Joss Whedon: The Biography (15 page)

When they returned home, Joss left for Oakland to work with Pixar. The project was so much more creatively involved than the script doctoring that Joss had been doing. It was a complete rewrite of the film, one he would have to undertake with a whole group of collaborators. His first step into that world made him nervous: when he was introduced to the team, they were told that Pixar had to shut down production on the film due to the major story issues. “Many of you are going to be laid off, and
Joss is here to fix the script,” he remembered someone announcing. “And then I was just like, ‘Why are you pointing at me? What’s going on? This is horrible!’”

Yet unlike the tense, awkward group dynamics he’d experienced on the writing staffs of
Roseanne
and
Parenthood
, he discovered that the
Toy Story
team members were eager to jump back into the story and strip it down to the essentials. They threw out all of the extraneous ideas to dedicate their focus on the very simple thing that makes Disney so popular: a story that connects with its audience. Lasseter told them not to concern themselves with fancy applications of CGI animation. At the time, not many people had seen computer animation—certainly not at the level that Pixar is now famous for—so it was easy to wow people with early animated tests of Woody and Buzz and footage of green army men walking. But Lasseter insisted that Joss and the team needed to concentrate on
Toy Story
’s narrative instead.

That guidance helped the writers shake off the issues they were having with the script. Or, as Joss explained, they realized, “Oh! We already know how to do this. We’ve just got a slightly new medium to do it in.”

Despite his strong desire to write songs for Disney, Joss agreed with Lasseter’s choice to refrain from making
Toy Story
a musical. “It would have been a really bad musical, because it’s a buddy movie,” Joss explained. “It’s about people who won’t admit what they want, much less sing about it.” A staple of Disney’s musicals is the “I want” song, in which the main character plainly expresses how he or she wishes life could change. But “Woody can’t do an ‘I want’ number,” Joss said. “He’s cynical and selfish, he doesn’t know himself. Buddy movies are about sublimating, punching an arm, ‘I hate you.’ It’s not about open emotion.” (Members of the Pixar team were surprised that someone who had written such dark, macabre, funny stuff as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
knew so much about musicals and was proud of it. “He would wear his musical interests big on his sleeve, when most people would hide that fact,” Stanton remembers.)

Joss worked closely with Pixar’s team as everyone got their heads around the idea of
Toy Story
as a buddy picture. Buzz Lightyear had always been conceived as a Dudley Do-Right: dim-witted but cheerful and self-aware. Joss helped them reenvision the character as an action figure who isn’t aware that he’s a toy, and who therefore takes his job as an Intergalactic Space Ranger quite seriously. It was a huge epiphany that turned the whole movie around and created the chemistry in
Toy Story
.

Once they had a good grasp on the film’s characters, the group built the story back up. Joss loved being in the room with all the animators and getting to try anything. “They were so sweet and so much fun,” he says. “Watching them draw caricatures of each other, getting Sharpie headaches and having to leave the room, and come back and draw in pencil. Just throwing ideas back and forth, and really feeling, you know, having your voice heard. My voice has been heard in very few of the rewrites I’ve done, and this was a different animal. This was really something that I felt like I got to help shape totally.”

The feelings of respect and excitement were mutual. “We’re all animators, so it’s kind of a prerequisite that we know our comic books, we know our toys, we know our movies,” Stanton says. “Our references were his references, so he felt like one of us.” As storyboard artists and as gag men, the Pixar animators were used to sitting in a room together, spit-balling ideas, and pinning drawings on the wall—which turned out to be quite similar to what Joss was used to in a television writers’ room. “I think Joss was a little envious that we could draw our ideas so fast; that tends to be the case with a lot of screenwriters when we work with them,” Stanton adds. “But we were so jealous that he would come up with these incredible one-liners. The thing that I connect to him so strongly is that I got to see, firsthand, the germ of the idea be created in a group.” Sometimes those germs led them down the wrong path for the story. “It’s not like he came in and solved it for us,” he clarifies. “We made our own mistakes, and we made our own solutions as a group.”

Joss would take all the ideas from the Pixar team and go into his office, crank up the music he needed to be inspired, and write. When he emerged, he delivered pages that evoked exactly what they had been trying to describe in the room as a group—but so much stronger, more economical, and so much more concise. “It was this huge epiphany, because [Joss’s writing] was beyond just the dialogue—his descriptions and the economy of his scriptwriting forced the exact images he wanted in your head,” Stanton explains. “It was this huge lightbulb for me that scriptwriting is not writing novels—it’s cinematic dictation. It’s having the art of being able to describe what the final image will be on the screen cinematically so well that anybody that reads this script page can’t help but see the same image. That was what a great scriptwriter did.” Stanton’s résumé now includes cowriting credits on Pixar’s later hits
Monsters, Inc
.,
Finding Nemo
, and
WALL-E
—and he’s quick to point to Joss as an influence, having soaked up how Joss worked and wrote during their time together on
Toy Story
.

Eventually, the story took shape.
Toy Story
is the tale of a little boy’s toys and their adventures when he isn’t around. The group is led by Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), a generally stand-up and cheerful fella who enjoys his status as Andy’s favorite toy. Things change when Andy’s birthday party brings a new player into the mix: Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), the astronaut action figure who doesn’t realize he’s not a real astronaut. When the Space Ranger usurps Woody’s position as Andy’s favorite toy, Woody decides to get rid of Buzz. His plans go awry, however, when they both get lost. Adding to the drama is the family’s impending move. Can the duo work together to get back home before they’re left behind—or, worse, before they fall into the hands of Sid Phillips, the evil neighbor hell-bent on toy destruction?

Joss tried to inject some girl power into the testosterone-heavy storyline by suggesting that it be Barbie who comes in and saves Woody and Buzz from Sid. “She’s [
Terminator 2’s
] Sarah Connor in a pink convertible, all business and very cool,” Joss said. But he wasn’t able to get his way; Mattel execs wouldn’t allow
Toy Story
to develop an actual action-hero identity for Barbie. In addition, the Pixar team itself preferred to keep the focus on Woody. “We decided we could either be PC and fair about this or bring true toy moments,” Stanton explained. Joss had better luck adding a Whedonesque character to the mix with Rex, a boisterous green plastic tyrannosaur who is often taken over by fits of anxiety and the worry that he isn’t scary enough.

In addition, Joss “wrote a lot of great lines that stayed in the movie,” Stanton remembers. “His best one was under the truck, where Buzz says to Woody, ‘You are a sad, strange, little man. You have my pity. Farewell.’”

In April 1994, about four months after Joss joined the
Toy Story
team, Disney finally greenlit the film to go back into production. Joss had become a hot property and was being pursued for other projects, so he decided to part ways with the
Toy Story
team.

Though Joss left, the rewrites continued; Pixar’s staff members are known to never stop refining the script even when a film is well into
production. But Joss’s influence lingered. He had reset the bar, and the rest of the creative team rose to the occasion. “Joss helped set the tone of sincerity and the reverence that I’d like to think is an amalgamation of him and us—as what everybody in the world knows as Pixar,” Stanton says.

The Pixar team didn’t see Joss again until a test screening when the film was nearly finished. He seemed a little shocked at how much it had changed. A couple weeks after the movie came out and he had finally seen it two or three more times, he sent a letter to the team. “‘I didn’t get it at first, but now I GET it’—and I remembered he capitalized
GET
,” Stanton says with a laugh. “It just took a while for him to adjust from where he had left the film to what it became.”

Toy Story
opened just before Thanksgiving, on November 22, 1995. Despite Jeffrey Katzenberg’s earlier concerns, fans from every age bracket embraced
Toy Story
. Critics admired the fact that such a warm and engaging tale could be told in CGI, through what the
New York Times
called its “utterly brilliant anthropomorphism” and “exultant wit.”
Entertainment Weekly’s
Owen Gleiberman wrote, “I can hardly imagine having more fun at the movies than I did at
Toy Story
,” and Kevin McManus of the
Washington Post
said, “For once, reality lives up to hype. With
Toy Story
, gigantic superlatives become appropriate, even necessary…. In fact, to find a movie worthy of comparison you have to reach all the way back to 1939, when the world went gaga over Oz.”

The film had earned more than $39 million by the end of its first weekend, on its way to becoming the top-grossing film of the year in North America and one of the most successful animated films ever released to that point (behind only 1992’s
Aladdin
and 1994’s
The Lion King
).
Toy Story
would go on to gross almost $362 million worldwide.

After the film was finished, Lasseter called Joss to let him know that there was an issue with the story credits on the film. Arbitration with the original
Toy Story
screenwriters was still being worked out, and several animators had taken a pass through the script at one point or another as well. Some had even completely rewritten it, attempting to avoid carrying over the bad ideas they felt were in the previous versions. Eventually, a lot of names ended up on the cover page of the final version of
Toy Story
—many of them writers whose work didn’t appear in the final
movie. Nonetheless, Lasseter wanted Joss’s permission to give story credit to all of the animators who worked on the movie.

More than a year after the WGA arbitration issue with
Speed
, Joss was now in Graham Yost’s position. He told Lasseter it was fine to add the writers in. “[It is] gratifying to me because it means I finally have an answer to [Yost’s question]. Which is, ‘No, I wouldn’t,’” Joss said.

Joss’s work on
Toy Story
landed him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The Oscar was later awarded to Christopher McQuarrie’s neo-noir mystery
The Usual Suspects. Toy Story
, however, is still an Academy Award–winning film; John Lasseter was given a special achievement award (the first for any animated film) for “the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film.”