Joss Whedon: The Biography (13 page)

Joss had several meetings with Jorge Saralegui, the junior executive at Fox who had recommended that the studio buy the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
film. Saralegui had also worked with Joss on
Nobody Move
, and while that script never quite made it through the development process, it had helped to establish a friendship between them. One day over lunch, Saralegui pitched the idea of a “dog movie, a movie with a dog in it,” Joss said. “I was writing mostly comedy, and I was being pitched comedies because that’s what I had come from. I was pitched so many [examples] like ‘It’s
Wayne’s World
meets
Flubber
.’”

Joss countered with a gag pitch: “Die
Hard
on a bridge.” The joke was that in the early 1990s, many scripts were written in the hope of recapturing the blockbuster success of the skyscraper-set action movie
Die Hard
(1988). But Saralegui thought the pitch, and the idea of setting it on the George Washington Bridge in New York City, had real potential that Joss didn’t see. However, Saralegui knew that Hollywood would see Joss as the guy who wrote
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and the kid-centric
Nobody Move
and worked on
Roseanne
, and with that résumé, he’d have little success selling an action movie on a pitch alone. The executive felt that Joss was better off writing a full spec script; once it was complete, Joss could shop it around town, letting the industry see his versatility.

Saralegui became adamant that he go home and write the script. “Don’t option it, don’t tell anybody about it, go and write it,” Joss remembered Saralegui saying. “I guarantee you will never be pitched a dog movie again.”

And so Joss did. His screenplay for
Suspension
, as in suspension bridge, followed Harry Monk, an ex-con who has just been released from a New Jersey prison after serving a fifteen-year stint for an armed robbery that included the shooting of a police officer. Harry is desperate to get back to New York, to return to an old haunt, but as he crosses over the Hudson River, he and the rest of the people on the George Washington Bridge are taken hostage.

After leaving his cab and exploring the bridge a bit, Harry connects with Avery, a skeptical female police officer. More officers get pulled into the hostage situation, and they tell her that Harry is not to be trusted. Joss said that due to Harry’s crime, “when he hooks up with other policemen, they hate him; they don’t trust him and he has to earn their trust.” For his first proper action film, Joss explored an idea that echoed back to his classes with Richard Slotkin at Wesleyan: redemption through violence.

There is a
lot
of violence in the script. The mastermind behind the bridge hijack is a psychopath named Chi, who is unstable and unpredictable and, in typical Whedon fashion, quite snarky and funny. The funny, however, does not soften his murderous tendencies. In order to show the police how far he will go, Chi has a young boy shot on live TV. “I wanted a baby for that spot,” the character admits, “but having the boy … was a nice touch.”

With the
Die Hard
comparisons obvious, the
Suspension
script does not do much to change up the action formula that will see Harry and
Avery emerge victorious and alive at the end of the film. Yet Joss did a great job of keeping the suspense at an intense and believable level, and making all of the characters real and relatable—which were skills that he would soon bring to another action film.

In June 1993,
Die Hard
and
48 Hrs
. producer Lawrence Gordon’s company Largo Entertainment bought the script for $1 million—a surprising amount for a project with no talent or director attached, from a fairly untested twenty-eight-year-old screenwriter. All of a sudden, Joss was starting to be widely seen not as a comedy guy but as an action writer.
Suspension
was a huge deal that put him on the map.

Joss hoped that the filmmakers would keep him on the project, but as often happens with less experienced scribes, he was replaced by another writer. The preproduction costs kept building, and in the end,
Suspension
was never made. “It’s one of those scripts that you eventually put so much money into it that it wasn’t worth continuing, which happens a lot,” Saralegui says.

The following year, Joss sold his next script to Sony for $1.5 million. In
Afterlife
, an intense science fiction tale, scientist Daniel Hoffstettor is in the last stages of succumbing to a fatal disease and trying to make the most of his final days with his wife, Laura. After he dies, he awakes with newfound health in a brand-new body. It has all been engineered by a government agency called Tank that “resurrects” dying men whom the agency feels have more to contribute to society, transplanting their brains into young, healthy bodies. Tank wants him to continue his research, but Daniel is desperate to reconnect with his wife. He escapes from the agency’s facility to find Laura, and while he’s on the run, he quickly finds out that his new body may be healthy, but it comes with some issues of its own. It previously belonged to a notorious and very recognizable serial killer, and the killer’s personality slowly emerges to take control.

Like
Suspension, Afterlife
was never made, but it, too, showed some of the hallmarks of Joss’s successful projects to come. First, while the story contained fantastical elements, Joss grounded them all in reality by focusing on the very human interactions that draw the audience to connect with the characters. Second, the script embodied Joss’s deep distaste for large entities that impose their desires on the free will of individuals.
This theme would return several times in his television series, with the Watchers Council, which oversees and attempts to dictate the actions of the Slayer in
Buffy;
the Alliance, the oppressive interplanetary government in
Firefly;
and the sketchy and morally ambiguous Rossum Corporation in
Dollhouse
. It would also become a factor in Joss’s personal life, in the form of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which he would go up against in two separate battles.

By 1993, Jorge Saralegui had been promoted to vice president of production at 20th Century Fox and was producing his first movie, the Keanu Reeves / Dennis Hopper actioner
Speed
. The film is about Jack Traven (Reeves), a SWAT officer who is pulled into a plot by a deranged bomber (Hopper) in which a Los Angeles city bus has been rigged to blow up if its speed falls below fifty miles per hour. Jack must work with Annie (Sandra Bullock), a passenger who takes the wheel when the driver is injured, to navigate the L.A. traffic, help track down the bomber, and figure out how to get all of the passengers off the bus before it explodes.

The film was set to shoot with director Jan de Bont, who had been the cinematographer on
Die Hard
and
Lethal Weapon 3
. Right before they were about to start production, Fox decided that the dialogue needed to be polished and that Graham Yost, the original writer (who also had been primarily a television screenwriter), wasn’t right for the job. They felt that it was time to bring in a heavyweight.

The studio hired Paul Attanasio, who had written the soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated
Quiz Show
and the Michael Douglas / Demi Moore vehicle
Disclosure
. Two weeks later he turned in a draft, but instead of polishing the dialogue, he had drastically changed the script. Attanasio’s script was sent to Peter Chernin, the new chairman of Fox Entertainment Group, who was very passionate about the project. Chernin called Saralegui on a Saturday morning and asked what he had done to the script.

“I knew it sucked,” Saralegui says. “I don’t know why [Attanasio] did what he did, but he did what he did.” Chernin subtly told him that he was on the verge of losing control of the project and to look for help. Saralegui brought in big-name producer Walter F. Parkes (
WarGames, Awakenings
), who read
Speed
and liked it, and mentioned some writers that he thought would be good to work on the dialogue. Saralegui, remembering
how much he’d enjoyed the stylized dialogue in the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
screenplay, suggested Joss.

Parkes had never read Joss’s work before, but he was on board once Saralegui sent him some scripts. “He loved Joss’s writing,” Saralegui says. The two quickly met with and hired Joss, who came onto the film a week before they started shooting in September 1993. Joss didn’t get to see his vision of “
Die Hard
on a bridge” come to fruition, but he did get to play with “
Die Hard
on a bus.”

One of the first things that Joss did was to revise the character of one of the bus passengers. Stephens (Alan Ruck) was originally an obnoxious lawyer. He was always set to die, but because he’d been such an unlikeable character, there was no reason for the audience to feel bad for him. “I turned him into a likeable, sort of doofy tourist guy and [they said] ‘Well, now we can’t kill him,’” Joss recalled. “My opinion was ‘Well, now you should, because now people will actually care when he dies.’”

Joss also pared down parts of the script that he felt were artificial. Reeves’s Officer Jack Traven was initially a hotshot maverick. But Reeves had shadowed law enforcement agents to develop his character, and he was taken by how polite they were, how they often courteously addressed people as “sir” and “ma’am.” He also respectfully asked for changes to particular dialogue and actions that he felt were incongruous with his character. Joss was inspired by the care the actor had put into the character, and he rewrote Traven to be less of a hothead and instead just a cop who thought more laterally than the rest of his squad. “What if he’s just the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed?”

“It’s all about finding the emotional reality of the characters and getting them from A to B in a realistic fashion,” Joss says. “You’re connecting the dots. ‘OK, he goes from a bus to a train to a plane. Why? What does that mean? What’s that gonna do?’ It can be great fun. Very stressful when you find the flaws, and you go, ‘Ooh!’ Make the flaws where the meat is.”

Speed
was released on June 10, 1994, and grossed $14.5 million in its first weekend, ultimately bringing in $121.3 million in North America and over $283 million worldwide—an impressive follow-up to
Buffy
’s $16 million. It was also a critical hit; Roger Ebert wrote, “Films like
Speed
belong to the genre I call Bruised Forearm Movies, because you’re always grabbing the arm of the person sitting next to you. Done wrong, they seem like tired replays of old chase clichés … done as well as
Speed
, they generate a kind of manic exhilaration.”