Joss Whedon: The Biography Read Free

in the elder Whedon, who encouraged him to bypass the traditional path to Hollywood success. If he hadn’t been let down by his first job, on
Roseanne
, he wouldn’t have learned how the choices producers make can either unite or divide a set, or that it can be good to walk away from what you thought was your dream job. If
Buffy
the film had been a hit, there would most likely not have been
Buffy
the television series—nor Joss Whedon the director, a role he honed on the
Buffy
series after an initial terrible experience with a crew who didn’t like him. If the Writers Guild strike hadn’t shut down Joss’s work on his Fox series
Dollhouse
, he wouldn’t have had the time to discuss web series ideas with his younger brother and his fiancée, which led to
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
and a new model for launching original creative content online.
    And if all of these failures had been avoided, the world would be bereft of Joss’s characters. And without them, many people might not have found touchstones of strength and guidance to help them through hard times. Without Joss and Buffy, I, personally, would not have found the fortitude and bravery to confront the man next to me on the bus—to tell him what he had done, so that I could leave that twenty-year burden with him and finally move on.
    Even with an impressive résumé that includes the highest-grossing blockbuster of 2012, two beloved cult series, and significant contributions to several pop culture phenomena, Joss still loses more than he wins. But like his heroes, Joss Whedon not only counts his victories, no matter how small, but shows how his defeats can be counted as wins too.

1
A FAMILY OF STORYTELLERS
    Much has been made of Joss Whedon’s ability to reinvent modern storytelling. First, he upended the “blonde girl trapped in an alley” horror trope with the 1992 film
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Five years later, his “high school is hell” approach to the
Buffy
TV series reignited both teenage dramas and sci-fi/fantasy television. Most recently, he assembled a bunch of outsiders into
The Avengers
, or as it’s been called, “the perfect comic-book movie.” But he wasn’t the first in his family to find success in Hollywood. He wasn’t even the second.
    Joseph Hill Whedon—he would name himself “Joss” in college—was the third son of Ann Lee Jeffries Whedon, a teacher and author, and Thomas Avery Whedon, a television writer who worked on
Captain Kangaroo, The Electric Company
, and
The Golden Girls
. His paternal grandfather, John Ogden Whedon, wrote for such classic TV series as
The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show
, and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.
    In the mid-1920s, John Whedon left his hometown of New York City and headed up the East Coast to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard University. The school would graduate several members of the Whedon family: Burt Denison Whedon, John’s father, received a bachelor of laws degree in 1903; John’s brother, Roger, graduated in 1929; and John was in the class of 1927. Both John and Roger focused on writing and were named to the literary board of the famed undergraduate humor magazine the
Harvard Lampoon
. John was elected president of the
Harvard Lampoon
in 1926 and was a member of another long-lived Harvard institution: the Hasty Pudding Club.
    The oldest collegiate social club in America, which counted Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy among its members, the group staged musicals that were completely written,composed, and produced by students. In the spring of his senior year, John Whedon was chosen to collaborate on
Gentlemen, the Queen
, the eighty-first annual production of Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
    After graduation, John returned to New York and started writing and editing for several magazines, including the
Forum, Harper’s Magazine, Collier’s Weekly
, and the brand-new
New Yorker
, where he later served as managing editor. There he penned