) came aboard as Sitterson’s partner, Hadley.

Joss and Goddard next set about casting the roles of the techs’ five sacrificial lambs. Since the idea was to show multifaceted young people who are forced into stock horror roles for the sake of the ritual, the actors needed to both fit into and work against stereotypes. For the part of the Fool, the stoner Marty, Joss suggested they look close to home—on the set of
Dollhouse
. Goddard had come to the set to look over different cabin locations that the location scouts had suggested to Joss. Actor Fran Kranz started to geek out over horror films with them, excitedly explaining that he had held a
Friday the 13th
marathon in college. Goddard pointed out that one of the locations they were considering was the original Crystal Lake, where that film’s Jason Voorhees does his stalking and killing.

Neither Joss nor Goddard said anything more to Kranz about
Cabin
, so he didn’t know what to think when he got an audition toward the end of
Dollhouse
’s first season. He wasn’t given the actual script but rather some fake scenes in which the police interrogate his character after a multi-clawed monster rips his friends’ heads off. Kranz took on a defiant slacker attitude that would play well into Marty. After the audition, he heard nothing until he had pretty much forgotten about it. Eventually Joss approached him on set and said that he was really good in his audition tape, but the testing process went on. Although Joss and Goddard were happy with Kranz as Marty, the studio took a while to sign off on him.

The waiting did lead to several tense moments on set. “It was awkward,” Kranz said. “We had a good working relationship so I felt comfortable talking to him about mostly anything. But there was this big elephant in the room, at least for me. I would be on pins and needles whenever he walked by. At one point … Eliza Dushku asked him how
Cabin in the Woods
was coming and he said, ‘We’re just putting together a really second-rate cast.’ It was a joke but I was so insecure I was like, ‘Oh, s——, what’s happening?’ It totally freaked me out. Of course, he’s screwing around.”

When Kranz was finally told that he got the part, he found out that his initial meeting with Goddard was not as random as he’d initially thought. “Joss [said that he’d] been seeing me in this role for a while, and that he brought Drew to set to check out this dude for Marty,”
Kranz recalls. “So that whole day that I just happened to be geeking out with Drew, I probably could not have done better [than] just sitting around being a fan of horror films and just being myself. Luckily, Drew right then was like, ‘Yeah, let’s definitely read him,’ and one thing led to another and I got the part.”