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Joss Whedon: So Cancelled His Thread Got a Sequel


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The take away I get from most of the toxic workplace revelations and allegations coming out of the TV and movie biz (not just the Joss situation) is that it's hard (or uncommon) to be an A-list writer/director/producer and not be an arsehole, and it's also not uncommon common for A-list actors to be arseholes too and treat other actors and crew poorly. And there is a fine line between being an arsehole and creating a toxic and abusive work environment, esp when you are in a position of power and control.

It also seems that outside of the biz the level of arseholery from people in positions of authority towards their subordinates that is accepted in the biz would not be tolerated in other sectors, and it would be called for what it is: bullying or worse. 

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39 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The take away I get from most of the toxic workplace revelations and allegations coming out of the TV and movie biz (not just the Joss situation) is that it's hard (or uncommon) to be an A-list writer/director/producer and not be an arsehole, and it's also not uncommon common for A-list actors to be arseholes too and treat other actors and crew poorly. And there is a fine line between being an arsehole and creating a toxic and abusive work environment, esp when you are in a position of power and control.

Everyone has their quirks and complexes. Everyone goes through a rough patch and sometimes take it out on those around them. This thing with Whedon sounds like another level. Worth noting: Ray fisher's earliest public allegation about the JL reshoots was that he took his complaints through the proper internal channels and was rebuffed.

43 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It also seems that outside of the biz the level of arseholery from people in positions of authority towards their subordinates that is accepted in the biz would not be tolerated in other sectors, and it would be called for what it is: bullying or worse. 

You'd be surprised. I had one boss who was always a bit quirky and demanding but also supportive and fair.  He was laser focused on his job and really good at what he did. He was one of those people you couldn't imagine working anywhere else for any reason. A few years later I was shocked to discover he had been forced out.  For reasons that's still a total mystery, his quirky behavior got more and more extreme.

He wasn't doing anything illegal per se but he was definitely unprofessional and making his subordinates lives miserable. His superior quietly investigated by interviewing his people one by one. "I've been hearing some things and I'd like you to tell me your side of things", he'd say. the more these stories started to rhyme, the clearer it was that action needed to be taken. To make a long story short, he had it made clear to him that he'd wind up V.P. of mops and brooms if he stuck around. He left on his own. 

At a different company, I had a superior who practiced a very "kiss-up, kick-down" style of management. She fostered the most corrosive work environment I've ever experienced. Either management was oblivious or just didn't care. The people who didn't quit only stayed on in the hope of making a lateral move into another department.  There were a lot.

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The telltale thing that this isn't just 'shitty normal' is that there was supposedly a rule on set that Joss Whedon couldn't be alone in a room with Michelle Trachtenberg - then a 14-16-year-old minor.

This isn't something that happens under normal circumstances - and that guy must really be shitty as hell to be a person who makes minor uncomfortable to this degree. He should ensure that she is comfortable working, not the other way around.

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37 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

The telltale thing that this isn't just 'shitty normal' is that there was supposedly a rule on set that Joss Whedon couldn't be alone in a room with Michelle Trachtenberg - then a 14-16-year-old minor.

This isn't something that happens under normal circumstances - and that guy must really be shitty as hell to be a person who makes minor uncomfortable to this degree. He should ensure that she is comfortable working, not the other way around.

How did this rule come about? Who ordered it and was it just about Whedon and Trachtenberg or did it apply to other people too?

I know this was touched on before but clearly the entertainment industry is dealing with the problem of indulging it’s talent, and has a history of covering up wrong doing.

This is all stuff that doesn’t tend to happen any more in the outside world. I’ve worked in companies where bosses scream and shout and bully workers, and often those companies don’t have mature HR processes to deal with if, or the people in charge are simply too central to the business for anyone to really do anything. But that has become less common over the years and mostly I think most bad behaviour is done in a less obvious, sneaky way now.

The entertainment industry has always been so focused on the Talent, that it can overlook anything if that talent still makes money. Maybe these days Talent has less pull and power. Actors and directors rarely have enough pull to sell a movie on their name alone any more, and everyone can be replaced. 

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34 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I’ve worked in companies where bosses scream and shout and bully workers, and often those companies don’t have mature HR processes to deal with if, or the people in charge are simply too central to the business for anyone to really do anything.

Or ANY HR policies for that matter. 

Have been in similar situations. And it's forced me to go on exhausting charm offensives and work a detrimental number of extra hours to effect positive change. 

THAT SAID - @Lord Varys* did mention that Trachtenberg was 14-16 at the time - and Californian child labour-laws** do include rules around expected behaviour towars under-age minors (there are mentions of hazardous activities, which I can see being interpreted in a loose manner by a sufficiently competent barrister - though I suspect @Rhom, if I am not mistaken, could talk about this more sufficiently, as I think they're a practicing lawyer? If I've confused you with someone else Rhom, my apologies in advance!). 

*Did you know there's also a @lordvarysberrys here? So we've got Lord Varys and Lord Varys Berrys. So one likes fruit more than the other?

** I know, I know, the rules change per state, but for the purposes of [hopefully civil!] argument, let's assume a certain level of semi-consistency. Also, because, y'know, I think it's clear that being a dick to kids is generally not seen as a being ok. Speaking, especially, as a primary school teacher myself.

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I think we can be reasonably confident that any such 'rule' wasn't written down or formally ordered by management, because by the time you do that, you're just going to fire the employee. Writing that down would be tantamount to admitting that the studio knew of and were tolerant of a risk of criminal abuse. That's never, ever going to happen under any jurisdiction. If anything happened, you'd be sued into the ground.

I think what Trachtenberg meant was that the cast and/or crew had an understanding among themselves, or were told by someone senior in an informal way that this would not happen.

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Of course this would have been more of an informal rule ... but if you work in an environment where a minor - who should feel even more safe and secure working there than the adult actors - had to protected in such a fashion then you know that something must be pretty fucked-up.

Joss Whedon should be the guy to make Michelle Trachtenberg feel comfortable working on set. He should not be the guy she would have to be protected from by weird informal rules.

The fact that he wasn't that guy really stresses the point that this was, overall, a rather ugly situation.

The same with that Marsters confrontation. That isn't the kind of thing nice and normal people do. You have to have a very warped ego to actually feel threatened by the popularity of a character you created ... and then let out that anger on the actor who basically just does his job and can in no way control how his portrayal is judged by the outside world. That is basically just sick. There is no excuse for that kind of thing.

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It’s easy to imagine that, if Whedon had been an asshole to some of the other cast, that it wouldn’t be unwise to say “hey, you know what, let’s not leave Michelle in a room with him in case he’s an asshole to her too.” So yea, as Ran said, we can’t really deduce what happened from that rule.

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Actually reading Trachtenberg’s comment I’m not sure if she’s talking about an actual rule that existed or whether she just means a personal rule she has established after the event. You could read it both ways. 
 

Either way it seems that Whedon had done something when he was with her, it isn’t clear what that is though.

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The point about it being an informal rule isn't that that would make it less serious - it wouldn't - but that it makes it unlikely that anyone could definitively answer the sorts of questions HoI was posing above, particularly after all this time.

However, again, that doesn't undermine the credibility of Trachtenberg's claim in the slightest.

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Based on the other stories, as well as the way Trachtenberg phrased things, it definitely sounds like this was something specific to Whedon for some reason. And that it happened after he did something or other (I would guess some sort of abusive screaming, rather than some sort of sexual assault; but I've no idea).

However, in the absence of any other details, I don't think the possibility can be ruled out that this was a blanket rule; that no one could be alone with an underage actor on set. And she was the only underage actor, and Whedon the only one who thought the rule shouldn't apply to him and so it got noticed. There's been a bunch of notable cases of predators working with child actors over the years; it's the reason California finally passed the Hollywood Child Protection Act in 2013. I could easily imagine a network like WB having a blanket rule that no one can be left alone with a child actor ever, just to be cautious.

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People have dug up this 2003, very, very long interview with Whedon from around June 2003 -- so approximately a year after the Carpenter situation at the start of filming in the summer of 2002. It's a retrospective on the whole of his career, The sections on his experiences on Roseanne talks a lot about early lessons he learned about good vs bad leadership, and then a very interesting section on Buffy.

It's lengthy and involved but here's a snippet where he talks about some of the relationship with actors.

Quote

IGNFF: Do you think occasionally, as part of the position, you do have to lay down that "mission statement" for people?

WHEDON: Yeah, and I think I could have done a better job of doing that with the actors on Buffy. I think we were all so young and so fresh and so crazed when we started, that I let a lot of tension on the set. In trying to be everybody's friend, and so excited to be doing this work, and sort of assuming we'd all get along, I let a lot of non-constructive emotion take open sway on the set, when I should have just put the hammer down and said, "You know what? We're here to do the work. Everybody, just get it done."

IGNFF: Does it make it harder to try and do that later?

WHEDON: Yes. Yes, because you'd set precedent, and that's something you have to learn. I was 31, had never run anything before, and most of my people were pretty new. We all were just sort of, "This is so exciting!" It seemed like we were all going to link arms and march towards the camera singing "La Marseilles." That ain't the case. It can't be.

IGNFF: "Let's make our single season on the air something to remember"...

WHEDON: Exactly. I mean, it felt like that. Come season two, it's like, "Well, you're our buddy! We can just misbehave, because you're our buddy, right? So it doesn't matter, because you're just one of us." I was like, "Whoops. I think I can do that better."

IGNFF: What was the biggest problem with trying to rein it in?

WHEDON: You know, it was just people getting their personal issues or their rivalries or whatever it was, letting them creep into the energy of the set. That was the problem. I should have been more in control, more concerned with the energy of the set as it affected the crew. Because, ultimately, the crew are people you have to protect – more than people I think sometimes realize. It's funny... I said to one reporter one time, and I told my wife this, I said, "You know, the first year, it was like we were all on Ecstasy. Everybody loved each other, everybody hated each other, and nobody wanted to go home." Because I was literally there all night – I'd sleep on the couch. My wife very quietly said, "Not anymore." I was like, "This round to you. The game is far from over!"

IGNFF: "We'll meet again!"

WHEDON: "We'll meet again! Probably when I come back into the kitchen." It's very true, the energy of a set is a very important thing. My cast... by the way, I'm talking about things that, on a Hollywood scale, are tiny. My cast always came to play, always came knowing their stuff, doing the work, doing the best. Whatever bad energy they had before the cameras rolled, they didn't put it on the screen. But at the same time, there was a lot of tension. Who that bleeds into are the crew, people who come in before – I was the only person coming in before the crew, and staying after the crew, and I get paid better. So I can't complain. They were the people there first and there last, and energy like that flows down a chute, it makes it not as much fun a place. Still, this stuff kind of calmed down, we went seven years, we all kind of grew up. By the end, more professional.

 

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1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Actually reading Trachtenberg’s comment I’m not sure if she’s talking about an actual rule that existed or whether she just means a personal rule she has established after the event. You could read it both ways. 
 

Either way it seems that Whedon had done something when he was with her, it isn’t clear what that is though.

She refers to herself in the third person; reads to me like a rule put in place by others albeit informally

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So in his own mind, JW's problem was that he wasnt commanding enough and tried to be everyone's friend and everyone else didn't respect the rules.

People have mentioned his ex-wife's commentss, here they are: https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

 

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25 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

So in his own mind, JW's problem was that he wasnt commanding enough and tried to be everyone's friend and everyone else didn't respect the rules.

I think that's a bit of a simplification, but in essence, yes, that the way he and the cast interacted in S1 led to a muddying of things and made it harder to assert authority, which led to bad feelings when he felt he had to put his foot down. Notably, in an earlier part he discusses that his common approach to laying down the law when people weren't doing as he thought they should was not to do it in public but take them aside or call them to his office. 

There were clearly other issues, of course. The move to UPN apparently caused a lot of turmoil, presumably due to salary negotiations with actors maybe as UPN gave the show a bigger budget and I'm guessing the actors would want a piece of it. People weren't always happy-happy with one another (there are a lot of vague rumors and gossip about tiffs between various actor pairings, but I don't trust most of them), and I don't think this was just the "Whedon played people against one another/played favorites" claim but a genuine result of actors just being... well, actors and not always getting along.  Charisma Carpenter herself talked of her insecurity on Angel when Amy Acker joined, because she was afraid she'd lose the spotlight she had when she was the sole lead female, and one can imagine other things like that going on.

Some said you can spot the favorites by who attended his Shakespeare reading parties, and people are sure Benson wasn't a favorite... but then there's a bunch of interviews of her having been a regular at said parties, so that doesn't seem to track at all.

It's also clear that Gellar was a consummate professional but really sharply separated personal and business, was looking to do more Hollywood work after Cruel Intentions, and her apparent growing distance from the show and cast also led to issues (presumably of resentment among some, including Whedon -- I think Fury again said in an interview that he thinks that Whedon and Gellar both believed the other didn't show enough gratitude for what they had done for one another's careers). There was even a thought they wouldn't get her back for S7, and that they'd need a successor -- Fury mentions that there was loose talk of making Dawn into a Slayer to have her continue the show, but that was more a network thing and the writers didn't think Trachtenberg and her character had really landed in a way that made that feasible (per Fury, it was 100% going to be Dushku's Faith as the lead if SMG didn't return, BTW).

The earlier section on his experience on Roseanne is also interesting. Roseanne Barr was a very tough boss to have.

 

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Taking the Joss issue off the table for a moment, most organisations working with minors have an official policy of not allowing men to be alone with young girls under any circumstances. It is a protection for the girl(s) most of all, but it is also a protection for the men, and for the organisation. Though I would say it is (was) a little bit naive to not have the same rule for men being alone with boys. So I hope the policies changed some time ago to not being alone with anyone under the age of...18? Child protection policies in organisations have been around for a long time, whether they are recommended by govt or legally mandated. I assume most people will remember the hoo-ha that was stirred that one time an airline asked a man to move seat because they accidentally placed him next to a girl in a row with no one else? People thought the airline was being unreasonable because it assumed the man was guilty. But really if the man was thinking straight he should have asked to be moved.

Back to Joss, but re the above, there really shouldn't have been a Joss-specific rule, because there should have been a studio policy applicable to all men.

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Quote

It's lengthy and involved but here's a snippet where he talks about some of the relationship with actors.

That's interesting. Season 1 was produced under somewhat odd circumstances, where they had a long lead-in with the pilot that didn't work, then the network allowing them to reshoot it, then getting the mid-season replacement order, but then it being held until the following year. So Season 1 was produced under bizarrely relaxed circumstances compared to most Hollywood network shows. I'm assuming they still only had 7-8 days to produce each episode (they were still under the standard budget restriction), but only having 12 episodes to shoot in one go (and I'm not sure if the first two were shot separately to the rest, so it might have been only 2 and then 10 starting a few weeks later) is much less demanding than 22, which is a test of stamina and endurance, and there was probably more leeway for pickups and re-shoots when you don't have the impending freight train deadline of transmission being just a few weeks after shooting.

So it sounds like there was plenty of scope for the actors to "misbehave" as it were on Season 1 and then to have a rude awakening on Season 2 when they found out what a real network TV workload was like (and they should probably be grateful it wasn't one of the Trek shows with 26 episodes to make).

Still, that shouldn't be seen as justification for anything that Whedon did. If he wanted to come out and defend himself by saying the cast was acting up and he needed to put his foot down firmly to make sure the work got done, he presumably would have done so. It also doesn't seem to track with the timeline: if anything, most of the cast and crew seem to agree that Seasons 1-3 were the most fun to shoot and the problems only came along later, particularly when Whedon's workload dramatically increased as he was working on three shows at the same time. By Whedon's own admission everyone else got more professional the longer they went on, and it sounds like he got less professional the more things went on.

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6 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

So in his own mind, JW's problem was that he wasnt commanding enough and tried to be everyone's friend and everyone else didn't respect the rules.

People have mentioned his ex-wife's commentss, here they are: https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

 

Joss must be spectacularly unlucky when it comes to dealing with cast members.

https://www.cbr.com/opposing-views-on-justice-league-toxic-set/

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I think Buffy and Angel behind the scenes dramas were probably at a fairly normal  level for productions in the early 2000s... and probably until today, even. Every year there's some new gossip about which actor got canned because they were a handful, which producer was replaced because they were abusive, which actors are feuding behind the scenes, etc. Look at the Lethal Weapon series drama from a couple of years back as a recent example. There's a quote from Whedon regarding S7 of Buffy, that the actors knew early on it was the last season... and that most of them were glad that that was it.

As for Justice League, it was a very troubled production according to all reports, and he was brought in to try and fix it. It was a mess not his making, but one he went to willingly, that's clear enough. Warner Brothers must have promised him the moon and dumped an enormous amount of money on his lap. If that e-mail is accurate, among the challenges were a bunch of upset cast members who questioned everything, trying to protect as many of their scenes as possible despite the fact that Snyder's assembly cut was nearly 5 hours long... and there was no way WB was letting them make a movie over 2.5 hours, and mandated 2 hours to Whedon. So it sounds like nearly every actor had a reason to complain, knowing that Whedon was there to hack the film to mandated length while also having to fill in a bunch of stuff to try (and fail, by all accounts) and make a cohesive film.

I also think it's fair to say that, as the e-mail states, Whedon wasn't really suited to playing peacemaker in this scenario, which is the thing that makes the mail ring with truth and why in retrospect WB should have done something else with JL -- what, I don't know. Just pause the whole thing until Snyder comes back and then force him to cut it to a managable size? It would have cost tens of millions, but maybe the continuity of having him on it would have allowed him to keep the actors on board.

 

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