Buffy

It was always rumoured that she was fired because of her pregnancy.

they actually wrote it into the script for angel but then she ended up in a coma and was never seen again.

Such a feminist, that Joss!

He is a proper scumbag. And it’s never just one instance is it? There are multiple people on different set over decades reporting similar bullying and abuse.

I always hate when it is related to something I hold dear, because I never know where to stand on cancel culture. Kinda wish all these scumbags/criminals would be self produced solo singer songwriters who I could easily forget about, not years of tv history made by whole crews of people who all can get painted with the same brush.

In retrospect, it's a red flag when your stars become visibly anorexic over the course of a show; we should have guessed that Buffy had similar on-set dynamics to, say, Ally McBeal.

Was that the case with Buffy? SMG shrank pretty drastically between s1-2 but you always seem to see this happen with female stars just when their careers start to take off.

Damn. Damn damn damn. pic.twitter.com/6iPDKeb8SB

— Connor Goldsmith (@dreamoforgonon) February 10, 2021

It was the case on Buffy and on Angel. Women who started out thin got thinner. The only exception I can think of is Amber Benson who was also thin but a larger instance of thin than most Joss heroines.

Also I think Twitter ruined James Marsters for me when someone linked the creepy ass love song he made for Michelle Trachtenberg

— Openly Black Studs Twerkel. (@thewayoftheid) March 29, 2017

something so heartbreaking about SMG being the workhorse of that show for 7 years—and a model of professionalism—and being treated poorly. How dare he?

Anyway, obvs this is a structural problem with the industry but fuck joss for real.

xps to horseshoe I’ve barely watched any of the last two series but maybe it was less apparent to me?

I think it’s in part that Joss likes a waif (Aly Hannigan, the actress who plays Fred) and then women who don’t fit that profile seem to get skinnier the longer they’re on one of his shows. Carpenter, who was basically the most beautiful person ever, got very skinny in season 3 of Buffy. Of course that happened on non-Joss shows too, but I agree with Lily Dale, not surprising he called her fat.

> the actress who plays Fred

amy acker

who was also in doll's house (as did eliza dushka) and cabin in the woods.

among the saddest parts to me is that joss' behavior was likely 99.9% known to all, all along, but by hollywood standards he was likely considered, consciously or not, a relatively "safe" evil

Speaking of Whedon Waifs, I guess Felicia Day hasn't made a statement yet?

Accusations that US director Josh Whedon abused power over innocent nubiles rock world of capitalist cinema. pic.twitter.com/j40v0zz56S

— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) February 10, 2021

there's a lot of women in the Whedon club who worked with him again and again - assuming he was not abusive to them necessarily

so he's just a run-of-the-mill Hollywood asshole? sad to say "at least he's not a rapist!" good to see actors fighting back against this bullshit artist mythology

No I think it’s more that the industry encourages a model of abusive male director and vulnerable female star...it’s built in and expected and everyone looks the other way. (I’m thinking Otto Preminger and Jean Seberg but there are obvs a million examples: Hitchcock, for one). Just because he didn’t do it to all his female stars doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Also, I think Joss had a particular compulsion to tell feminist stories while cutting down women.

also we can’t assume that women who aren’t talking haven’t experienced this behavior, though they may not have

i didn't mean to imply it wasn't real - it's typical of abusers to single out targets they feel are vulnerable, while treating others normally. just mentioning because he DID have a great network of female talent that he would reuse in all his projects

yeah, the fact that his work was so straight-up girl power makes this story so daft

also - like Weinstein - not coincidental that he's finally getting a reckoning after his success/ability to produce hits has died over the last decade. shame it didn't happen sooner

I just think it suggests a particular kind of pleasure in being the feminist director who low key enjoys punishing actual women. Lots of smart men are feminist in theory.

What you said a while ago reminded me of how lots of his stories are about these superstrong, tiny women and that was always really jarring with a lot of the stories you’d hear floating around re Charisma & also what his ex-wife said about him. There’s a good summary with tons of links on The Cut about this.

I am just posting endlessly in this thread because the idea of him being mean to Sarah Michelle (for seven years! While she made him look like a genius and worked her ass off!) makes me want to KILL

I am also currently watching the Britney doc so I’m, like, rage short-circuiting.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/8596ee9f1a334b8669ba9687497ff260/tumblr_ox3gaxm11u1s9c6nao1_1280.jpg

By all means, post away. I’m glad the women are all supporting each other, I absolutely loved the Buffy women a lot.

also - like Weinstein - not coincidental that he's finally getting a reckoning after his success/ability to produce hits has died over the last decade. shame it didn't happen sooner

this is almost certainly more a case of people believing abuse testimonies / targets of abuse having outlets to speak than his hits drying up. His last decade of output has been: a film that grossed 1.5 billion; its sequel that grossed 1.4 billion; a film that grossed 70 mil on a 30mil budget and did well on home media; a self-funded B&W indie shot in his own house that grossed over 5 million; and writing & shooting 90% of a franchise film that grossed 660 million and is still the subject of so much cultural discussion that it's getting a 4-hour director's cut this year.

his ability to have people who worked on projects with him say positive things about him does seem to have progressively dried up over the decade, though.

second Avengers did well at the box office, but so does every Marvel movie. It's probably one of the most disliked MCU films though, and he basically didn't really want to do it. One wonders the same about Justice League...

is still the subject of so much cultural discussion that it's getting a 4-hour director's cut this year.

what was the 30mil/70mil movie?

Cabin In The Woods

oh, right. i love CITW but i didn't get the impression it was considered a success

success on its own terms, the only good thing he's written in a decade etc

anyway I really just wanted to make the point that its very good that so many ppl now feel able to speak out, whether or not he's vastly more prominent in Hollywood now than when Buffy was getting cancelled and having to move to a low-budget children's channel

horseshoe relentlessly otm, thanking u

I agree w/ sic, nhex's take seems ahistorical. Also he didn't direct CitW!

Look at this way - if Justice League had done gangbusters as WB had hoped, the Synderverse would've continued, we would've likely had the Cyborg and Flash movies by now, and this Ray Fisher thing would've disappeared. Carpenter only came out openly today because of her involvement in the investigation prodded by Fisher.

i don’t know what happened to anyone who hasn’t told me of course but conceivably women who worked for him multiple times are proud of their work, loved things about doing it, and told themselves at the time any parts they didn’t love were simply features of the industry, which as horseshoe stresses they would have been grimly correct about. speaking-out avalanches like this are imo mostly about laying the ground for people to refuse to put up w this kind of thing in the future, confident that it is not actually the necessary price for the real joy of playing cordelia.

aside from all the actress’ work the writing/directing credits of buffy episodes are pretty full of women’s names iirc; i haven’t thought of the show as a whedon auteur project for a long time. that i did once is obv part of the problem.

Yeah for sure; TV is collaboration and SMG and Carpenter in particular helped make Buffy great.

Amber Benson tweet:

Buffy was a toxic environment and it starts at the top. @AllCharisma is speaking truth and I support her 100%. There was a lot of damage done during that time and many of us are still processing it twenty plus years later. #IStandWithRayFisher #IStandWithCharismaCarpenter https://t.co/WJAmDGm76C

— Amber Benson (@amber_benson) February 10, 2021

i don’t know what happened to anyone who hasn’t told me of course but conceivably women who worked for him multiple times are proud of their work, loved things about doing it, and told themselves at the time any parts they didn’t love were simply features of the industry, which as horseshoe stresses they would have been grimly correct about. speaking-out avalanches like this are imo mostly about laying the ground for people to refuse to put up w this kind of thing in the future, confident that it is not actually the necessary price for the real joy of playing cordelia.

Or… these people work in an industry where getting work is notoriously difficult and getting predictable high-paying high-profile work is next to impossible so people end up taking jobs that with people they know over people they like because the people they know are the ones giving them jobs and everyone has bills.

yup. no rocket science required

Whedon was good at writing creepy, controlling nerd characters, like the Buffybot guy. Write what you know, I guess.

fun fact, the actor who played Buffybot guy (Adam Busch) had/has an almost-decent band called Common Rotation. I went to a house concert of theirs some time in the 2000s. I was dating a Buffy fan and he (Busch) was dating Amber Benson. We shared an elevator and, for some reason, bought her novel.

(Just to clarify, I don't mean that we bought her novel in the elevator. My memory of that night is fuzzy, but I think we got to talking and ended up buying a copy of her novel but I don't think we bought any of his records. They seemed nice.)

everyone has bills

sure. just saying “the boss is an abusive asshole” is not the only quality of a job, which is another reason continuing to work with him isn’t proof you think he isn’t.

It can also be hard to realize how abusive an environment is when you are immersed in it, especially if the other people immersed in it have come to think of it as normal. And if you are young and it's one of your first work experiences, you may not have the frame of reference to know what's expected and what's not.

Yeah and if you swim in the soup of a misogynist culture everyday. Who among us doesn't look back on the stuff we put up with in our teens and twenties with horror?

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress Michelle Trachtenberg claims showrunner and creator Joss Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her on set.

jesus christ

a Firefly writer:

"Casually cruel" is a perfect way of describing Joss. He thought being mean was funny. Making female writers cry during a notes session was especially hysterical. He actually liked to boast about the time he made one writer cry twice in one meeting. #IStandWithCharismaCarpenter https://t.co/SgPF1rgRby

— Jose Molina (@JoseMolinaTV) February 13, 2021

My dream is all the actresses & their stunt doubles show up at his door and roundhouse kick him in his face one after another

Fucking w all these great women who made these shows successful is just so heinous

It hurts my heart & makes me so angry