Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy (4 page)

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Authors: Candace Havens

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An aspiring filmmaker with waist-length bright red hair and eccentric points of view, Joss had some disastrous pitch meetings. Despite his trepidations and at his father’s suggestion, he decided to try television. As Joss relates, “When I was just starting out, and I had no idea how I was going to become the brilliant independent filmmaker that I imagined myself to be, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try my hand at a spec.’ By selling a TV script, I could make enough money to sort of keep myself afloat. That was the first time I ever sat down and tried to write. I had never studied writing, or thought of myself as a writer exactly. I always assumed I would write whatever I made, but I never really gave it much thought. Then I sat down and really tried to write a script and found the great happiness of my life.”
Then I sat down and really tried to write a script and found the great happiness of my life.—Joss
 
Writing turned out to be his true passion. It was like an addictive drug for Whedon. He poured everything he was and wanted to be into those early scripts. All the stories that had been rolling around in his brain for the first twenty years of his life were actually something he could put on paper. He began writing scripts at an amazing rate.
He began sending scripts to everyone he knew in Hollywood, including some of his father’s friends. The quality of his writing attracted notice from the beginning. Producer Howard Adler saw some of these early spec scripts. “It was his sense of humor I remember most,” Adler says. “You don’t forget something like that. By the time I tried to call and get him to come and work for me he was already working somewhere else. But he was definitely someone I really wanted on my staff.”
Joss wound up taking a job as staff writer on the popular ABC television series
Roseanne.
The
Roseanne
work environment was famously difficult. Roseanne ran the show with an iron but erratic fist. She was notoriously challenging to work with and she changed producers and writers with alarming frequency. Conflict with management was continual, and the politics were fierce. Even she has admitted that she wasn’t the easiest person to work with.
 
Roseanne Barr, a funny lady but a tough boss.
“You know I did a lot of crazy things back then, but I’m not going to apologize for it,” said Roseanne after a press conference with television critics. “It was my show and I wanted to make it my way. I worked with some great people, but there were a lot of them that had no business being in television. It’s tough, and if you can’t take it, well that’s too damn bad.”
But the chaos worked for Joss, at least at first. He was too junior to bear the brunt of Roseanne’s difficult personality, and, most important, he got to write. In the first six months on the show he wrote five scripts, unheard of for a lowly staff writer. The frenetic pace suited his writing style and he was one of the few people there who liked having the pressure to churn out script after script. But the politics shifted and in the second half of the year he was shut out by the producers and had little to do.
It was around this time that Joss married Kai Cole, an interior designer. He describes her as “the funniest woman I’ve ever met” and jokes that he married her despite the fact that she was happy and popular in high school. Kai Cole would become an important part of Joss’s life, influencing his life and work. A number of scenes in Buffy came from Kai’s experiences. “[One example] in particular is the scene where they bring home Dawn when she was a baby. My wife was eight when they brought home her sister Dawn and it was on her birthday, which everyone forgot. So she was all cranky about it. They put Dawn in her arms, and she told me about this. She said she just felt like, ‘I have to take care of this.’ And so that whole scene was based on that story that she told me. I have a stepsister but I don’t have a younger sister and I don’t have the same kind of relationship with my family or siblings that she does. She has been very instrumental. There have been a lot of other things, but that in particular was just one thing I entirely stole.”
But Joss didn’t let his romance interfere with his work. He was using his free time at
Roseanne
to work on his script for the film that would later become
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He even worked on it during his honeymoon.
It was great to have the time to work on his script but Whedon, ever the workaholic, couldn’t stand being on the payroll without being able to make a significant contribution. He left
Roseanne
after a year.
“I know people want me to say bad things about working there, but the truth is they gave me a shot when no one else would,” Whedon says of working on the television show. “It was a strange place to work, but I had a chance to write scripts. Do you know how many writers are out there who never have a chance to do something like that? A lot of my stuff was rewritten, but it didn’t matter. It was great experience for me.”
Even though he was still determined to go into film, it wasn’t long after quitting
Roseanne
that Whedon ended up on the short-lived television series
Parenthood
. While the show had some critical acclaim, it never did well in the ratings. For Whedon it was a chance to work with a talented writing staff and he made the most of the experience during his short time with the show.
“That was where I learned a lot about the creative side of writing for TV It was another good experience for me and there were some great people who worked on that show.”
His
Buffy
script complete, Whedon began pitching it to the studios. He received favorable comments but no one was willing to take a chance on such an unusual script by an unknown screenwriter. Most of the executives who rejected the script thought it was entertaining but didn’t think there would be an audience.
“Everyone liked the script and I had a lot of encouragement, but no one wanted to pick it up,” says Whedon. But the quality of the script, and the work he had done on
Roseanne
and
Parenthood
, earned him a modest reputation as a fast, reliable, and high-quality writer. He began getting small writing assignments.
One of Whedon’s early film jobs was writing loop lines for movies that had already been made. The job entailed creating a joke or some type of conversation that would help the viewer make a connection between the scenes. Whedon wrote for the Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin film
The Getaway
and the Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman film
The Quick and the Dead,
among others. Soon he would get larger and more lucrative script assignments, and ultimately become one of the most important script doctors in Hollywood. But early in his script-doctor career came his big break—
Buffy
was picked up.
Joss had a powerful vision for
Buffy.
It was a concept he’d been thinking about for a long time. It began with a revisionist perspective on the countless horrorfilm scenes in which a young blond girl is pursued and ultimately killed by some hideous creature. In Joss’s film the young woman would not be helpless. She would be the hunter instead of the victim.
I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass.—Joss
 
“The idea for the film came from seeing too many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed,” says Whedon. “I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass. It was a simple thing for me to write because I knew exactly how I wanted things to work. I wanted her to have special powers and I thought it would be great to have vampires as the villains. She wouldn’t be able to fit into normal society because she had these powers and this job that kept her from being what she wanted to be.”
Joss’s vision included the integration of elements rarely seen together—horror, action, comedy, and heart-wrenching emotion. In 1988 Joss optioned the script to Sandollar Productions, a production company founded by Dolly Parton and her manager, Sandy Gallin. Almost three years later, in 1991, Sandollar offered the script to Kaz and Fran Rubel Kuzui. They agreed to take on the film, provided Fran Kuzui could direct .
“The instant I saw the title, I knew this was a film I had to make,” Fran says. “Five pages into the script and I was hooked. The more I read, the more I was attracted to the world that Joss Whedon had created. Here’s a girl, a high school cheerleader, who’s suddenly being told she’s part of something else.”
The Kuzuis were able to sell the concept to 20th Century-Fox, who funded the $9 million picture in exchange for worldwide rights.
Buffy
would become a reality and would be distributed by a major studio. Joss was thrilled. But his excitement soon turned to vexation and then horror as the production proceeded. What Joss discovered was how painful it was to have other people meddling with, and, from his perspective, destroying, his creations.
Buffy
isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.
—Fran Kuzui
 
In fairness to Joss, it’s pretty clear that Fran Kuzui had an unusual interpretation of Joss’s script. As she tells it,
Buffy
“isn’t a vampire movie, but a pop culture comedy about what people think about vampires.” Emphasizing the comedy at the expense of horror or genuine emotion, Kuzui created a very mediocre film. But observant critics noted the first-rate script that underlay the third-rate film. James Brundage of
filmcritic.com
noted that “the performances, admittedly, are lacking. The direction is downright bad . . . but all of this is made up in spades with one of the most finely crafted formula scripts courtesy of Joss Whedon.” The
Fort Worth Star Telegram
stated that Whedon’s “script [was] too witty for director Kuzui’s dreary handling.”
Time
magazine declared that Kuzui’s “frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total.”
Whedon’s script [was] too witty for director Kuzui’s dreary for director Kuzui’s
—
Fort Worth Star Telegram
 
Like a slowly developing horror movie, Joss observed the gradual degradation of his script over the course of the filming. There were days when Whedon didn’t want to go near the set because he feared the worst. His hip, scary script had been turned into a silly, campy film. There was nothing he could do about the miscasting or the rewriting.
The film starred Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Luke Perry, Rutger Hauer, and Paul Reubens. The casting was problematic. The two most experienced actors in the film, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer, were extremely difficult. Sutherland played Merrick Jamison Smythe, the watcher in the film. He walked through his role with apparent contempt for the production and the script, often coming in with his lines rewritten. He was rude to the rest of the cast and certainly wanted nothing to do with the writer. Whedon said several times that working with Sutherland was one of the worst experiences of his life.
 
Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy.
Rutger Hauer, the vampire Lothos, was difficult and bizarre. He insisted, for example, that he play a bedroom scene with Kristy Swanson in the nude (he ultimately relented, at Swanson’s request). But there were some bright moments. Whedon had a great appreciation for Paul Reubens (Amilyn) before the film, but even more so after.

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