Joss Whedon: The Biography (25 page)

But unlike a script doctor, he had final say over what ended up on screen. “When something was good, we filmed it and it remained good,” he says. “That was probably the attraction for the writers as well, knowing if they got it right, I would never rewrite them, because I do not wish to create more work for myself. I don’t have to be the guy who did the thing; I’m perfectly happy to be the guy who runs the show with someone else to do the thing. As long as the thing gets done.”

Joss did insist, however, on a very top-down writing process. While other series may be more collaborative, even allowing a lot of story influence from the actors,
Buffy
’s central ideas, themes, and structure tended to come from Joss himself. And no story on
Buffy
would ever be broken without Joss’s input. Over the course of 144 episodes, that’s a lot of stories.

“Joss’s shows are really the products of Joss’s brain,” explains Jane Espenson, who joined
Buffy
as an executive story editor during the third season and would rise through the ranks until she became a co-executive producer in the final season. As a result, his writers’ rooms tend to be productive when he’s in them, and sometimes a little bit idle when he’s not.

There had been changes to the way the
Buffy
writers’ room was run between the show’s first and second seasons. In the first, it was more of a group experience, with all of the writers including Joss and Greenwalt working together to pitch and break stories. Beginning in the second
season, Joss’s writers still worked together in the room but would go to Joss to present the story once it had been broken.

“There was almost never a day in which the staff would pitch him a story and he would just take what we’d done,” Espenson says. “We’d help, but it tended to be his—mostly, I think, because he was just that good. He wasn’t failing to see what we’d accomplished; it was just that he really could come up with something better.”

Occasionally, when they had a particularly tough story to break, the whole writing staff would toil away in the writers’ room for weeks to get the story on the board. Then Joss would come in and throw it all away, and they’d start over. Or they would end up just waiting until he came in, because they didn’t feel like they could make any progress until then.

“Once, I’d worked a long time on coming up with this story that I wanted to pitch,” remembers later Whedonverse writer Shawn Ryan, who would spend a season with Joss before creating the highly acclaimed dark cop drama
The Shield
for FX. “I took, like, five, ten minutes to pitch it, and he just looked at me and said, ‘You know, that’s a real good story, but it’s all just moves.’ That was his way of saying that it may have some good plot moves, but it didn’t engage him emotionally with the characters. And so I really needed to learn to change my thinking. Ultimately, I brought that to
The Shield
and my other shows—to find out what the emotional arc of the episode would be before figuring out the plot.”

“Behind all of the intelligence and a great sense of story was always a great sense of the end,” Howard Gordon adds. “What was this adding up to? I think that is something that not a lot of writers look at. I mean, you almost have this novelistic approach to these characters, and having just been inside for this brief time and having watched the series recently with my fourteen-year-old daughter, who was too young at the time to watch it, I got to reappreciate just how intricate, how smart, and how special the show is.”

If even Joss found a story hard to break, it was because he hadn’t yet settled on some important aspect—usually the reason to tell the story or the way in which it was going to emotionally touch Buffy. “He would pace around the room, sometimes climbing on furniture, or lifting furniture, or leading hilarious discussions about everything except the story, while his subconscious sorted stuff out,” Espenson recalls. “The telltale sign that a story was going to take a while to break was the degree of distraction and off-topic-ness that Joss would display.”

But Espenson adds that there was an upside to such tough break sessions: “We would often just talk in the room, which made us a close group who really liked and understood each other.” Noxon agrees, recalling that the writers’ room was filled with “delightful, funny people who know way too much about useless topics. So it was sometimes hard to stay on track, because it was so much fun to just talk about what we had seen or what we loved, or sing musicals, which happened too often.”

David Fury, who went from freelancer to staff writer in season three and would later become another co-executive producer on the series, described the writers’ room during his tenure as a civilized environment. Instead of a conference room in which everyone sat around a long table, as was the case with most of the sitcom writers’ rooms in which Fury had worked previously, Joss had a room adjoining his office that was decked out as a kind of den. “Sofas, easy chairs, etc., on which we could also be relaxed and casual, allowing our ideas to come out of banter between us,” Fury explains. “Joss would often sit in a rocking chair with a cup of tea and, no matter how pressing the deadline was for the next script, he’d more often than not exhibit calm yet entertaining leadership.”

The writers’ room usually had toys, which Joss loved to fiddle with. “We had lots of toys in the
Buffy
room—action figures and little things from inside those Kinder Egg chocolates,” Espenson says. (Years later, in the
Dollhouse
writers’ room, “there were little magnetized ball bearings that could be used to build shapes.”) She adds, “The main thing about a Joss room is that it takes on the shape of his personality—you laugh a lot in a Whedon room.”

Greenwalt, for his part, has a word of advice for future writers who find themselves in a Whedon writers’ room: “If he lies down on a table in the middle of a production meeting, it’s always funny if you lie down and spoon him from behind.”

Joss ran an informal school of sorts in his writers’ room; he had the writers read
Regeneration Through Violence
, Richard Slotkin’s intense academic tome that had inspired him at Wesleyan. For a much lighter balance to Slotkin’s discussions about how no great change can come without apocalyptic, violent feeling, Joss also assigned them Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics
, an illustrated guide to how comic books work. McCloud
broke down the storytelling devices of comic books, to which Joss would refer the writers when discussing directorial choices. Since most writers were focused on telling the emotional story,
Understanding Comics
helped them consider the visual elements of how each scene is framed.

Joss would discuss comic book storylines with his writers as well, because he felt that they were great examples of how to locate the real emotion in a story and then find a way to dramatize it that wasn’t always so literal. Like finding “the Buffy” of an episode pitch, superhero stories had to be emotionally grounded to create a sense of authenticity within the fantastical comic book world.

Echoing his childhood hours spent watching films with his mother and his college nights watching films in a basement, Joss also brought movies to the writers’ room for viewing and discussion. He and his writers examined the language in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 film
Sweet Smell of Success
and Martha Coolidge’s 1985 comedy
Real Genius
. The first is a film noir about a prominent gossip columnist who enlists an unscrupulous press agent to break up his sister’s relationship with a jazz musician; the second is a satire about a teenage prodigy and a brilliant but outlandish college student who team up to develop a high-energy laser. There couldn’t be two more different movies. “But he wanted us to look at things about language,” Noxon says. “In
Sweet Smell of Success
, the way they speak to each other is brilliant, and
Real Genius
has great language, great ways of talking. We got schooled. We had to do our homework, and he would come back after the weekend and say ‘I saw this’ or ‘I read this.’ That surely helped me understand where he was coming from.”

“I think that is the great privilege of working with Joss—that he makes you better than you are,” Gordon says. “It is one of those things where you have somebody running a show and it doesn’t always work this way. I hope I share with Joss the ability to recognize a voice who can sing in the key [of the series] and then bring out the best in that person. Emphasize their strength and help them to be as good as they can be and also protect them from their limitations. Joss does that really well and very gracefully.”

The schooling also included some playful hazing, putting Joss back into a high school mode—but this time with people he liked and felt comfortable around. And this time he was at the top of the social pyramid. When Noxon turned in her first script, for the episode “Bad Eggs,” she went home to sweat and shake from all the nervousness. She had a
phone message from Joss and David Greenwalt that said, “Marti, we’ve read your script and we have some bad news. There’s just no easy way to say this.” Her heart dropped and panic set in as they continued: “Oh, we’re just kidding, they were great—welcome to the family.”

Another time, Joss popped his head into her office and Noxon asked if there was something he wanted her to be thinking about. In all seriousness, Joss said “Leprechauns” and then walked away. It didn’t sound like the best idea to her, but Noxon dived into some deep leprechaun research, including watching the Warwick Davis / Jennifer Aniston horror movie
Leprechaun
. She presented all her research and Joss just stared at her for a while before telling her, “Yeah, that was such a joke.”

Noxon says, “I have never lived the leprechauns down. I still think about that when I’m talking to a new PA or someone who just wants to get their foot in the business. You say something completely facetious and they’re like, ‘On it, I will go bomb that guy’s house.’ So that was me—I was just, you know, you say
jump
, I say
leprechauns.
”

Jane Espenson was another target of Joss’s teaching and his teasing, as a writer whose previous work had been largely comedic. Joss often approaches writers in the way he assesses actors: “I go for the comic ones. If you can write comedy, you can write ‘the other thing.’” But that didn’t mean that all comedy writers could jump into the waters of
Buffy
and have no issues. Espenson’s second script was season three’s “Gingerbread.” She was terrified of the story they’d broken, because it had dead children in it. “I had just come off of five sitcom jobs in a row and had been trained to avoid topics, like dead kids, that were certain to kill any comedy,” she says.
Buffy
was a funny show and she had no idea how to maintain that humor within such an uncomfortable topic. “Instead of leaning into it, I leaned away, trying to compensate with more jokes,” she explains. “Joss hated it and still teases me about all my ‘dead kid’ quips. I learned that there are other ways to be entertaining than to be funny about
everything
. It was still a long time before I became comfortable writing a script without humor, but I took the first steps toward losing the crutchiness of it at
Buffy
because of Joss.”

The schooling wasn’t limited just to the staff writers. Diego Gutierrez, Joss’s assistant from 1998 to 2001, was considering his future and discussed with Noxon the possibility of going back to school. Joss, who had been setting up a shot on a ladder nearby, stopped what he was doing and looked at him as if he’d just said the stupidest thing ever. “That’s
dumb,” Joss said. “This is your grad school right here—this is what’s happening right here.”

From that moment, Gutierrez shifted his focus to take advantage of the opportunities he had at
Buffy
—the biggest of which was his access to Joss. In addition to his general assistant responsibilities, he shadowed Joss to see how he worked and learn how to break stories. “Joss was definitely a very specific mentorship, because he was so specific the way he did things—he would break the story and then lock himself up for however many hours in his office and he would just come out with a script.”