Joss Whedon: The Biography (21 page)

Joss kept his parking-lot promise to David Solomon, bringing him onto the
Buffy
crew as a producer. He also had to assemble a writing staff—which is where he hit his first major snag. Since
Buffy
was a midseason series, it wasn’t ready to send out offers to writers until July. By that time, a lot of writers had already been snapped up in May and June by shows with fall start dates. Adding to the uphill climb was the fact that it was a show in an untested niche (teen horror drama) on a little-watched network, with an inexperienced producer leading a young cast. It wasn’t really considered a hot career opportunity.

Joss and Greenwalt read spec scripts from practically everybody, whether their experience was in drama or comedy. Given his own
background on
Roseanne
and
Parenthood
, Joss didn’t want to discriminate. He wound up with a mix of writers from both half-hour and hour-long shows, including the team of Joe Reinkemeyer and Matt Kiene (
Law & Order
and
L.A. Law
) and sitcom writer Dana Reston (
The Nanny
).

Two of Joss’s early hires came from the NBC sitcom
Hope & Gloria
, but it may have been a previous credit of theirs that got them in the door. Dean Batali and Rob Des Hotel had written for a Nickelodeon live-action series called
The Adventures of Pete & Pete
, a quirky cult show that chronicled the lives of two brothers named Pete, their friends, and the small town in which they lived. It was a heavily dialogue-driven show that celebrated clever turns of phrase. Due to its wit and intelligence, it appealed to audiences older than the general Nickelodeon grade school demographic—including one Joss Whedon.

“Joss remembered one line we had written in our
Pete & Pete
script,” Batali says. “One of the characters says, ‘Now begins the age of Pete,’ and he thought that was such a great line. I’m convinced that that’s why we got the job—because we wrote the line ‘Now begins the age of Pete.’ Because it’s such a Buffyesque line: ‘Now begins the age of Buffy.’”

Once the writing staff was assembled, the writers set about brainstorming story ideas for the first season’s episodes. Joss opened up the discussion by saying, “Tell me your favorite horror movie and your most embarrassing moment, and we’ll take it from there.” Joss’s own early ideas for scripts included a sexually aggressive football player who happens to be a werewolf, “controlling parents as Stepford/baby-snatching guys,” and a “competitive cute girl as witch.” It was David Greenwalt’s spin on the last one that made Joss feel that the show was clicking into place, that they were on to something.

Once a writer pitches a story idea that sparks some interest, the staff then “breaks” the story, turning the basic idea into a series of dramatic beats and working out the emotional arcs that underlie the plot. From Joss’s witchcraft pitch, the staff broke the story that would become the first-season episode “Witch.” In it, Buffy is in desperate need of some normalcy in her life and decides to return to cheerleading. However, things go awry at the team tryouts (as they so often do on a Hellmouth), and Buffy and her friends quickly realize they must stop Amy, a fellow
student, from using witchcraft to take competitors out during the audition process.

As they were breaking the story, David Greenwalt pitched the idea that “Amy” is in fact her own mother, a former cheerleading queen who has switched bodies with her daughter in order to relive her former glory years. But Amy’s body isn’t as adept as her mother’s, and in frustration, the mother methodically attacks cheerleader after cheerleader until “Amy” finally moves off the bench and onto the court.

“Oh! This show’s gonna be so good!” Joss remembers thinking when Greenwalt made his pitch. “It’s the creepiest thing, and it’s totally true!”

Greenwalt’s contributions in the writers’ room helped Joss develop the show’s voice. “I like my stuff to have an edge, but I also am desperate for people’s affection and kind of a big softie,” Joss says. “So is David. Having a voice that was similar to mine but had its own particular spin was invaluable.” It was great, he says, to “have that sensibility next to me at all times, the guy who’s ready for the most painful twist, the cruelest joke, the most agonizing moment—and then, at times, a redemptive angle. Things could have been very, very different if I hadn’t had his whip-smart, completely unflinching, tough, noir kind of sensibility. It took
Buffy
beyond ‘Let’s talk about our feelings!’ and into a real world of both creepiness and idiotic humor. Because David’s not afraid to go for the cheap jokes any more than I am.”

But what clicked with Joss most of all was that Greenwalt was able to balance his edginess with an old-school approach to narrative. It was Greenwalt, Joss says, who was “constantly pulling us back to ‘But do we care about Buffy? But is Buffy in trouble?’”

“We learned early on when we started writing that we’ve got to have the metaphor,” Greenwalt explains. After all, a storyline that’s just about a cool monster every week would quickly get old and predictable. “You’ve got to have the Buffy of it—what does it mean?”

For Joss, too, the answer to “What’s the Buffy of it?” was of utmost importance to the development of each episode. “He knows what he wants when he sees it, and he’s willing to take the time to
wait
to see it,” says future
Buffy
writer Jane Espenson. “He has high standards and is sometimes impatient. He puts story first—or maybe I should say
meaning
—he puts meaning first.” Rather than taking the procedural approach and focusing on the plot (“What’s going to happen in this episode?”), Joss tackled the story through his characters. How would
they interact? What’s the conflict between them?
Then
he’d tackle the plot points.

He’d do that by breaking stories from the inside out. Instead of looking at a story from where it would start or end, he would come up with an idea and explore what would be really compelling about it when “blank” happens. For example, in the fifth episode of the series, “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” Buffy is at a funeral home with her date when a vampire appears and corners the guy. “The question then becomes ‘How do we build to that? How do you get to that moment?’” explains Batali. “
How
, and then you start filling it out, so it’s inside-out story breaking.” Howard Gordon, a second-season hire who’d go on to produce
24
and
Homeland
, among other series, agrees. “Joss reverse engineered [stories] from the ending. He was not somebody who was overly enamored with the beginning of a story, which most writers are.”

The
Buffy
stories that made it out of the writers’ room all had their roots in that central allegory of the series: high school as a horror movie. As Joss explained to his writers, high school was the most horrifying place he’d ever been. The familiar tropes of the horror genre became a prism through which they could explore familiar adolescent anxieties such as peer pressure and popularity.

Greenwalt remembers being especially impressed with the patience Joss displayed at the next point in the development process. After a story has been broken and the beats of the story sketched out, the credited writer for the episode “goes to the board” in the writers’ room and writes out the beats. From there, the writer maps out the actual scenes with locations on index cards, creates an outline, and finally begins to write the actual script. Every show and writer breaks a story a little differently, but in general, “going to the board” is where the story is finalized. “When we’d break stories,” Greenwalt says, “I’d watch him wait, and wait, and wait to go to the board—writers want to go to the board too soon. Then, finally, he’d get up and write a couple of things on the board, and they’d just be perfect and be right.”

However, Joss had several story ideas that the
Buffy
writers were never able to break. In one, he wanted the Scoobies to find a box in the school that they wouldn’t know how to open. “We spent four or five hours one night on it,” Batali says. “We could never figure it out. There was another story about the idea of a race of demons that are aliens. Joss really liked the idea that demons were actually aliens, that they were from outer space.”

On several occasions, Joss would showcase surprising artistic skills to help his writers visualize certain elements of a story. While working on “Killed by Death,” he left the writers’ room to draw Der Kindestod, the demon who sucked the life out of children who were feverishly ill. Another time, after they’d spent the morning working on a story, Joss returned after lunch with a clay model of the story’s monster that he’d sculpted. In both cases, he delivered the demon with the same pronouncement: “Well, here’s what it should look like.”

When it came time to shoot the episodes, however, Joss was at first far less in control. “The first year, it was like we were all on Ecstasy. Everybody loved each other, everybody hated each other, and nobody wanted to go home. Because I was literally there all night—I’d sleep on the couch,” he said. “I think we were all so young and so fresh and so crazed when we started, that I let a lot of tension on the set. In trying to be everybody’s friend, and so excited to be doing this work, and sort of assuming we’d all get along, I let a lot of non-constructive emotion take open sway on the set, when I should have just put the hammer down and said, ‘You know what? We’re here to do the work. Everybody, just get it done.’”

Still, when Jeanine Basinger visited Joss on set, she was excited to see how much he was taking charge. He ran around to check up on every element of shooting, taking close care to even review the wardrobe choices. She was also quite touched to see how much the staff had picked up his manner of speaking, which would later come to be known as “Slayer slang.”

Later, at lunch, Joss asked if Basinger thought the series would be successful. He followed that up by saying that he was glad he finally got to do what he wanted, and even if
Buffy
only lasted two episodes, he’d be happy. Together, they decided to be hopeful but to stay realistic.

Joss’s long hours and all-nighters also proved frustrating for Kai, who’d grown accustomed to her husband’s domestic contributions. “I did not cook at all when we first met,” she says. “He’s an amazing cook, an awesome, natural cook—doesn’t use recipes or anything. His mom was a
great cook, so he kind of learned at the foot of her. I’m so jealous because he just doesn’t think about it. He just kind of knows how to do it. He even makes roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas.”