Joss Whedon: The Biography (14 page)

Sandra Bullock, who was still early in her career, stood out in what could have been an especially clichéd role, that of Jack’s potential love interest. The
Washington Post
offered Bullock’s Annie the sort of praise that would soon become common for Joss’s female characters: “If it weren’t for the smart-funny twist she gives to her lines—they’re the best in the film—the air on that bus would have been stifling…. She emerges as a slightly softer version of the Linda Hamilton-Sigourney Weaver heroines: capable, independent, but still irresistibly vulnerable.”

The writing credits for
Speed
were a matter of great contention, with Joss demanding recognition for his contribution and the film’s original writer, Graham Yost, insisting that he should receive sole screenplay credit. The dispute ended up in arbitration before the Writers Guild. Under WGA rules, a writer must have contributed to the plot of the story, not just its dialogue, to receive official credit, so the guild ultimately sided with Yost and Joss went uncredited. (His writing credit is listed, however, on a rare early version of the
Speed
poster—a copy of which Joss owns.)

“The arbitration was a great sticking point with me,” Joss said. “I’ve always just disagreed with the WGA’s policy that says you can write every line of dialogue for a movie—and they literally say this—and not deserve credit on it. Because I think that makes no sense of any kind.” He realized that “writers get very protective of themselves. They’re worried that some producer will want to add a line so he can put his name on it. But what they can do is throw writers at it forever without putting their names on it because of this rule. So I actually don’t think it works for writers. It certainly didn’t work for me.”

Saralegui also disagreed with the ruling, even if he understood the WGA guidelines. Joss “deserved credit” because he was responsible for a lot of the feel of the movie, he says, and “the characters felt different after he wrote them,” even though these newly fleshed-out characters were still the same ones that Yost had created. “It’s really Graham Yost’s story idea, but it’s also his characters and his plot,” he adds. “So, it’s a tough one.”

It was not until a decade later that Yost admitted in an interview that Joss “wrote 98.9 percent of the dialogue.” Yost added, “We were very much in sync, it’s just that I didn’t write the dialogue as well as he did. That was a hard part of the whole ‘Speed’ thing. It’s my name up there, but I didn’t write the whole thing. But I fought hard to get that credit, so I’ll live with it.”

Even later, Yost expressed how impressed he was with Joss’s writing, and said that he would always be grateful to him. “When I read his draft, I went, ‘Oh, thank god. Oh, he gets it.’ He’s a very funny writer, a very smart writer. So I was very, very lucky.” He also credited Joss with Hopper’s signature taunting line: “Pop quiz, hotshot.”

As for Joss, he said that “Graham Yost has always been very polite to me and very sweet but he did say to me, ‘You would have done the same thing.’ And all I could say to him at the time was, ‘Well, I guess we don’t know if that’s true.’”

Even without official credit, the
Speed
script got Joss’s work noticed in the industry. Between it and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, he now had two solid projects that showcased his dialogue prowess on screen.

At first glance, the theatrical version of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
had nothing in common with the 1995 computer-animated classic
Toy Story:
quippy blonde teenager does battle with evil vampires versus a tale about toys learning how to get along. And yet it was
Buffy
that brought Joss to the attention of Pixar Animation Studios when it was time for the company to rewrite the script for its first film.

In 1993, work was well under way at Pixar on
Toy Story
, a long-form version of its 1988 Oscar-winning animated short
Tin Toy
. John Lasseter, who had been an animator at the Walt Disney Company, led the project. During his time at Disney, Lasseter had become increasingly interested in the possibilities of full-length film composed entirely of computergenerated imagery (CGI), which made him an anomaly in an era when hand-drawn animation was still the norm. After he unwittingly stepped on the toes of some of his direct supervisors with a plan to produce a CGI version of Thomas Disch’s 1980 novel
The Brave Little Toaster
, Lasseter was fired. He went on to become a founding member of Pixar Studios, which Apple cofounder Steve Jobs acquired in 1986.

Toy Story
was the then-small animation studio’s first big project, and it was in dire straits. Disney had agreed to back the film, and on November 19, 1993, it screened a rough draft of the picture, essentially just a filmed version of the storyboards combined with dialogue and music. Disney’s verdict: the movie was unwatchable. The story had lost the heart
that
Tin Toy
had; the leads, Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear the astronaut, were sarcastic and unlikeable—not exactly ideal heroes for a children’s movie.

Ironically, it was Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg who had insisted that
Toy Story
should not be a children’s movie at all. In the documentary
The Pixar Story
, Disney’s Tom Schumacher explained that Katzenberg “would always … be pushing for what he called ‘edge’ … snappy, adult, the edge of inappropriate, and not to feel too young.” He worried that the title would repel older kids and adults from the film, and under his guidance, Woody, whom countless children would later come to love and admire, was written as a bitter toy who berated and insulted all the other toys and was bound and determined to destroy Buzz.

Despite Katzenberg’s prior instructions, Disney insisted that Pixar stop production and take three months to rethink and rewrite the film. It was the latest reversal in a tug of war between the organizations over the project—including a battle with Lasseter, who was insistent that the film not be a musical, unlike other Disney films of the era such as
The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast
, and
Aladdin
.

The Disney regime pointed to one problem in particular: no one on Pixar’s creative team was a writer. The group was filled with producers and animators, who were confident that they had good story instincts and could storyboard the film very well. But none of their previous shorts had had any dialogue, and usually a feature-length film needed characters that actually spoke. They agreed that the project needed a professional screenwriter.

So Lasseter’s team began reading scripts, in search of someone who could save
Toy Story
. Several writers took a shot at it, but they weren’t generating the top-notch material that the project needed. Unfortunately, a creative team that was new to screenwriting also lacked the skills to recognize the lack of experience of the writers that came through. Disney didn’t want to leave the project in the hands of unproven scribes, so the company brought in an established writing partnership, Joel Cohen and former
National Lampoon
contributor Alec Sokolow. Cohen and Sokolow worked through seven drafts of the script with Pixar’s story team before departing the project.

That’s when the story team came across Joss’s original
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
script. They loved it—they loved his irreverent style, and that the script was both dark and comedic. “It was fascinating to read the
script that we loved, that had us cracking up and put wonderful images in our head,” says Pixar’s Andrew Stanton. “All the things that you would attribute to Joss now were fresh to us.”

As luck would have it, Joss was already in the Disney stable at the time. He had wanted to work on musicals, and what better place to do so, he thought, than the studio whose recent animated blockbusters were inspiring a resurgence of the form? He was working on a new animated film that was supposed to be a musical version of the classic Jules Verne science fiction novel
Journey to the Center of the Earth
and would eventually become
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
. He’d also been deeply invested in a project that he called “Marco Polo Meets My Fair Lady.” Through Disney’s songwriter program, Joss had not only written the script but also penned the lyrics for three songs set to music by composer Robert Lindsey-Nassif. The studio, however, wanted to pull him off the project to work on a floundering CGI film that would have no singing whatsoever.

Yet there was a big reason why Joss wasn’t entirely available to tackle
Toy Story
. When Disney came calling in late 1993, Joss and Kai were in the middle of an eight-week cross-country road trip. The journey was a bit of a test for their future. They had been together for a couple of years, but with all of the work Joss had been getting as a script doctor, Kai wasn’t sure if he’d have enough time in his career to keep pursuing the relationship with the same intensity. She hoped the trek would prove whether they had the compatibility and commitment to make it long-term.

“I often say to people, ‘Plan a wedding, take a road trip,’” she explains. “Then you really find out about a person.” So they set out on a drive around the country, during which time Joss promised that he would not work, that he would just live in the moment with Kai. After the first five days with bad directions and bad food, there was little that Joss and Kai could hide from each other. Luckily, they were having a blast. “We loved driving across country and just laughing and talking and reading,” she says. “We get along really well; we’re very compatible.” But about two weeks into their trip, Joss got the call about the
Toy Story
rewrite—and Disney wanted him right away.

Put off by the initial script, Kai begged him not do it, but Joss explained that the situation was every rewriter’s dream. It was “a perfect
structure with a ghastly script. If you have a pretty good script, but there’s just something you can’t put your finger on and figure out structurally, that’s a nightmare,” he says. “When you read something where the structure was John Lasseter’s story concept, which was rock solid, and you could just go in there and do a strong rewrite, that’s good.”

Conflicted, Joss called his Wesleyan professor and mentor Jeanine Basinger for advice. He wanted to take the job, but he wanted to spend the time with Kai as he had promised. “Everything can be negotiated except Kai,” Jeanine replied. “Negotiate the other end. Tell them you know exactly how to fix it and you’d love to do it—the problem is, they have to wait four weeks.”

Joss did exactly that, which was a telling moment for Basinger. “I knew for sure Kai was the one,” she says.

The rest of the trip went as swimmingly as the first two weeks. The only bad part of the whole experience was a single incident that Joss never lets Kai forget about. It speaks volumes about her tendency to jump into things impulsively and his hatred of spoilers. In a small South Dakota store, they found a big bag of old Nancy Drew books. They took turns reading the tales of the girl detective to each other in the car as they drove. “One day, we were reading this Nancy Drew, and [when] we got to where we were going, we took a nap. I couldn’t help it, and I finished the book,” she says sheepishly.

“I don’t think Joss has ever been madder at me than when I finished that Nancy Drew. He felt so betrayed that I would go on and finish the book. I was apologetic the whole time: ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I just lost control. I had to know what was going to happen.’

“Joss responded, ‘It’s Nancy Drew. You know what’s going to happen. It’ll work out OK.’”