Joss Whedon: The Biography (10 page)

By the time “Brain-Dead Poets Society” aired, it was the second half of the season. The politics on the show were still in flux, and on March 27, 1990, executive producer Jeff Harris resigned by taking out a full-page ad in
Daily Variety
. The show’s remaining higher-ups became increasingly insular, and Joss felt shut out. Worse, his writing assignments dried up. “Chicken Hearts,” the thirteenth episode of the twenty-four-episode season, was the last for which he received a writing credit. He had the financial security he craved—story editors on
Roseanne
made at least $3,000 a week—but the junior writer who had handed in six scripts now found himself with nothing to work on.

Instead of continuing to sit in the office and write nothing, Joss decided to focus his energy on an idea for a movie script that had been brewing for a while. It would be a revisionist take on the “girl in a dark alley” trope from so many popular horror films of the 1980s, in which a young woman—usually a blonde—makes the bad choice of venturing somewhere sketchy, where she is inevitably chased and killed by a maniac. “The idea … came from seeing too many blondes walking into dark alleyways and being killed,” Joss said. “I wanted, just once, for her to fight back … and kick his ass.”

The idea began as the story of “Martha the Immortal Waitress.” Martha was a stand-in for himself: a person to whom no one would give much concern, but who had “more power than was imaginable.” Joss tinkered with the concept during his time as a video store clerk, when he watched countless films with titles like
Assault of the Killer Bimbos
. He checked them out thinking that they were a new form of female empowerment film wrapped in some ridiculous B movie premise. Upon watching them, however, he realized that they were little more than sexploitation films with silly titles.

As a result, Joss became determined to make a movie with a similar low-budget aesthetic, along the lines of legendary director George Romero’s zombie movies, but one centered on the crazy notion that the girls in the film weren’t stereotypical bimbos but rather intelligent and resourceful. He would combine the standard silliness and fun of a B movie with a serious feminist agenda. His main character would be an homage to all the pretty, frivolous girls who dared to have fun and have sex—like Lynda in
Halloween
and Samantha the cheerleader in
Night of the Comet
. These were the girls who no one expected could take care of themselves, much less become a superhero who would someday save the world.

And to Joss, the perfect name for his blonde hero was also the name he took least seriously: Buffy. “There is no way you could hear the name Buffy and think, ‘This is an important person,’” Joss explained. “To juxtapose that with Vampire Slayer, just felt like … a B movie. But a B movie that had something more going on.”

But that wasn’t his only reasoning for naming the project
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Even if the sexploitation films with silly titles continually disappointed him, he still regularly picked them up off the shelf. As did many of his customers at the video shop, thinking that the movies with the silly titles might be “jolly fun.” Joss knew that
Buffy
, if it even got the chance to be made, would never be a blockbuster hit in the theaters. So he designed it to look like that silly, fun movie that someone would pull from a shelf to give it a try—only to be surprised by the fact that it was actually good.

For the rest of his contract on
Roseanne
, Joss would go to work in the show’s offices and, with nothing to do, instead work on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. He finished an eighty-five-page draft—very short by feature film standards—just to get the story out, then went back in to flesh it out. But
the side project didn’t alleviate Joss’s discontent with his role on the series. As much as he’d admired the show for its feminism, its humor, and its honesty, he decided he couldn’t work there anymore.

“I just wanted to be able to do work for one reason and one reason only, and that was because it was work worth doing,” Joss said. “[Roseanne’s] not the reason I quit,” he hastened to add. “At the end of the day, it was a good stepping-stone, not a good experience.”

After
Roseanne
, Joss was brought onto the NBC series
Parenthood
by executive producer David Tyron King. The show was based on the characters from the 1989 Steve Martin vehicle of the same name; starring Ed Begley Jr. and future household names David Arquette and Leonardo DiCaprio, it followed three generations of the Buckman family. Unlike the straight sitcom format of
Roseanne, Parenthood
was a half-hour, single-camera comedy-drama, or dramedy, a popular genre at the time that included
Doogie Howser, M.D.
and
The Wonder Years
. The series lasted less than a full year and was just one of a number of failed attempts to bring movies to television that season—
Ferris Bueller, Working Girl
, and
Uncle Buck
were all canceled in short order as well.

“It was a very talented ensemble and talented staff,” Joss says. “Ty King is an amazing writer, but there were many forces conspiring against us, people who just didn’t get the show.”

The politicking going on behind the scenes compounded the disappointing ratings. It wasn’t as dramatic as the chaos on
Roseanne
, where Joss had already had his trial-by-fire initiation into the realities of Hollywood. But, again, he was able to step up and be an active part of the writing team, complete with a lot of all-nighters. It was his second chance to shine that didn’t quite deliver a Hollywood ending. On
Roseanne
, his chance had sort of been taken away from him, so he left. On
Parenthood
, the show was canceled before he could show what he could do.

Yet the experience wasn’t without its merits. Joss’s major takeaway from
Parenthood
was his time spent in the writers’ room. In King, Joss found the guidance he’d longed for on
Roseanne
. King was easier for him to relate to than his previous coworkers; he was relatively young for a showrunner—roughly the same age Joss would be when running
Buffy
seven years later.

At one point, the two were venting about the frustrations of the show. “This is terrible,” King lamented. “This is unbelievable what they’re doing. They’re killing us. This is just … I’m so angry.” Then he turned to Joss, with the biggest smile, and said, “This is so much fun.”

“I never forget that,” Joss says. “It’s so true.”

The following year, Joss didn’t pick up another television show gig, but his own personal narrative took an unexpected shift when Michelle “Kai” Cole literally walked into the room. She had been driving across country with Joss’s cousin en route to San Francisco. On September 6, 1991, the girls made a stop in Los Angeles, at Tom Whedon’s house.

Kai and Joss both describe their meeting as something intense and immediate. “He was far across the room, and the first second that I saw him—I had one of those experiences, where he got closer,” Kai remembers. “He kind of came into my face really fast, but he didn’t move. It was sort of this weird, physical reaction that I had to him. It was instant, and we both had it. He says he was in lust at first sight.”

That moment is captured in a photograph Joss’s brother Sam snapped within half an hour of them meeting. In the picture, Joss and Kai are both looking at each other. “He’s directly looking at me, smiling, and I’m sort of looking under my eye, looking over at him,” she describes. “It’s kind of an amazing thing to have a picture where you meet someone for the first time. And we’ve been together ever since.”

He was twenty-seven, she was twenty-five. They’d both been working to define themselves on their own terms, each even choosing a new name that they thought fit better. They were well past the teenage awkward stage, yet their meeting was quite overwhelming for both of them. Both were very silent—unusually so, Kai explains—yet they were very aware of each other. They went out to breakfast with Sam and hardly spoke to one another. The first thing Joss said to Kai was “I like your boots.” Kai couldn’t find any words; she barely got out a “thanks.” That didn’t last for very long, though—the not-talking.

They all went out dancing that night at Arena, a gay nightclub in Los Angeles. It was his dancing skills that tipped the scales, Joss jokes, and “the fact that we were at a gay bar and I was the only man that was interested in dancing with her—the lack of competition is what got it.”
They just clicked from that time, Kai says. She did continue up to San Francisco but returned quickly. “We sort of celebrate [September 6] as our anniversary. It was very instant. Joss calls it the longest one-night stand, because we actually slept together that first day.”

It had been a long time since Joss had dated anyone. Unlike during his teen years, however, he had taken a conscious break from romantic entanglements, and he was certainly not looking to fall in love. But the couple was so instantly, intensely together that a couple months later, Joss took her to his mother’s home in New York for Thanksgiving. Naturally, it was an intimidating experience for Kai.

“His mom was the litmus test. I know Joss did love me, but if his mom didn’t really like me, I think there would have been something wrong,” she explains. Luckily, there were no problems. “Joss’s mom was so easy. A lovely person who made a lot of sense.”

Next, Kai had to pass the test with the other important female figure in Joss’s life: “I felt the same way with Jeanine, that it was really important that she like me.” It’s a tradition that Jeanine Basinger’s students take their potential long-term partners to meet her, and not one that she or they take lightly: One boy once took his soon-to-be fiancée to meet her. She was appalled to learn that the girlfriend did not like the classic Hitchcock movie
Vertigo
. Basinger questioned the student about it afterward. The couple broke up two weeks later.

So the stakes were high when Joss took her to his mentor’s home, but it turned out that Kai had no reason to worry. “My husband and I were both here, and my husband fell in love with her immediately,” Basinger says. “We both knew instantly she was the right one. She’s a wonderful person and a very strong, intelligent, and talented woman in her own right. She’s the kind of woman you know is right for Joss—a very good wife, a very good mother, but she’s a full, equal partner. If Joss went to Borneo for two years, I would be happy to visit with Kai.”

There were two key moments early in the relationship that solidified the connection between Joss and Kai. The first came when she read the movie script for
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. They had been together for a while at that point, but she had yet to read any of his work. She knew she loved him but was worried that if she didn’t like the way he wrote, it would affect their relationship. One night, Kai finally decided it was time, so she snuck off with a copy. She opened up to the middle of
the script, rationalizing that if she didn’t like it, it would be because she hadn’t started it from the beginning.

To her great joy, however, she loved it—even from the middle. Kai flipped back and read the entire thing from the beginning, then rushed into his office and threw herself on Joss with enormous relief.

Around the same time, Joss saw Kai working on a dress that he particularly hated. He tentatively asked if she had sewn it, to which Kai responded, “Oh, God no. I’m trying to fix it!” Again, relief was felt.

“It was very important,” Joss says. “Someone’s aesthetics and art are who they are,” and if you don’t like it, “you can’t go through life pretending that you think that’s all very well.”

A high school cheerleader named Buffy Summers has just learned that she is the Chosen One. This makes her special, she’s been told, but it will take a while before anyone else believes it—hell, it will take a while before even she believes it.

Joss had been working on Buffy’s story for years, since before he was even a professional writer. He’d finished the screenplay as a frustrated story editor on
Roseanne
. His fledgling agent shopped it around Hollywood, until finally it was optioned by Sandollar, a production company founded by Sandy Gallin and the legendary Dolly Parton.