Buffy

Big reported (with BTL workers) story:
https://variety.com/2021/tv/features/joss-whedon-buffy-angel-charisma-carpenter-toxic-workplace-1234915549/

According to sources, after Whedon created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 1997, he was largely left alone, operating on a tight budget with little oversight, thanks to a steady stream of strong media buzz and rich key-demo ratings. The show shot at a relatively remote location on soundstages in Santa Monica where executives were not regularly roaming around, and the production operated much like an indie film. Insiders say the combination of Whedon’s lack of experience running a television show, the financial pressures of delivering an action-and-effects-heavy hourlong dramedy, a cast largely populated with young and eager actors, and the absence of regular supervision contributed to an environment ripe for a chaotic, highly competitive, toxic workplace. Many people who spoke with Variety described the set as operating like high school, with Whedon making everyone aware of who was in and who was out.

Another major factor contributing to the messy nature of the “Buffy” set: Stories of Whedon engaging in affairs with women working on the show quickly spread, according to three independent sources. As the executive producer and showrunner, Whedon was the boss, including of the women with whom he engaged in relationships. The alleged behavior contributed to a toxic workplace and heightened competition on set, blurring the lines between personal and professional demeanor for the cast — dynamics that continued long after Whedon’s purported affairs ended.

This describes so so many toxic workplaces pic.twitter.com/NQoNYThItV

— Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis (@KendraWrites) February 26, 2021

The last 1/3 of this is a nice write-up of the screwball mode of American art.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7d34y/when-joss-whedon-was-our-master

wherein: Joss Whedon, a narcissist hangs himself with his own rope, preserving the rich tradition of selfowning narcissists since time immemorial

the final paragraph is like *throws phone through window*

https://www.vulture.com/article/joss-whedon-allegations.html

and the Ray Fisher stuff is wtf

I guess Joss Whedon's comeback strategy is to gaslight Ray Fisher on Martin Luther King Jr. Day? pic.twitter.com/jRa1Lt3iVA

— ☕Stephen M. Colbert (@smcolbert) January 17, 2022

I doubt Whedon specified that Vulture should publish on MLK Day, but it is extremely damning anyway

That piece xyz linked is weak though. The writer seems to think screwball is defined as a) is based on a play and b) privileges dialogue over action; they also only cite His Girl Friday (ok) and Arsenic & Old Lace (uh wut) as exemplars of screwball.

I understand why JW has emerged as a popular lightning rod for overly stylized, recognizably voiced, "all the characters sound the same" screenwriting, but if you actually lived through his rise to fame you might recall all the same things being said about Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc. Not to mention Woody Allen, Armando Ianucci, Succession, etc. There are countless other examples

Fisher in response

Looks like Joss Whedon got to direct an endgame after all…

Rather than address all of the lies and buffoonery today—I will be celebrating the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Tomorrow the work continues.#MLKDay

A>E

— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) January 17, 2022

JW cant even use the "have to go pee" move again now

Thanks Rob, don't know much about screwball so was wondering what others thought about it.

digging into the real issue tho: his adjustable dome size is mesmerising and perhaps even in its way beautiful

Thoughts and prayers for silence. pic.twitter.com/D9PynqmnHz

— Aaron Pruner (@AaronFlux) January 17, 2022

This was a nice thread on that piece (which I am not going to read, the 'highlights' are bad enough)

so where's this Joss Whedon article that's making you all mad. Someone pass it over, it's my turn

— extortin, snortin, supportin corbyn (@fireh9lly) January 17, 2022

Ah ok to be clearer on my objections then:

The "based on plays" thing is just a head-scratcher. While some screwball comedies are based on plays, many are not. And the idea that being based on a play means you end up with people in a room talking to each other isn't particularly true either. Most pertinently that ignores the genre of farce—a key influence on screwball—where characters are often moving on and off stage. While the dialogue will strike contemporary viewers as the most obvious characteristic, there's also plenty of physical comedy elements in screwball, and I just don't agree that dialogue is the only way character is communicated in screwball (costumes are often super important!). Plus, rapid, rat-a-tat dialogue can be found in lots of classic, non-screwball hollywood movies like gangster films or noir. Personally, I don't think Whedon's stuff sounds partic screwball; in contrast, mentioned above, Amy Sherman Palladino was v deliberately going for a screwball style with Gilmore Girls and you can tell.

Examples of screwball: core classics would be films like It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, My Man Godfrey, and The Palm Beach Story. Importantly, these are all *romantic comedies*—which is why Arsenic & Old Lace is such an odd one to claim as screwball (it's a black comedy)—and usually the leads are at odds for most of the film in a "battle of the sexes." Like any genre, the limits can be contentious, so you can get screwball-ish films that aren't rom-com, but you wouldn't start there when defining it. Amusingly, despite that Vice writer going into depth on Whedon's doubtlessly bad X-Men run, they don't mention Much Ado About Nothing: a battle of the sexes romantic comedy based on a play. Obviously calling a Shakespeare screwball would be anachronistic, but it helped set the template!

I doubt Whedon specified that Vulture should publish on MLK Day, but it is extremely damning anyway

That piece xyz linked is weak though. The writer seems to think screwball is defined as a) is based on a play and b) privileges dialogue over action; they also only cite His Girl Friday (ok) and Arsenic & Old Lace (uh wut) as exemplars of screwball.

I understand why JW has emerged as a popular lightning rod for overly stylized, recognizably voiced, "all the characters sound the same" screenwriting, but if you actually lived through his rise to fame you might recall all the same things being said about Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc. Not to mention Woody Allen, Armando Ianucci, Succession, etc. There are countless other examples

― rob, Monday, 17 January 2022 22:00 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Very weirdly written in places ("Lavinia Bidlow[...] is played by an actress from Whedon’s Dollhouse, where she also played a morally ambiguous matriarch." - could the writer not be bothered to google her name??) and over-reaching in it's attempt to dismantle Whedon's legacy. It's a tainted legacy to be sure and lots of it has aged poorly, but "His comics writing is occasionally sub-par" seems a bit of a feeble criticism given the more serious allegations raised against him.

Totally. I get why the knives are out and have no interest in defending his work in 2022, but "Joss Whedon is the reason the live-action Cowboy Bebop sucked shit" is not a claim worth making right now for several reasons

this all seems foreseeable from the moment he changed his name to 'joss'

lol

Read that full interview now. Holy shit.

There are points where he almost, almost convinces you to pity him, and then you read the accounts from women he's dated and it reads like the behaviour of a pure sociopath. Thanks for the fun times Joss, hope you never work again.

Read that full interview now. Holy shit.

There are points where he almost, almost convinces you to pity him, and then you read the accounts from women he's dated and it reads like the behaviour of a pure sociopath. Thanks for the fun times Joss, hope you never work again.

Indeed.

Joss always seemed to get ultra defensive about keeping things within the strong vision he himself had for what the story/end product should become, he was never open to anyone altering things or doing anything other than helping him create his story. I remember James Marsters once saying that he thought of a direction for Spike (I believe it was Spike falling in love with Buffy) but that he had to pitch it as a tongue-in-cheek joke to Joss so there was a chance for Joss to take it as his own idea. Joss' own accounts on working with Donald Sutherland, working on the Alien script and again here on working on Justice League also all show that he expected actors to say the lines he had written for them.
In that sense, I can sort of understand where he was coming from regarding his treatment of cast and crew, but it sure doesn't excuse it and it indeed all reveals his character as a narcissistic asshole. And that is even beside his infidelity and treatment of women.
I still love pretty much all of Joss' creations, even with the rotten core of his ego-driven forceful creation towards HIS products, but as much as I think he wanted it, there is still far more to all of those shows and movies than only Joss writing that made them what they are: the cast, the other crew - sadly mistreated as many of them were, they still made for some terrific art.

And Joss Whedon may be a terrible nasty sociopath, but he certainly does have his talents in writing dialogue and general storylines.

I also thought that the vice article was terribly weak. The author doesn't like Joss' writing and somehow seems to wants to prove that it has always been bad writing with bad influence. But a lot of it is missing the point or making subjective arguments which I really cannot agree to. The article also makes a big point out of the fact that Joss' work is dialogue-driven and we're not shown why characters feel or act the way they do. It's dialogue driven, sure, but it is not only dialogue and many examples could be given of strong scenes without dialogue ('Hush', anyone?). Also, a lot of the dialogue is really good and does reveal a lot about the characters. I don't agree with many of the given examples. I thought the X-Men run was fine & the quoted dialogue was actually pretty good - I personally had more of an issue with the plotting of Joss' comics than with the text.
Also, I don't agree at all with the thing about characters being derivative of each other. Kaylee is nothing like Willow. Topher is nothing like Xander.

That last paragraph is so infuriating. What a fucking dick.

He is exactly the toxic narcissist that all those Insta reels warned us about

That article reminds me of various profiles I've read of tech bros in the Silicon Valley, these nerds suddenly given money and power and explicitly coming to the twisted conclusion, well, might as well take advantage of it now and do and be all the terrible things we could never do and be in high school.

I still don't quite follow the Ray Fisher stuff, but even setting aside what may or may not have happened on Justice League (a misbegotten project all around), or Buffy, he sounds like he at the very least grew into a bad person that, for all his purported therapy and pursuit of personal betterness, does not appear to have learned a single lesson.

Did he "grow into" a bad person? Or maybe he was always a gnarled mass of eels, but he hid it well because he liked the attention he got for appearing to be a S.N.A.G.?

I don't see his story as "wide-eyed wunderkind becomes beloved through innovative work, then becomes bad because power and fame corrupted him."

I see it as "He was a deeply troubled and flawed young man, who noticed early on that the best way to get the approval he desperately wanted from attractive and smart young women was to create an elaborate persona of woke feminism. He went to precisely the sort of college where that worked as a dating strategy. As his fame and cachet increased, he realized how much he could get away with, he had no incentive to change."

Maybe he couldn't tell where the persona ended and the "real" Joss began. But in any case, since everyone kept telling him he was brilliant and beloved, there was no reason for him not to indulge his long-held fantasies. In scripts, on various sizes of screen, and - heck - in various dressing rooms. Because why not?

I don't think he came into the industry pure as snow and got corrupted in the process. That lets him off too easily. I think he entered the industry and cannily saw a path to making his 13-year-old's jerkoff scenarios come true. He was fantastically rewarded for doing so (as long as they were couched in an overall storyline of "female empowerment") so there was never a reason for him to evolve.

If in his later career he did stuff like therapy or whatever, mmmkay, but the seed (NPI) was probably there from the beginning.

i think whedon's writing got worse over time tbh (which is not exactly advocated by that v flattening vice piece, but regardless). he totally burrowed into his own tropes. i recall with unfortunate clarity the "we have a black president now" line from the season one finale of dollhouse

also it's impossible not to feel like he made one of the characters in firefly a sex worker just so she could get called a whore constantly

i think whedon's writing got worse over time tbh

yep. I watched The Nevers and while it wasn't awful (I'd compare it to something like the revived Doctor Who), the degree to which it was clearly "joss plays the hits" was pretty embarrassing. If we're narrativizing his career, I think "dude ran out of ideas" is more apt than some of this remote psychopathology

Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc

def always lumped whedon in with this crew in my head so no certainly not solely responsible for this particular strain of horrible writing, god what a baleful and wearisome bunch

I (haven't seen the Nevers but) don't really share the impression that his writing got worse. I think his writing was always overall (IMO) very good, but with occasional flaws from early on.
The impression I get is that after seeing more of his work, some of his tropes became more apparent through frequent use and got very, very tiresome. And none more than the notion that people are simply not allowed to have a happy relationship, because of some kind of philosophy that characters ending up together may be what the viewers want but not what they need. That's why as soon as people finally get together, one gets killed off or worse. I often wondered if that was some kind of pathetic release of Joss' own personal frustrations/inabilities.

It definitely sheds new light on Tara's death.

Like, a really gross new light.

some of his tropes became more apparent through frequent use and got very, very tiresome. And none more than the notion that people are simply not allowed to have a happy relationship, because of some kind of philosophy that characters ending up together may be what the viewers want but not what they need

Okay not to be Cap'n Save-a-Joss, but this was always endemic to television, and increasingly so to movies.

It was everywhere 20 years ago. I would argue that it is even more present today, when franchises and reboots thereof are basically the only thing studios will bankroll.

In the US at least, television series need to be a perpetual motion machine. Storylines mostly cannot ever resolve. Hence, people can't be happy - or can't be happy for long, because that means series death. You need to keep torturing your characters and delay their gratification, and if they get any satisfaction at all it must be ripped away from them at the soonest opportunity.

In the UK, I gather, there is more appetite for series that are permitted to be limited, so it's possible for a UK television character to become happy. But a US television character cannot be allowed to be happy.

It's like, no one wants to watch Romeo and Juliet as a happily married couple, raising adorable kids and eating grapes in the sunshine until they die blissfully at the same moment in one another's arms. Because drama requires conflict. This is an problem that is significantly older than Joseph Motherfucking Whedon.

Joss may not have invented the notion but he took it to the exteme and kind of made it his trademark. Tara gets killed the moment after renewing her relationship with Willow. Fred gets fatally possessed the episode after finally getting together with Wesley. Not to mention what happened wit Cordelia/Angel, Jenny/Giles, Anya/Xander and there are more examples, also Dollhouse Topher/whatshername etc. Buffy allowed for plenty of status quo change but not this. Compare fir example with a show like Grimm (helmed by a Buffy/Angel alum, also featuring Alexis Denisof), where two inportant side characters do hook up early on, develop to marriage and end happily ever after. You can be sure that they wouldn't have, had Joss Whedon been running that show.

Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc

def always lumped whedon in with this crew in my head so no certainly not solely responsible for this particular strain of horrible writing, god what a baleful and wearisome bunch

― Nerd Ragequit (wins), Tuesday, January 18, 2022 11:29 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago)

tbf I meant to include a few writers I'm actually fond of here, but I blanked on a good example (I did mention Succession later). Maybe Milch? One of the things I hated most in that Vice piece was the bit about how it's bad when it "sounds like a writer wrote that," a terrible philistine opinion. Lord save us from a Deadwood with naturalistic dialogue

whedon's shows were def celebrated to some degree for his willingness to off major characters

the moment this stopped being effective for me and revealed itself as a rotten, lazy and emotionally manipulative trope was wash's death in serenity

actually tara's death never landed for me either but they also barely developed her character imo

Agreed on Serenity/Wash. The movie also took out Book, who had a ton of backstory to explore.

Grimm - Monroe/Rosalie were great, plus they had the Nick/Juliette/Adalind triangle for The Drama.

xp to rob otm I didn’t read the vice thing but “nobody talks like this!” never seemed a valuable criticism to me esp in these cases where “this is insufferable” is closer to the mark

bunheads was good, yr insufferable

i will stump for williamson, cody, and specific sherman-palladino projects (first three seasons of gg and, as mentioned, bunheads. mrs. maisel is an awful show from hell imo but i get why people like it)

wins otm

nobody talked like the people in Shakespeare either

or Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, etc.

I don’t actually know know as-p (name is kind of annoying tho) always avoided her stuff for the very reason that I get tired of these things that aren’t comedy (& thus free of the necessity to be funny) but everything must be a quip anyway

Williamson & sorkin are the worst to me but with all of them it’s like there can be value right up to the point where the water torture of the dialogue just becomes shut up shut up shut UP

know-know it’s what it’s called when you know a hyphenated creator

The movie also took out Book, who had a ton of backstory to explore.

book was always more of a theoretically interesting character than an actually interesting character, but the movie still did him very dirty

the moment this stopped being effective for me and revealed itself as a rotten, lazy and emotionally manipulative trope was wash's death in serenity

For me it was earlier, with Fred's possession in Angel. The episode 'A Hole in the World', written and directed by Joss himself, is often regarded as one of the series' best episodes. But I couldn't see what happened to Fred as simply part of the story anymore, it was Joss doing his thing again. With an entire episode to hammer in the fact that this was what was happening and there was nothing to be done about it.
I like Illyria and the subsequent episodes a lot, but dislike 'A Hole in the World' & Fred's death for more than merely storyline reasons. Also because it is the first thing to happen right after her one moment of relationship bliss with Wesley.

To be fair, the Serenity movie did give us the one Whedonverse relationship to make it to the end (Kaylee/Simon). Hollywood pressure?

he expected actors to say the lines he had written for them

isn't this generally how it works?

i know there are directors who believe in improvisation and i imagine most actors enjoy having that extra input/freedom but i kind of thought that was fairly rare. particularly if the person who wrote the script is also the director

Depends on the kind of film/show, comedy that involves the actors riffing off each other obviously has a lot more room for off-the-cuff improv, sometimes to the detriment (e.g. Ghostbusters 2016)

If it's a gazillion dollar superhero movie with a troubled production, and things are already tense and difficult, you could see it causing some problems if some of the cast suddenly decide to go off-script.

xp

I got the impression that at a certain point Whedon lost interest in running a cohesive show or writing solid episodes that progressed the narrative and became more focused on showing that he could do anything he wanted to. Hence, he can write a Lynchian dream episode, or an existentialist drama, or a musical, or in this case, an operatic tragedy, and if the effect on the audience seems gross and manipulative well that’s too bad because he’s going to write his operatic tragedy.

don't forget the puppet episode of Angel

pic.twitter.com/vNBgoRPVOW

— charisma carpenter (@AllCharisma) January 18, 2022

xpost puppet episode was by Ben Edlund, bit of an undervalued contributor to the latter seasons of Angel (and Firefly)

<3 charisma carpenter forever

the Vulture profile was so so satisfying to read...novelistic!