Joss Whedon: The Biography (12 page)

Joss knew that the final film would not be representative of the dark and comedic action-horror film of empowerment that he had scripted, and he had time to prepare for the release a few months down the road. However, he had no warning of the next, far more devastating event in his life.

By 1992, Lee Stearns had spent nearly half her life teaching at Riverdale Country School. Two years earlier, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars honored her as an outstanding teacher, yet people had held her in high esteem long before she received the prestigious title. Lee constantly pushed her students to think about their personal effect on the world around them, both on a global scale—she helped establish New York City’s first high school chapter of the human rights organization Amnesty International—and in much smaller, more personal terms, as in the afternoon teas she cohosted for senior girls, which focused on the issues particular to the lives of female students at Riverdale.

Lee often took both her children’s friends and her students into her personal life. On one of her earliest sabbaticals, instead of heading off and leaving all things work-related at home, she and husband Stephen had taken four students along with them to travel through Europe. (She also developed plans for a never-realized sojourn from Britain to the Middle East through Rome via the old Roman roads.) Over time, her home became a sanctuary for several students and faculty colleagues who needed a place to live. Joss’s best friend Chris Boal lived with Lee and Stephen for a time after he left college. And a few were lucky enough to be asked along for a getaway at Lee’s Catskills farm.

Lee spent much of her time upstate writing. She had the final manuscript for one historical novel and was working on her next, for which she had spent time in the British Museum researching, among other things, an immensely powerful woman in Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Several years earlier, she and fellow Riverdale teacher Nancy Rosenberg had written
Bellwether
, a comedic story about a prep school. The last
full manuscript she finished involved a presidential campaign in the year 2000—a time that, though just eight years in the future, she would not live to see.

Lee Stearns died unexpectedly of a cerebral aneurysm on May 20, 1992.

Nearly a decade later, Joss would relive the experience of his mother’s death—the surreal moments and his seemingly irrational reactions—through one of his fictional female avatars, while writing the
Buffy
episode in which the main character’s mother, Joyce, dies.

In the fifth-season episode “The Body,” Buffy arrives home one morning to find her mother on the couch, cold and unresponsive. Buffy blindly goes through the motions—calling 911 and then Giles, her surrogate father figure, to come and be with her, watching the paramedics try and fail to revive her mother—until finally she is once again alone with her mother’s body.

Over the years, fans have told him that it helped them deal with a death that had happened years earlier. Joss was touched but surprised by how many people reached out to say that they found the episode comforting and cathartic. To him, it was not a story about finding comfort in God or coming to terms with what death means in some grand, preplanned scheme. “At this time a lot of people turn to, as [writer] Tim Minear would call him, the Sky Bully,” Joss said. “But since I don’t believe in the Sky Bully, and don’t really have that to fall back on, I haven’t really found any lessons in death other than I wish it wouldn’t.”

For Joss, the point of “The Body” was to capture the first few hours after someone dies, when there is “no solution, catharsis, or anything else … the almost-boredom.” At one point, Buffy fixates on something meaningless—the buttons on the house phone—which was something that Joss did when Lee died. It isn’t until the moment when Giles arrives and attempts CPR on Joyce that Buffy reacts with an incredible intensity and yells at him to not touch “the body.”

“I wanted to be very specific about what it felt like the moment you discover [that] you’ve lost someone. That moment of dumbfounded shock. That airlessness of losing somebody,” Joss said. “Death is a physical thing…. Apart from the sense of loss that you inevitably feel, there is
the fact of a body. And dealing with that is an experience that really does kind of stop time….

“I had always learned from TV that a death made everybody stronger and better, and learn about themselves. My experience was that an important piece had been taken out of the puzzle, amongst my family or friends, and that that piece would never be replaced and people would never be the same. There is no glorious payoff. There are sometimes revelations, and lessons that are useful. You have to take something out of it, because it’s inevitable: none of us [are] getting out of here alive.”

After 20th Century Fox bought the
Buffy
film, the studio offered Joss a development deal. As a part of it, he’d written a script called
Nobody Move
. It was a comedy about a twelve-year-old boy whose girlfriend, the love of his life, and her family are preparing to move away, so he decides to stop them. His schemes, each one bigger than the last, all seem to backfire.

In addition to becoming the Wile E. Coyote in a tween romantic comedy, the boy is coming to terms with having recently lost his mother. Everyone around him, including his father, thinks that he is fine and doesn’t pay him much attention. Desperate and alone, he constructs all his over-the-top plans to keep his girlfriend from leaving because of his need to keep anything else from changing.

Joss actually wrote
Nobody Move
before his mother died. At the time, he felt that the boy’s actions seemed fake and unrealistic. He didn’t know where they were coming from as he wrote them, just that they needed to be done. And then his own mother died, and he did everything the boy did in the script. It wasn’t until years later that he put it all together—that he had all the same reactions and had no understanding of why he did them.

It was an intense realization for him, and he referred to this time through a quiet, emotional exchange during an awkward moment between Buffy and her friend’s girlfriend, Tara, in “The Body.” Tara reveals that her own mother died when she was seventeen and that there were thoughts and reactions that she had that she couldn’t understand or begin to explain to anyone else. “Thoughts that made me feel like I was losing it, or like I was some kind of horrible person,” she says.

Buffy then asks if Tara’s mother’s death was sudden. “No, and yes,” Tara replies. “It’s always sudden.”

Two months after Lee died,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
opened July 31, 1992. It would go on to achieve decent box office numbers—around $16 million against its budget of about $9 million—but the reviews were less than stellar. It was an additional blow for Joss in an incredibly painful year. He had lost his lifelong role model and feminist icon, and the icon and role model he had created—nurturing the character for years, even drawing a sketch of her at one point—had been twisted into something unrecognizable by the Kuzuis’ desire to make a broad comedy. It was a hard and important lesson, and one that he took to heart: in the future, he would need to find a new way to take creative control of his work.

After the
Buffy
premiere, Kai suggested that maybe a few years down the road, Joss would get to tell the story of his Slayer again, the way he wanted to make it. He remembers telling her, “Ha ha ha, you little naive fool. It doesn’t work that way. That’ll never happen.”

In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Joss shifted his focus to spend a lot of time with his father. Both men were out of work at the time; Tom had finished up his run as executive producer on
The Golden Girls
when the series ended in May 1992. So he and his son worked together on some spec scripts and a sitcom pilot. Their pilot was modeled after the show
Siskel & Ebert
, in which two rival Chicago movie reviewers discussed, and often argued about, films that had recently been released. The sitcom version by the Whedons gave that premise an
Odd Couple
spin, with extra mutual loathing. To keep the series current and interesting, the fictional reviewers would comment on real movies during the show, and the scenes in which the characters actually reviewed the films would be shot the day before each episode aired so that they could actually reflect what was coming out the following weekend.

Their pilot wasn’t picked up, but working together so closely was quite fun for both father and son. Not only did they have similar sensibilities in their writing, but Joss also learned a lot from Tom. “His very
simple advice has always been the best,” Joss says. “First one being: if you have a story that matters, you don’t need jokes, and if you don’t, all the jokes in the world won’t save you.”

Joss poured additional energy into working on his own new ideas and spec scripts. Agent Chris Harbert had a special technique for pushing his client into action: when another writer sold a project or a script, he’d send Joss the
Variety
article about it, because he knew it would engage his competitive side. “I would go upstairs and start writing. It’s that competitive envious thing,” Joss said. “I get jealous of anyone who gets to do cool stuff. That’s never not the case. It’s part of being ambitious.”

Joss also got into script doctoring—working on other people’s scripts that were already in development to punch up the dialogue or story. In 1993, he picked up his first gig writing “loop lines” for the remake of
The Getaway
starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. He scripted new dialogue that could be looped in over footage that had already been shot—for instance, when an actor’s back was to the camera—to fill in missing connections in the story or just get rid of dead air. “If you look carefully at
The Getaway
,” he said, “you’ll see that when people’s backs are turned, or their heads are slightly out of frame, the whole movie has a certain edge to it.” The following year, he would spend a couple of days punching up dialogue for the western
The Quick and the Dead
so that he could meet the director, Sam Raimi, who had written and directed a film very influential to Joss’s horror sensibilities:
The Evil Dead
. “That’s a movie that goes genuinely insane, on its own terms, without ever violating its terms of reality,” Joss said. “The movie itself goes bonkers, and I just think that’s a beautiful thing.”