Joss Whedon: The Biography (58 page)

Initially, their plans for the series were more modest; they thought they’d shoot the whole thing on a webcam and play all the parts themselves. But as they wrote more songs, the scope of the project kept expanding, and by the time they’d finished about half of the script, Joss began reaching out to his actor friends.

Neil Patrick Harris, who had previously missed out on the role of Simon Tam in
Firefly
, was approached to play the titular Dr. Horrible. Joss only got as far as telling him that he was doing a web musical before Harris said yes. “Then he got mad and said ‘Wait a second, let me pitch first,’” Harris explained. “Then he told me the name of it, the idea behind it, and the reasoning behind it and I said ‘Hell, yes.’”

For the role of Captain Hammer, Joss turned to a Whedonverse stalwart. Nathan Fillion says that Joss called him with the news that he and his brothers were working on a project. “ ‘Hey, so, we have this thing and we’re thinking about putting it together, and the writers’ strike—,’ and I said, ‘I’m in.’ He said, ‘It’s a musical.’ My heart went [
exalted sigh
]. Because, you know, to be recorded singing, that’s another thing altogether.” Fillion had been incredibly impressed with “Once More, with
Feeling,” and he longed to add a musical to the projects he did with Joss. “Then he told me Neil Patrick Harris was gonna be in it. Now, to be recorded singing is one thing. To be recorded singing next to Neil Patrick Harris, that’s another thing altogether.”

Apparently learning his lesson from two interrupted pitches by phone, Joss e-mailed Felicia Day to ask if she could sing, hoping she could take on the part of Penny. The actress had been a friend since she played one of the Potentials on the seventh season of
Buffy
, and she was the creator and star of the web series
The Guild
. That series, a comedy about a group of online gamers, had been an inspiration for
Dr. Horrible
. “The thing about Joss is that he definitely attracts the most talented people in all areas,” Day said. “When he wants to do an Internet musical starring a supervillain, everybody’s saying ‘Yes, please.’”

Harris had done a number of musicals, including
Sweeney Todd
and a Broadway run of
Assassins
, both by Joss’s beloved Sondheim. Fillion had done musicals in high school and college and had worked his way through college as a karaoke host. With a cast of this caliber, it quickly became obvious that
Dr. Horrible
would no longer be a webcam video. With improved production values, the budget climbed to roughly $200,000—still limited for the scope they had in mind, but far higher than that of the average Internet project.

Raising the necessary funds was the biggest challenge of the project. To quote Dr. Horrible himself, “It’s not about making money, it’s about
taking
money. Destroying the status quo.” In this case, the money that Joss initially took was from himself. Joss and Kai approached their accountant, who was resistant to the idea of them using their own money to bankroll
Dr. Horrible
, but the Whedons were insistent. They also worked together to reach out to others who might be interested in funding the project. The couple found enough people who wanted to be a part of Joss’s labor of love that they were able to raise the $200,000 they needed.

The budget would have been roughly double that amount if not for the fact that most of the participants agreed to work for free, in exchange for a share of future profits. “[Joss] said that obviously none of us will be paid,” Harris explained, “but if it catches on like he hoped it would, we would all be paid handsomely at the tail end of it all. That really wasn’t even a concern for me. I would have done it for zero dollars.”

When it came to working out the details of everyone’s profit participation, Joss was willing to be generous—drawing a contrast with the way
the AMPTP was treating the WGA. He was very vocal about the fact that his passion for
Dr. Horrible
came out of his feelings regarding the writers’ strike. He saw the Internet as a medium in which he could set the rules—because, as he puts it, the “guilds haven’t been beaten down yet.” Since there were no established pay scales for actors and crew working on scripted Internet content, “I got to invent them,” Joss said. “I got to make the writers and stars profit participants on gross level.” They used the WGA and Screen Actors Guild general rates for a series-related webisode as their initial model, and worked with the guilds to finalize the compensation agreements.

“There’s no reason why there can’t be a business model that is completely inclusive in profit participation,” Joss said. “I’m the studio. I still get way more than everybody else, after I make back my production costs and everything’s paid out. When we’re into pure profit … I win. So—and this was the whole thing during the strike—why try to offer us nothing, when all we’re asking for is a percentage?”

“The concept was so pure and kind of amazingly moral,” Harris said. “Joss wanted not just to walk the picket lines but actually do something about it.”

To keep
Dr. Horrible
on budget, the project needed to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Michael Boretz, Joss’s assistant in the later
Buffy
years, was brought in as a producer, and his first task was enlisting key crew who knew how Joss worked and could quickly get them into production. Lisa Lassek, editor on
Buffy, Angel
, and
Firefly
, came in, as did Shawna Trpcic, costume designer for
Angel
and
Firefly
. Ryan Green,
Serenity
camera operator, jumped in as director of photography. “It was helpful having those years of experience to know the people,” Boretz said, and “then once they were hired, to be able to communicate effectively with them to relay Joss’ vision and help facilitate getting us into production quickly.”

Boretz credited Joss with inspiring such loyalty and eagerness among his collaborators. Aside from his writing and storytelling talents, Boretz said, Joss is very warm and inviting. “He creates that kind of environment on the set as well. And that’s why people like to come back and continue to work for him and are willing to do favors.” Whedon studies
scholar Rhonda V. Wilcox agrees. “One of the things that makes him a really strong television creator is that he is good at collaboration. He’s good at drawing the best out of other folks because if you’re going to do good television, you normally have got to have other people to help you write it. Joss gets people who are glad to work with him. They know they’re going to do interesting work and so they’re willing to do stuff like
Dr. Horrible.
”

Simon Helberg, who played supporting character Moist, marveled at Joss’s ability to call in favors. Helberg had produced his own comedy web series,
Derek & Simon: The Show
, so he had quite a bit of experience with online content budgets and the need to rely on others’ goodwill. “When I pull a favor, it’s like, ‘Can we use your TV room for this party scene?’ When Joss does it, you’re talking about [using] a [Universal Studios] back lot and [getting] a horse.” He adds, “Everybody there was his crew and his team, and it’s rare. I think there are probably a lot of directors and filmmakers out there who don’t have a solid company of people they work with consistently—but a lot of the great ones do. It seems like Joss definitely had that, so when he said, ‘I’m gonna take a camera and take some money of mine and make this little thing, and can I get some of you guys to help?’ they all jumped on the bandwagon. That speaks volumes for what he’s like to work with.”

By the time the producers had finished writing and had the cast and crew locked, the writers’ strike was over and everyone had to get back to their “regular jobs.” That meant they had virtually no rehearsal time before the shoot. The vocals for all the songs were recorded in Joss’s loft from March 1 to March 5, 2008, and they found a window of an additional six days in March to get everything shot. Yet despite such a quick turnaround, production seemed to go smoothly, due in large part to Joss’s direction. “Joss knows what he wants and sort of how to get there,” Helberg says. “I think Joss and I had strong visions of [Moist]. They were slightly different, I think, and we came to a place that we were both really happy with. Working with Joss is to work with somebody with such a creative voice and a very specific vision and where every detail of it is chosen with care and a point of view.”

There was lots of scurrying around and shooting on the fly. Joss empowered the very bare-bones crew to do whatever was needed to get each shot. Harris says that it was “all kinds of guerilla filmmaking, but with great passion and love, not anger that it wasn’t going differently.”

Dr. Horrible
became a community project, where “everybody was like a family,” Kai says. Nathan Fillion agrees. “More than any project I’ve done,
Dr. Horrible
had the feeling of, ‘Hey, I got a box of costumes and old clothes we could use, and there’s an old barn we can use for a stage,’ and everybody pulling together and saying, ‘I’ve got some old lights we could use.’” It was like a bunch of friends having fun and putting on a show, and if someone new came in, “an hour later you know their name and you know what they’re like, and you have a good time with them. It felt the least like a job.”

Joss’s experiment with a new model of filmmaking was succeeding, but the old ways were just as frustrating as ever. The end of the strike meant that production on his studio projects could continue, but at Universal Pictures, circumstances conspired to keep
Goners
in limbo. On March 13,
Variety
announced that Mary Parent was leaving the studio to chair MGM’s Worldwide Motion Picture Group. Without Parent to shepherd the project through the Universal preproduction maze, the future of the film was in question. Joss told MTV in July that it had “gotten backburnered,” and four years later he’d explain that the change in management resulted in his story being orphaned. “Everything was in place. And the new people just completely shit-canned it,” he said. “And I wasn’t ready for that.”

Parent’s move to MGM may have orphaned
Goners
, but it found a home for another Whedonverse project. The first film she greenlit in her new position was Joss and Drew Goddard’s horror tale
The Cabin in the Woods
. When the studio announced the purchase on July 8, it also laid out two brand-new paths for the writers:
Cabin
would be the first feature film produced by Joss, and the first feature directed by Goddard.

The two writers had decided on this division of labor while they were working on the script, but Goddard wasn’t convinced that it would actually come to pass. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I had a feeling at some point Joss was going to say, ‘You know what? I think I want to direct this one.’ Which he did,” he laughs. It was disappointing, but to him it meant that they had something special in the script. And if he wasn’t going to direct
The Cabin in the Woods
, Goddard could “ask for no better director than Joss Whedon to take over.” Fortunately, Joss changed his mind, and Goddard ended up in the director’s chair.