Joss Whedon: The Biography (57 page)

CBS and Fox they think they got us,

Do they got us? NO!

Even though we all wear scarves and glasses,

We’re a union, just by sayin’ so …

Joss was back on the picket lines in time for Mutant Enemy Day, held on Friday, December 7, at the picket on the 20th Century Fox lot. It kicked off with a delivery of one thousand donuts from Sarah Michelle Gellar to the Whedon writers, actors, and fans—some had flown in for support—who had come out. The actors that came spanned the entire Mutant Enemy oeuvre: Nicholas Brendon, Eliza Dushku, Juliet Landau,
and Harry Groener from
Buffy;
J. August Richards and Amy Acker from
Angel;
Nathan Fillion, Morena Baccarin, Summer Glau, and Alan Tudyk from
Firefly
. And of course the writers, to whom the strike meant the most: Tim Minear, Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, David Fury, Drew Goddard, and several others.

Joss announced later that he’d brought four Sharpies, prepared to sign autographs for the fans who came out to support them. But he never had to take a single marker from his pocket—fans were certainly happy to see and talk with the writers and stars, but they had no time for autographs. They were focused on marching, waving at motorists, and encouraging drivers to honk in solidarity.

“The fans from day one have understood what this is about,” Joss enthused. “There’s never been any ‘Where’s our shows? Why are you guys doing this?’ They understand that we’re reacting to an impossible situation. They also understand that making a show or a film is collaboration between the artists and the fans. They come out and support not just with us but with each other and the whole concept of an artistic community.”

Whedon fan support was not limited to special Mutant Enemy strike days. Fans came by to support the writers at other times, and even delivered pizzas to Jane Espenson’s group at Universal. The pizza drive was organized by Whedonesque (Kai later told Joss that “these people are going to be running the world”), and it surprised strikers who didn’t quite understand what was going on. “The writers … were very appreciative. They were kind of confused though,” one of the organizers reported. “ ‘Joss Whedon sent us pizza?’ ‘No, his
fans
.’ I don’t think most of them were familiar with the idea of TV and film writers having fans.”

The strike went into the new year, and Joss kept penning missives. Some of the pieces he wrote were so angry that the Writers Guild didn’t use them—yet when the strike looked like it was coming to a sudden close, the group suddenly wanted to get his words in the press. On February 6, 2008, a day after the WGA leadership scheduled a meeting with active members to get feedback on a proposed contract, a letter from Joss was sent to guild members:

Dear Writers,

I have good news. I have lots of good news. In fact, I have
way too much
good news.

The strike is almost over…. The Oscars seem to be the point of focus for a lot of this speculation. That either they must be preserved, or that the studios feel they must be preserved, and therefore this terrible struggle will end. There is an argument to be made for wanting the show to go on: it showcases the artists with whom we are bonded (there’s no award for Best Hiding of Net Profits), and it provides employment and revenue for thousands in the community that has been hit so hard by this action. Having said that, it’s a f%$#ing awards show. It’s a vanity fair. It’s a blip. We’re fighting
(fighting,
remember?) for the future of our union, our profession, our art. If that fight carries us through the Holy Night when Oscar was born, that’s just too bad….

I ask you all to remember: the studios caused an industry-wide shutdown. They made a childishly amateurish show of pretending to negotiate, then retreated into their lairs (yes, they have lairs) to starve us out. They emerged just before Christmas to raise our hopes, then left in a premeditated huff….

This is not over. Nor is it close. Until the moment it is over, it can never
be
close. Because if we see the finish line we will flag and they are absolutely counting on us to do that. In the room, reason. On the streets, on the net, I say reason is for the “moderates.” Remember what they’ve done. Remember what they’re trying to take from us. FIGHT. FIGHT. FIGHT.

I have been mugged an embarrassing number of times, even for a New Yorker. I’ve been yelled at and chased, beaten down and kicked, threatened with a gun and the only mugger who still hurts my gut is the one who made me shake his hand. Until there is a deal—the right deal … let’s keep our hands in our pockets or on our signs. Let’s not be victims. Let’s never.

In solidarity,

Joss Whedon

It had been six years since Malcolm Reynolds left the small screen, but Joss was still revving up his inner Browncoat. “That’s the reason I write that guy,” he explains. “Because I write about helplessness, and
in the face of a massive corporation or Rupert Murdoch, what else could you ever feel … but helpless. In general, the strike was depressing because there is a systematic destruction of the middle class in this country that is intentional and successful. It’s a constant thing—it is corporate greed and calumny, those things stick. Bullies are bullies—they must not be tolerated.”

On February 9, the WGA and the AMPTP reached a tentative deal. Three days later, WGA president Patric Verrone announced that the guild membership had voted to end the strike, and on February 26, a new three-year contract was overwhelmingly approved. The 2008 Minimum Basic Agreement gave the WGA new rights for creating new-media content. Writers would also receive better residuals for “the reuse of movies and television programs on the Internet and in new media.”

Joss was not thrilled with the final deal; “He thought it was a bad idea,” Kai says. He felt that the WGA had been beaten down and had given in without adequately considering the artists’ livelihood. He wanted to find a new way of doing things completely outside the system represented by the AMPTP. It was time for Joss Whedon to rewrite the rules yet again.

Without the writers’ strike, Joss Whedon’s next groundbreaking project might never have come to pass, at least not in the same ambitious form. He’d been thinking prior to the strike of self-producing an audio podcast, but he’d only gotten as far as coming up with a title and a basic concept:
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
, a musical about a would-be supervillain who details his exploits on his blog and tries to win over the girl of his dreams. “I wanted to write songs,” Joss said. “I really liked and related to this character and thought, I could just put up some songs as a fun side project.”

Then the WGA went on strike, and with Joss’s studio work on hold, his side project became a major focus of his attention. He decided to expand it from a podcast to a visual web series, and to bring in other people who would act and sing different parts. Still, he wanted to keep it low-budget, something he could produce himself without any involvement from the studio system he and the WGA were currently battling on the picket lines. With
Dr. Horrible
, he would be the “studio”—he would make the decisions instead of waiting for the green light from someone else. “Freedom is glorious,” Joss said. “The fact is, I’ve had very good relationships with studios, and I’ve worked with a lot of smart executives. But there is a difference when you can just go ahead and do something.”

The first thing he did was to enlist some producing partners. Joss had seen a YouTube video in support of the writers’ strike that was written and produced by his brothers Zack and Jed Whedon and Jed’s fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen.
WGA vs. AMPTP
was a witty, tongue-in-cheek piece
that illustrated the huge divide between the two camps. Joss loved it, and on December 20, 2007, he promoted the video on Whedonesque—ending his post with a vague promise that he was “scheming schemes” to make new stories and asking his fans to stay tuned. It’s easy to surmise that the scheme in question was
Dr. Horrible
. He asked the trio behind the video to join him on his new project.

This would not be the first film project that Joss and Jed had worked on together, since young Joss had directed his little brother in his short film
Stupidman
when Jed turned eight. “The embarrassing thing about that,” Joss said, “is that it was a group of eight year olds and I did stand in the next room pacing back and forth going, ‘they’re not laughing, they’re not laughing,’ like it was a Broadway opening.” Joss needn’t have worried. After the kids watched the fifteen-minute movie, they immediately requested repeat screenings.

Joss had already written one song for the web series, “Freeze Ray,” and he played it for everyone on his keyboard at the collaborators’ first official creative meeting. “All of a sudden the world of Dr Horrible started to come clear to us,” Tancharoen said. “It all evolved from there.” Tancharoen and Jed felt that the musical should start with “Freeze Ray,” because it was such a disarming introduction to a supervillain out to take over the world: Dr. Horrible’s alter-ego Billy is an awkward boy with the aching desire to talk to Penny, a girl he sees in the Laundromat.

With my Freeze Ray, I will stop

The world

With my Freeze Ray, I will find the time to

Find the words to

Tell you how

How you make

Make me feel

With “Freeze Ray” setting the tone for the script, Tancharoen and the Whedon brothers began to flesh out the characters. Dr. Horrible is an aspiring evil mastermind who longs to be welcomed into Bad Horse’s Evil League of Evil but has yet to make more than a whimper in the villainous world. Where he sees the world as utter chaos and wants to take over, his crush Penny is an idealist who volunteers at a homeless shelter as one of her ways to make the world a better place. Threatening both
his villainous and his romantic aspirations is Captain Hammer, a jocky, self-centered oaf of a superhero who dates Penny as a way of lording it over his nemesis.

Joss wanted to make the web series in three parts, corresponding to the three acts of the story, but without network commercial breaks and time constraints to worry about, those parts could be of any length. He and his collaborators decided that they would just fit in everything that served the story. They aimed for the full story to be thirty minutes, and the final product would clock in at forty-two minutes—an epic by the standards of original online media at the time.

By 2008, there had been several web series that had their own small followings—
lonelygirl15
aired on YouTube from 2006 to 2008,
Quarter-life
aired on MySpace in early 2008, and
The Guild
premiered on YouTube in 2007. Episodes tended to be only a few minutes each, and almost none were over ten minutes. Most series were very low-fi, shot with a reality television aesthetic. A high-production-value series broken into three episodes, each nearly fifteen minutes long, was a daunting, daring task.