Joss Whedeon, getting more canceled by the day

[polishgenius]

4 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

Really? No one is saying that? Then what is Zorral saying in these posts, exactly?

 

He's saying that Whedon based the browncoats on the confederacy and despite Whedon's best efforts to divorce the romance from the evil this cannot help but have dodgy connotations. Your point about 'cannot have the confederacy without race-based slavery' is the point: since the confederacy was entirely about that, a fictionalised version of them that takes the slavery out still cannot help but imply romance in their cause.

I'm not sure why you're so insistent that this inspiration cannot be the case when Whedon himself is on record saying that it is.

[Ran]

16 minutes ago, DMC said:

Wait, are you saying UPN didn't have Standards and Practices?  That's..really odd.

Yep... well, basically. They had no official office and a relatively small group keeping eyes on things, and were therefore a lot more permissive than their competitors.

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yep... well, basically. They had no official office and a relatively small group keeping eyes on things, and were therefore a lot more permissive than their competitors.

Huh.  I seem to remember something about that mentioned when Smackdown! debuted, but I didn't think it mattered much considering WWE's Raw was already on Viacom's TNN at the time.

[john]

I don’t see why there should have been a situation where Whedon could have been left alone with Trachtenberg anyway, regardless of the issues people had with him. It’s a tv production, they’re not selling waffle cones on the beach

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 2/12/2021 at 5:12 AM, sifth said:

Actually a few of these "trial by twitters" (such a stupid name) have been fake. Are you aware of what happened to Chris Hardwick?

Yeah, he was accused, and because it wasn't corroborated, nothing happened to him. If you're implying it was fake--that's BS. 

On 2/12/2021 at 6:10 AM, Heartofice said:

I mean that quote right there she outright says that the methods got the best out of her? Is there a quote that contradicts that?

She's struggled with mental illness all her life, and I've read interviews with her where she talked about what a long-term negative effect Kubrick's "method" caused her.

[Martini Sigil]

I honestly don;t know any specifics about Whedon's toxicity... other than being an asshole... what is he being accused of?

[polishgenius]

3 minutes ago, Martini Sigil said:

I honestly don;t know any specifics about Whedon's toxicity... other than being an asshole... what is he being accused of?

If only there was a 19 page topic somewhere detailing all his issues, proven and alleged. You could read that.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

10 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

I actually liked the humor and the snark most.

Council of Geeks and Jessie Gender's take on Joss Whedon:

"The reality is the squeaky wheel gets replaced."

Perfect.

[john]

2 hours ago, Mr Gordo said:

Eh, I’ll assume you’ve never been involved in a tv production, cause there are plenty of times they could have been the only two people in the room. It’s not just all done in one big lot. Plus if he wanted too I’m sure he could have cornered her somewhere. Even then that’s irrelevant. He was alone with her and shut went down. 

They don’t make tv shows on big lots? All right, I’ll take your word for it that creative execs routinely meet alone with junior cast members. I’m saying it shouldn’t happen like that. What is there to discuss that couldn’t have other creatives or business representatives there too? Seems damning to the whole production team that he was able to verbally abuse her badly enough in the first place that they had to instigate this rule.

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, john said:

They don’t make tv shows on big lots?

 

Deliberately changing what he said to make his point seem more ridiculous seems a bit beneath you. They're not entirely made on one big lot. Plenty of meetings happen in rooms and there's gonna be plenty of opportunity for the chief creative to pull actors aside with 'hey let's discuss some stuff about how this is going real quick' or whatever should he want it that way.

As for should it have happened? Hindsight says obviously not. Nobody was suggesting it should have.

[Annara Snow]

11 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

He's saying that Whedon based the browncoats on the confederacy and despite Whedon's best efforts to divorce the romance from the evil this cannot help but have dodgy connotations. Your point about 'cannot have the confederacy without race-based slavery' is the point: since the confederacy was entirely about that, a fictionalised version of them that takes the slavery out still cannot help but imply romance in their cause.

I'm not sure why you're so insistent that this inspiration cannot be the case when Whedon himself is on record saying that it is.

Your interpretation doesn't explain the "There is slavery and racism in the show" part. What was that supposed to mean, when used as a retort to the point that Firefly browncoats were not fighting to uphold race-based slavery?

You don't have to fight so hard to prove that someone else's comment made sense and that they wrote something you wish they wtote, rather than what they did. I don't see Zorral explaning that they meant what you say they meant. I just quoted what they said, both of their posts, so it's weird for you to insist that they said something else.

And how am I "insistent that this inspiration cannot be the case"? Now you're using a Starw Man. Of course the "romance of the lost civil war" that follows the Confederacy was the inspiration. But when you remove slavery and racism as what the lost side fought for, it's not a story of Confederacy anympre. Didn't you just agree with that?

[mormont]

Surely, the problem is that modern racists insist that racism and slavery were not what the Confederacy fought for? So, if Firefly is presenting a movement that is inspired by the Confederacy, but is not fighting for race-based slavery, then far from excusing Firefly, that is part of what makes the depiction so problematic?

[Ran]

The real sum total of the inspiration was a federation splitting and fighting a war over whether those who seceded had a right to do so or not, and some on the losing side heading away to the frontier because they didn't care to be reminded that they lost and were still subject to the system they had fought against.

The in-world explanation of the conflict is that the Alliance's corporate-controlled core worlds were exploiting the outer worlds, diverting material wealth to themselves. The Alliance isn't "evil", per se, but it  has aspects and factions that are corrupt and exploitative. So the idea that the Alliance provides assistance in some situations is true enough, but given how often we see that for the most part that justice has to be meted out by scruffy, vaguely illegitimate smugglers, the Alliance is clearly not providing services equivalent to what it's providing its core worlds and there are clear signs of institutionalized bias against the outer worlds within the Alliance military.

At the same time, it's not like the independent worlds are all happy, shiny places, and I think Firefly shows that pretty clearly. 

I think using the Civil War as a very superficial explanation of what was going  on back then definitely lends itself to misinterpretation, so it's problematic in that sense. And that's basically because he gave due credit to Shea's The Killer Angels as having inspired his thinking about Firefly.

 

[Werthead]

6 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Deliberately changing what he said to make his point seem more ridiculous seems a bit beneath you. They're not entirely made on one big lot. Plenty of meetings happen in rooms and there's gonna be plenty of opportunity for the chief creative to pull actors aside with 'hey let's discuss some stuff about how this is going real quick' or whatever should he want it that way.

As for should it have happened? Hindsight says obviously not. Nobody was suggesting it should have.

The producers, showrunners and even writers have their own offices and actors can get pulled into them, whilst actors have their own rooms (or trailers, depending on the setup), plus there's generic meeting rooms in most studios. It's also not exactly an unusual situation for the showrunner to call an actor into a one-to-one to talk about their character, especially if they don't want information about upcoming stories to get out to other people who don't need to know.

[john]

13 hours ago, polishgenius said:

As for should it have happened? Hindsight says obviously not. Nobody was suggesting it should have.

I’m talking about the one on one meetings shouldn’t have happened. Everybody is suggesting that is par for the course and I’m not disputing it but it seems like a dumb idea to me. Not because of potential abuse, just because it’s a collaborative creative endeavour. Ok, I take Wert’s point about meetings over plot lines that are supposed to be secret, that hadn’t occurred to me, but even then you could have more than one writer in the room.

re the Civil War: for what it’s worth, when I first saw Firefly I assumed browncoat was like a switched version of redcoat and it was a thing about the revolutionary war, not the civil war.

[Werthead]

 

[Ran]

That's the sort of response I would expect from a lot of people, and indeed it's what a lot of people have been saying if you really look at what they're actually saying -- that the experience was fine and professional for them, and that they don't seem to have recognized at the time that others were having a very different experience but will stand by and support anyone who tells their truth now. They're good friends and colleagues.

I imagine some day there'll be some deep-dive interviews laying out more of what was going on behind the scenes for some of the actors who have made statements suggesting they suffered similar treatment to Carpenter but haven't gone into detail about it. I expect it'll be a long time, though, before they feel comfortable with it.

 

 

[Ran]

None of the Firefly actors have really commented, and contrary to the suggestion that Baldwin was the only one who spoke up about not having negative experiences with Whedon when Fisher voiced his complaints, Alan Tudyk also tweeted (last year) that he found Fisher's claims hard to imagine after having known Whedon for 17 years.

Of course, he deleted that tweet today or yesterday when folks tagged him about the current stuff, and he apparently liked Amy Acker's statement, for whatever that is worth on Twitter. Doesn't seem to change the fact that in 2020 he knew no reason to believe Fisher's claims out of hand, which suggests that his experience of Firefly and Whedon was entirely positive., And to be fair to Baldwin, Tudyk, and anyone from Firefly's cast who haven't piped up,  I think it's very likely that Firefly just never had any of the issues on set with Whedon that may have existed for some actors on Buffy and Angel. 

 

[Lord Varys]

10 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

You wonder if the reason Firefly didn't have as much problems is because it didn't run long. 

That was my idea, too. They just made about a dozen episodes. Not that much time for a lot of shit piling up.

[Ran]

I think it's possible. It may also have been just some sort of dynamics specific to those sets. David Fury, in talking about Carpenter, goes to a more general point about some challenges they had on Buffy and Angel, and seemed vaguely exasperated with (some of) the actors:

Quote

It felt a little bit like we were all working our assess off to keep these people employed and it’s like, you have to take that into consideration before you make any life choices. You just do. And you have to be much more vocal about it. If something happens and you tell them early on or whatever the thing is, that’s fine. But it’s the idea of just kind of showing up and, boom, “I’ve got tattoos,” or, boom, “I cut my hair in the middle of an episode,” which I think Sarah did. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now you’re just fucking with us. You’re making it so hard to finish this episode, because you’re changing it.” There’s always that attitude of, “It’s my life and I can do anything I want to.” Well, that’s not great.

I think Emma Caulfield also messed with her hair color mid-episode on one or more occasions, IIRC. Like, maybe people doing petty stuff like that is a sign that something had broken down in the relationship between the performers that did things like that and the production. On the other hand, maybe this is just purely an artefact of working multiple seasons together -- the small issues pile up and start to get more irritating in retrospect.