RavishingRickRudo

I'm thinking "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" meets "Lord of the Flies" meets "Toy Story" - where a Slinky, a Cabbagepatch Doll, a Pog, a Tickle-me-Elmo, and oh say a Pet Rock get left behind in a box when a family moves away and must find their way back to their once-loving owner; and along the way the Slinky and Tickle-me-Elmo battle it out for leadership and innocence is what truly gets lost in this tale of dying fads in todays society and the emotional scaring of being left behind.

Mad TV is more about annoying you than making you laugh - the Vancomb lady and Mrs. Swan were the precursors for Stewart and the old lady that always coughs...

I'm thinkin bout a Toy Story-esque film where a new brand of slinky comes out - one that can go UP stairs, as well as down - and the older version of Slinky feels left out. It's really a social commentary at how technology effects the labour force.

I'm thinking maybe a sort of arty, independent film, done in that sorta docu-style that's so hot now-a-days, about the very real, very secret, slinky addiction that claims the lives of 4 Americans a year. Or perhaps a Slinky gets nominated for political office and wins in a sorta Jingoistic "rah rah, USA!, rah rah" film that would usually star Harrison Ford or Kevin Kline... and it really speaks on the lobbiests and campaign finance as the Slinky was pushed by Matel - or whothefuckever makes it. It also speaks on society and how we'd elect a Slinky to political office as it's a "lesser evil", or because it was packaged right, or because it didn't over-step it's boundaries, or because of the corporate stooges we all are... I'm talking about films that would make you THINK, not these STUPID monster movies that are full of special effects and one dimensional characters.

Or the prophecies just haven't come true YET. Which means Angel and Harmony can get it on and the apacalypse can happen all over again! THE BEEEEEEAST!

I would see Stacy befriending Fertig after Test and Steiner make fun of him - this could be run in conjunction with Terri getting him in the sack and where Terri (the golddigger, who is after Tomko's money via Fertig - Tomko having made Fertig a large shareholder in the Tomkorporation and thereby set to inherit lots of $$$ and the company if Tomko were ever to sell his and step down) and Stacy (someone who really has Fertigs best interest in mind) battle over Fertig's attention. Terri, then, frames Stacy by drugging both Tomko and Stacy and -with the help of Steiner and Test- videotape and take photos of a supposed "romantic encounter" between the two and show it to Fertig. The fragile Fertig gets manipulated by Terri and ends up getting his brother to step down from his position (when he was drugged, Steiner and Test got him to sign release papers) and breaks his friendship with Stacy...

Don't you ever speak poorly of Cool Ethan again. Or what, you'll file me under cocksucker in your lil black book?

Maybe HE is Connors real father... think about it.

the title HHH is holding is not the WCW title, period. Gosh, it looks so similar - are you sure?

ONE MORE TIME! GOOD GOD that's a lot of C/P. http://64.5.52.62/~cfqcom/nuked/modules.ph...article&sid=218 Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 7 Behind the Scenes with Joss Whedon & Tim Minear, by Edward Gross “THE MESSAGE” Official DVD Summary: While Jayne opens a mail package from his mother that contains a wool cap with ear flaps and a pom-pom, Mal and Zoe open their package to discover the body of their owl war buddy, Tracey. JOSS WHEDON: The episode we were shooting when I got to tell everybody that we were cancelled. I love that episode because it dealt with war, Mal’s morality and a dead body, which is always fun. It bears an enormous sadness considering it’s all about death and betrayal and honor and sadness – it all worked out fine considering things. It bore that because everybody knew that it was over. Except me, who still refuses to admit it. It’s part of my charm, really. Tim and I wrote it together and I wrote the flashback. I was waiting for word and Peter Chernin had a call in to me and I didn’t know what was happening, so I wrote a joke flashback that was basically me and Tim in the trenches, waiting. The privates were all executives that kept coming in and putting us on hold. I gave it to Tim and it was actually an incredibly emotional joke, because it basically ended with the two of us waiting together to hear word; listening to Mulan Rouge on hold in the trenches. It was really Mal and Zoe, but Tim and I knew who it was, though neither of us will say which one of us is Zoe, because we both want to be her. On that day, I actually went and pitched Batman, because they were doing the movie, they were looking for pitches and I was, like, “Oh, what the hell, I’ve got an idea. CFQ: There had been no indication that you had pitched to them. JOSS WHEDON: I didn’t intend to. Everybody was like, “Dude, it’s Batman,” and then I came up with an idea I really loved about doing an origin story. I pitched it and they kind of looked at me like, “There’s a video fishbowl.” Just nothing. I kind of came out of that and was like, “How many more lessons do I need that the machine doesn’t care about the creative process?” I got back to the office and found out we were cancelled and realized that maybe there was one more lesson to be had. Gail Berman called me and the only thing I had to say was, “Will you allow me to try and take this somewhere else?” She said yes, I thanked her and that was it. Then I went to the set and made the announcement. TIM MINEAR: Great effects in that episode. There was a pretty exciting chase in a snow canyon between two spaceships. Which is amazing now that I’m working on another show where we can’t afford to have a room. Now it’s like, “Can I have a room with a table?” “No, it’s too expensive.” Joss and I wrote this episode and we were sort of writing it while I was directing. The scene that I remember the most is when I was shooting a certain scene on the bridge, Joss showed up on the set, pulled me aside and said, “They’ve cancelled the show. Do you want to tell people now or do you want to keep shooting?” I said we should tell them. We gathered everybody around and Joss said they pulled the plug on the show, they’re not going to order anymore and he vowed to fight for the show in any way that he could, which he has been doing ever since. So everybody went off and got drunk, I guess, and then we came back. This was a Friday night and I stopped in the middle of shooting a scene. We came back on a Monday and the first scene back I had to shoot – when people look at the DVD, they should look at the scene where it’s Mal and Inara and Zoe sitting around the dining room table, laughing their asses off as Mal is recounting a funny story about his dead privates [soldiers]. So the first thing we had to shoot with these people after telling them they were cancelled was a scene where they had to laugh hysterically. That was good acting. The thing is, it never became depressing in a way. We still had fun shooting the rest of that episode and I remember that the last thing I shot was the flashback to the battle scene, which is one of the things I’m proud of because it looks really cool and Joss wrote that scene. “HEART OF GOLD” Official DVD Summary: The crew comes to the aid of a bordello when its madam, an old acquaintance of Inara’s, asks for help after a gunslinger claims a prostitute’s baby is his and he’s taking it because his wife is barren. Note: Both “Heart of Gold” and “Objects in Space,” for the most part, were shot prior to “The Message.” JOSS WHEDON: Another one that we did a lot of reshooting and tinkering with after the fact. I think it came together really well, but when we looked at the first cut it left something to be desired. It was just one of those things with a lot of missteps. Also we had been getting notes from the network and we had done this early enough in the process where we looked at it and we were, like, “Nobody but us seems to have gotten the message to tone down the Western thing, so everything looked so Western that we were, like, “The network is going to kill us. This is like we’re spitting in their face.” So we did a few reshoots and changed a couple of lines to sort of hit the idea of why it was the way it was. We did a lot of tweaking. Our guest star, Belinda Clarke, I loved and I loved Inara’s reaction to them sleeping together. There are a lot of things in that episode that are key, but there was much work done in the editing room because we were scratching our heads saying, “It looks like Bonanza, what do we do?” CFQ: And the network was really afraid of the Western aspect of the show? JOSS WHEDON: They really were. That’s why they loved “Ariel” all to pieces, because it didn’t have Western elements much at all. CFQ: Did they not know what show they were buying? JOSS WHEDON: You know, that’s a question that I’ve asked. Basically shows do go through development stages. What happened with me is I came in and said, “Here’s exactly what I want to do,” and they were, like, “We want a show from you, so do that.” It wasn’t like, “Does it have to be a Western?” It was a little too late for that. They let me make the pilot and then they were, like, “Oh. Right. A Western with the horsies and sidearms?” They just didn’t think that people would respond to it, although when they saw the credits and saw the shot of the spaceship scattering those horses, that they liked. It was a stretch. “Heart of Gold” is one of the unaired episodes and it had one of the most important moments, which is Inara telling Mal she’s leaving the ship. Which we referenced in “Objects in Space,” and then had to reshoot the scene because we weren’t going to air “Heart of Gold” before “Objects in Space.” So we had a little scene between Mal and Inara which we had to do a reshoot in which they didn’t reference that. Now with the DVD, where they’re in the correct order, we put it back in and it does. TIM MINEAR: This one is also known as “Shower of Gold” or “Heart of Pooh.” It’s not our favorite episode. This one kind of fell through the cracks. We never quite got the story broken properly. There were just things about it we didn’t love. But as far as I’m concerned, any episode of Firefly is good; it’s always fun to see those people. This episode, though, is a little generic. I will say that the last things that I shot for the series were some inserts for that episode; pick-up shots for a montage and that sort of thing. I remember the A.D. sending each actor into the room as I was shooting and they would get wrapped out of the series after I’d get them. That was weird, because you wrap out guest characters, you don’t wrap out your regular actors, except we were cancelled. So they would come into this room, do a shot or two, and then the A.D. would say, “Ron Glass. That’s a Firefly wrap for Ron Glass,” and then Ron would make a speech to the crew and everyone would cry and then each person came in. Everyone hung around until the last person was finished, because they wanted to be there for it. So that was kind of odd. Then the last shot I did of all of them together – there’s a shot where the entire crew of Serenity is walking up to a brothel. That was actually shot on a soundstage and it’s everyone walking up to this brothel and it was the last time they were all together on a stage to shoot a moment in Firefly. After this really depressing day of everyone crying and making beautiful speeches, I packed up my bag and went home that night and it was all finished. I turned on the TV and that was the night they were airing the pilot finally, so that was the great irony. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “OBJECTS IN SPACE” Official DVD Summary: The crew is caught off-guard when a bounty hunter eager to claim the enormous reward on River’s head, sneaks aboard Serenity and methodically begins taking the crew prisoner one by one. JOSS WHEDON: About as big a labor of love that I’ve ever done and definitely one of the two or three episodes that I’m proudest of that I’ve made of any show. But not unstrange. It’s an odd little episode in some ways. It was very much an existential statement on the meaning of objects in space and how they contain meanings within themselves; how we approach that and about two people that see them in a way that every day people don’t, and what the essential difference is, which is that one of them, the bounty hunter, is innately bringing evil with him and one of them, River, is innately bringing love. That was sort of what I wanted to say with it; what I wanted to get into. It comes with probably the most pretentious, repetitive, and probably incoherent commentary that I have ever done. I really tried to explain exactly what it was I was trying to do and some of it defies explanation, because the ecstasy of meaninglessness is something that you can’t really convey very well in a boring commentary. But I think the episode itself does it beautifully. I love the way it plays with space and the way it plays with her as a sort of a formal device. She just flaws me in this episode; you see so much of the dancer in her in this episode. The way she moves around the ship, the way that touching every wall affects her, is truly beautiful. And the whole sequence in the beginning where she’s seeing into people’s thoughts was just such a delight to shoot; so ethereal. That’s where my wife looked at me and said, “You son of a bitch, you shot your ballet.” And then we had Richard Brooks, who just flawed me. He so embraced what I was trying to do and was hilarious and menacing. He was everything he needed to be. I loved writing that character. The episode was very hard to write. I had written “Our Mrs. Reynolds” and was, like, “Oh, I just type and they talk,” but then halfway through I was, like, “I have no structure, what am I doing? I was a fool.” But eventually it came together. Part of that process was me going on the ship, climbing up in the rafters, standing on a railing – doing all the things they were going to do physically. That’s the great thing about TV, being able to be there physically be there, I could just walk through the ship, experience it the way I thought they would and then go back and write it down. His voice, his bizarre sort of existential questioning of everything, was just so much fun to write. Every moment of it he nailed. I also think the exchange between Mal and River on top of the ship is the heart of the show incarnate. I love that. TIM MINEAR: Joss wrote and directed. I remember he had a lot of trouble writing that episode. He called me and said, “I’m not sure what this is about, I can’t figure this out.” He knew he wanted to do something with River. I said, “Well, can’t it just be Bobba Fett?” He made fun of me for a long time because of the way I pronounced the name, but he did say, “Okay, now I know what it is,” and he went off and wrote it. And there’s such beautiful filmmaking in this episode. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CFQ: The real question of course is how serious talks of a movie version of Firefly are. JOSS WHEDON: Like I said, the first question out of my mouth was whether I could take this someplace else, and as I sit here with you, I am sitting next to a computer screen that represents the fact that I have been trying to do that every single day since we were cancelled. If I lose the fight, it will be because the fight was unwinnable. Because I love what we did with those shows, and what we could have done and what we were going to do and what we should have done and what we still can do, so much and those characters and not those actors, as people, I refuse to say it’s over. Even a movie doesn’t get made, the fact that the DVDs will be out there forever is very important to me. It’s some of the most important work that I might ever do. Not the most popular necessarily, but it’s catching on. CFQ: If you do a movie, do you expect it to stay very much in the vein of the show? JOSS WHEDON: Obviously it’s bigger in scope. Not just a bigger budget. It has to be bigger in scope, it has to be a movie and I’ll tell you that coming up with an idea and seeing it through to a screenplay has been the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do, because it was designed as a show. The movie needs to be true to that while being completely separated from that. You don’t make a movie just because you have a bunch of charismatic people. You need a story that is bigger than life in this situation. What’s great is that the show was always about the fact that these guys are actual size, not bigger than life. To take them and put them in a situation that is so dire as the one in the movie is, is kind of where the fun and tension is. The fate of the world is in the hands of schlemiels, and that’s always exciting. CFQ: I guess on your shows the fate of the world has always been in the hands of the schlemiels. JOSS WHEDON: Yes, it’s true. Ironically, much like the shows themselves.

One of my favourite episodes is talked about and Joss talks about compromise. Excellent stuff. From http://64.5.52.62/~cfqcom/nuked/modules.ph...article&sid=212 Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 6 Behind the scenes with Joss Whedon & Tim Minear, by Edward Gross “WAR STORIES” Official DVD Summary: Wash regrets insisting he be allowed to accompany Mal on a mission after the two men are captured by Adelai Niska - the client who previously hired Mal to steal the medicine bound for Paradiso. JOSS WHEDON: There was that run of the last bunch where it felt like we were firing on all cylinders. I loved the Zoe-Wash relationship. You know, that was the sticking point at the very end of picking-up process. The studio said, “They can’t be married,” and that’s when I said, “I don’t want you to pick up the show.” CFQ: Are you serious? JOSS WHEDON: Yeah. They said, “We’re thinking of picking up the show because we read “The Train Job” and we see the potential, but we don’t want the characters married, it interferes with romantic entanglements.” It was just a nightmare experience. I said, “I’m not making Melrose Space. I want to see a marriage. I’ve got a preacher on board, I’ve got a young girl who’s a schizophrenic - I’ve got aspects of life. That’s there for a reason and marriage is one of them.” And what was great in “War Stories” was being able to play the conflict of the marriage without making it whiney and insufferable. They’re both incredibly charming and funny during that, and then to play that out during a torture scene… really examine the issues as a way of trying to deal with being tortured…well, juxtaposition is pretty much the benchmark of my career and it doesn’t get any bigger than that. CFQ: You were really prepared to walk with the show over the marriage situation? JOSS WHEDON: Oh yeah. Here’s the thing with a show. You have to understand that you are collaborating with somebody and they have a right to the kind of show that’s right for their network. You also have to understand that you must run that show, not them. And that it must be your show. You cannot make a show to please the network, and if you start taking a show and changing it to please a network until it loses all meaning, you’re not going to please a network. Ultimately the show that works is the show that has a vision. That doesn’t mean that everything I do works. I’m sure there are shows that were built by committee and everybody talks about Casablanca and how they didn’t know what they were doing, but look at what they did. The fact of the matter is that for a show really to work, you have to run it. Every time the network gave me a note like, “Make Mal more likable,” I could do that. Have more action? I can do that. Those don’t destroy the germ of what it is I’m trying to do. Make them not married, now you’re telling me you don’t want to make the show I want to make. That’s when you walk away. If you’re desperate to get something on the air, you shouldn’t be trying to. It’s just not a way to live. I’m very fortunate in that I can walk away, but I would have walked away from Buffy at the same time if they’d tried to mutate it into something I didn’t believe in. You have to know where to draw the line, where to pick your battles, because you want to collaborate. But you don’t want to be bullied into making a show that’s not your own, because ultimately you’ll hate it. Fox is very aware of that. CFQ: Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but wasn’t Angel largely reshaped into more of a standalone show largely to please the WB? JOSS WHEDON: Not so much. They did halt production in the second episode of year one and said, “Look, we don’t feel the second episode fulfills your mission statement as you described it to us.” We looked at it and said, “Okay, we get that.” And this year, it was not retooled in a way that I felt was damaging to the show. They said they wanted more standalone episodes so people don’t get confused, because we got so wrapped up in our mythology last year, that it was like one giant episode. That’s the truth. I respected that. So that was our new challenge, but it doesn’t change my worldview, my characters, my intent with the show. It’s all doable, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. It’s a very difficult thing to know: when is it over? When is it wrong? When is it too much? When does it cross that line? A lot of people are like, “You want to change Bob’s name to Rob? You have crossed the line!” There’s just that sort of instinct, because you take so much abuse as a writer from executives and you hear so many stupid things. You can never come into an arrangement like that. They’re paying for this thing and you have to respect that. You just have to find the right battles. TIM MINEAR: We brought back Niska from “The Train Job.” This was another late script that we had to sort of pitch in on at the end of the day. I remember Joss wrote the teaser and the first act and it was a really long teaser. I remember looking at the cut and saying, “The teaser’s kind of boring with all of these people talking. What if we move this into the teaser and made this the first scene of act one and dropped this all together?” He totally went for it. And in the interrogation scene where Mal and Wash are being tortured, I took a pass at that and was trying to write Wash as sort of Woody Allen. We talked about the idea that they’re being tortured, but they should totally be having a conversation about Zoe and about this unmentioned jealousy that Wash might have because Zoe is so close to Mal. What I liked about that scene is that instead of just making that a gag, it was a way for Mal to keep Wash from dying; he made him so angry that he couldn’t pay attention to the torture. Once again, giant production values and nothing is cooler than Gina Torres taking Nathan Fillon’s ear and putting it in her shirt. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “TRASH” Official DVD Summary: Mal is shocked to discover his old friend’s new bride is Saffron who, although furious after Mal blows her cover, offers o cut Mal in on what she calls the perfect big-time scam. JOSS WHEDON: Who among us didn’t want to see more of Saffron? She was delightful. Between her and Mal’s BUTT, we knew that this was landmark television. It was another sort of heist episode and was fun with a lot of things to play. It really was probably the lightest episode we did. The scene between Mal and Inara at the beginning is just hilarious. Really an opportunity to play around with everybody more than anything else. Obviously we always like to hit a few issues and I was interested in Saffron’s psychosis and I liked breaking it down like that and seeing what was behind it. It doesn’t mean you catch her, it doesn’t mean you win, but her interplay with Mal speaks a lot about both of them. It just came out fun. TIM MINEAR: Ben Edlund again. The return of Saffron and another hilarious heist. That was tricky, because Ben got to sit down and write this character that Joss had created that was very beloved on the “Our Mrs. Reynolds” episode and I thought he did a great job. One of the fun things about this episode was Serenity coming up under this trash bin in this floating city. It’s kind of sad that the episode didn’t actually air on television, because that floating city over the ocean was just not something you see on TV every day.

2 of the best episodes discussed by the 2 primary guys of Firefly! GOOD! From! http://64.5.52.62/%7ecfqcom/nuked/modules....article&sid=200 Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 5 Episode by episode with Joss Whedon & Tim Minear, by Edward Gross "OUT OF GAS" Official DVD Summary: After an explosion leave Serenity crippled, Mal orders everyone to abandon ship while he stays behind in an attempt to make repairs - and reminisces how he found the ship and picked its crew. JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: My single favorite episode. I broke the story very specifically with Tim. I pitched all of the flashbacks, very specifically the structure and I'm blowing my horn about what I had to do with that episode, because I did not write it and I did not direct, and it really is our best. Tim just wrote an amazing script, David Solomon, who's been with me since the beginning of Buffy, shot it very beautifully. David Boyd, the D.P., brought in that insane reversal stock for the flashbacks that provided that incredible look. I don't think anything ever got to the heart of both what we wanted the show to be sort of what a show should be, what the show was and how it was than that one. Apart from the flashbacks, just the very ending, just seeing Serenity from across a crowded room and falling in love, it explains so much about our characters, and who they were and what they wanted. It was such a simple premise: this ship is going to break, we're all going to die because of something really, really mundane. I just think there was more emotion, surprising humor and a perfect kind of structure to that thing than anything else we did. To me, it was the most moving episode that we did. CFQ: For me, an interesting aspect of the premise is that opposed to the Romulans firing disruptors at the Enterprise, you've got a ship in danger for a ridiculous reasons. JOSS WHEDON: To me, the show was always about people who don't have health insurance; who are trying to get the next meal, the next job, and the thing is that when you don't get sick days, you can lose your job; you can lose your car. It's like a domino effect. It's very scary to live on the fringe there, and that's where these guys are. This was the best example of that we ever had. TIM MINEAR Q&A TIM MINEAR: That's probably my favorite episode and probably one my favorite things I've written in a long time. I think Joss and I both sort of did our best work on Firefly. CFQ: But why? What was it about Firefly that touched the two of you so creatively? TIM MINEAR: I haven't the slightest idea. There was some kind of alchemy going on where the cast was perfect, the crew was amazing, the department heads were really reaching to do something extraordinary and maybe it was because the network didn't love us. I don't know what it was, but it was something about the show…You know what? A lot of it had to do with Joss' belief in it. That was infectious. So for some strange reason we just bought into this universe hook, line and sinker. It was completely real for us, these people were completely three-dimensional to us and there was just something about it. I remember I was going to write the next episode and Joss had the idea that they run out of gas. I'm like, "That's great, but now I have to write 54 pages. What does that mean?" We looked at it this way, we looked at it that way. There's a tiny part of the story where this other crew comes aboard the ship, but that was originally going to be the story. They run out of gas and we get to see another scavenger ship with a crew not unlike the crew of Serenity, but they're bad guys. That was the idea, but it didn't thrill me. I remember Joss and I went out to dinner. We were eating our steak and Joss said, "Can the episode open with Mal being shot in the gut?" And I said, "Now you're talking." Somehow we got to this notion of he's bleeding to death and he's remembering how he put his core crew together. So then, once we had that, it seemed natural that if we were starting with him getting shot in the gut, then the story becomes how did he get shot in the gut? Which meant that I was probably going to have to jump back 24 or 48 hours before and tell that story up to him getting shot. In the meantime, I'm crosscutting with him dragging himself to the sickbay and then to the engine room with this part to try and get the power back on. So there are actually three timeframes going throughout that whole show: 48 hours before, what's happening now with him being shot and then years ago, and it's all going to end up with him laying his eyes on this ship for the first time. What you discover by the end of that episode is this whole episode has been a love story, and it's been a love story about Mal and this ship and what this ship means to him. So for some reason I got to tap into all kinds of interesting things in that story. I remember we put it together, David Solomon directed and God bless him. David Solomon did for this episode what David Semel did for my episode of Angel, "Are You Now or Have you Ever Been?" They're similar in many ways. They're both flashback episodes and there's a kind of poetry about how they're shot. I didn't shoot either one of them. So we put it all together and we looked at it were all so proud. We sent it to the network and I get a call from the network and they're confused. They're confused because it all seems to be taking place out of order. They were asking me if I could put it in chronological order. I had to explain to them that here was no chronological order for this episode. If I put it in chronological order, it wouldn't make any sense because it's jumping around like a fever dream and that it has it's own kind of dream logic. I added that no one who has seen it has been confused in the slightest. But they just assume that people are too stupid to follow something like that, I guess. Basically my feeling was that if they insisted I put it in chronological order, I would just quit. There would be nothing I could do at that point. But, look, there were some people at the network saying that. For the most part, the executives who were covering this show loved this episode. They totally got it, completely protected it and it got to air as conceived. CFQ: What I love about it is that you get a constant reinforcement of who these people are. TIM MINEAR: A lot of people thought this would make a good pilot, but I disagreed. You need the weight of four or five episodes so you can appreciate who these people were several years earlier. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "ARIEL" Official DVD Summary: Simon offers the crew a proposition: if they help him sneak River into a hospital so he can run tests on her, he'll tell them where to find medical supplies that will fetch an enormous price on the black market. JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: Another show that blew me away and a lot of the credit goes to Allan Kroeker, who shot it. He really used our hand-held aesthetic in a dynamic way. There was just a lot of really gorgeous footage and a lot of energy. I remember actually pulling into the Fox lot behind Tim, getting out of the car and going, "I know what the next one is…" When you have the sword over your head the entire time of production, when you think you might be cancelled at any moment, the one great thing is you're not allowed to go, "Here's an interesting idea that we can doodle with. You have to go straight to the primal place. What is the most painful, the most important, the most riveting, the most telling - what will keep them in the seats, what will get them to come back? You have to go to the primal place every time out. To me, after "Out of Gas," what I needed to see was Simon and River and their world and what they had, what they lost and really see Simon sort of taking charge, which he pretty much did. I also wanted to see Jayne betray them, because you can be irascible so long before you're just lovable. A lot of the thriller stuff in the episodes, which I'm actually quite bad at because heists are confusing, came from the writers, though it turned out to be something that was very crucial to the show. The jobs can be really riveting and exciting if they're well done. So it turned out to be an extraordinary episode, and of course it ended with what we call the Jesus Corleone speech where Mal says, "You do it to any one of my people, you do it to me," while he's about to kill Jayne. That, to me, was one of the most powerful things that we did. It was Nathan who thought of using the little hand-held coms so we didn't have to have two guys standing at a window for an entire scene. That worked out great, because then he could move around. CFQ: While it may be true to the characters, some people may think it's kind of bold to take Jayne in the direction he went in in this episode. JOSS WHEDON: It is, though we buy it back a bit when he clearly has regret and then he has a redeeming moment where he doesn't want people to know that's what he did, which is enough. But you want that tension there from the start when Mal says, "When are you going to betray me?" and he basically says, "We'll see." Which I love, because he has that in him, no matter how lovable he might be. TIM MINEAR: The thing that attracted me to Allan Kroeker's work was that unlike a lot of TV directors, he got in there with the camera; he got into people's points of view, he moved the camera through space and he shot like it was a movie. So we brought him in and I remember we were working on the script right until the last minute, which is often the case. He didn't have a script for prep, he had an outline, and I was constantly changing it as he was shooting, and he kept up very nicely, thank you. This is one of my favorite episodes. The scene between Mal and Jayne at the end is maybe the best in the show, where he locks Jayne into the airlock and threatens to blow him out. The acting is so good in that episode; everybody is brilliant. Our crew created all sorts of amazing things that we simply couldn't believe. The script was written by Jose Molina, who was Howard Gordon's assistant when he was on Angel, and then Jose went off and became a writer in his own right. He worked on Dark Angel, we brought him over to Firefly and he just kicked ass on "Ariel." He came up with a lot of the fundamental plot for that story. I had a team of people who could really break stories on that show, and that was pretty exciting. CFQ's Firefly Episode Guide will continue tomorrow.

MY GOD! I've gone MAD! MORE! MORE! MORE! From http://64.5.52.62/%7ecfqcom/nuked/modules....article&sid=187 READ! Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 4 Behind the Scenes with Joss Whedon and Tim Minear, by Edward Gross “OUR MRS. REYNOLDS” Official DVD Summary: After a celebration in which the crew is honored for ridding a planet of a group of bandits, they return to Serenity to find a woman named Saffron who claims that Mal married her during the festivities. JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: This was a really interesting one for me. I just never had a writing experience like that before. I literally wrote stuff down, looked at it and said, “Where did that come from?” I just couldn’t stop writing. CFQ: You mean that it sort of wrote itself. JOSS WHEDON: Yeah, it did, and I’ve never said that about anything. When Mal starts talking to Saffron about his life, I didn’t know any of that stuff; I hadn’t planned out any of that stuff and didn’t know where I was going with it. I read it and I said, “Where did that come from and why is he talking so much? Oh, because she’s one of those people who make people talk so much.” And then Wash does the same thing and you realize she’s one of those people that gets you to open up and kind of sets you against everybody else. The amount of fun I had writing that just could not be greater. And that was a tough shoot. CFQ: What made that particularly tough? What I mean is that it doesn’t seem any bigger than most of the episodes. JOSS WHEDON: That would be me and the director not seeing eye to eye. The actors were so completely in the pocket; they were all so funny and knew exactly what they needed to do. Morena, after she’s been drugged, is maybe the funniest thing we ever did on that show. Just adorable. It came together so nicely. The original mission statement of the show was have nine people so you can throw a pebble in the pond and that’s your show. You don’t need a giant big guest star or an explosion monster. You can just do one thing and then have the show be everyone reacting to it. That show demonstrated that so well. CFQ: As a writer, I would imagine that with a scene like the Mal one you discussed a minute ago, it has got to be a great feeling to have a creation come to life in that way. JOSS WHEDON: It is literally one of the two or three best experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. That just doesn’t happen. I plan things out very carefully and I had my act structure, but apart from that I didn’t really have an outline for this. They just kept talking until it was time to stop. Actually until it was about 10 minutes over the time to stop. TIM MINEAR: Joss wrote that and I thought it was one of the best scripts he’d written in a long time, which is saying something. It was just so funny and such a great twist. I really thought it was terrific because he captured the personalities of the whole crew. He took this character of Saffron and she was basically a pebble cast upon the water and she caused all of these ripples. It was a great way to get to know who these people were, and a lot of it took place in space, which I thought was great, on the ship, because in a show like this the ship more or less becomes one of the characters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “JAYNESTOWN” Official DVD Summary: When the crew returns to a planet where Jayne participated in a heist gone bad, they’re shocked to discover that Jayne’s past actions have turned him into a local hero of Robin Hood-like mythic proportions. JOSS WHEDON: This was one of the first times we began to realize what a force we had with Ben Edlund, who pitched the idea. Very few ideas are actually pitched to me. I tend to come up with them myself or in concert with Tim or Marti Noxon or David Greenwalt. Or I tend to come in with at least some idea of, “You know, I think we need to feel scared. I want the insecurity of….” It’s usually a process of developing the idea from something I’ve pitched out. On Firefly we were hearing pitches and would have had more opportunities to do stuff that came directly from the writers. But Ben is one of those guys who comes up with ideas – and he’s doing it on Angel, too – where you just go, “Uh, yes. Okay, I’ll just be here, go ahead.” By the way he wrote a hilarious script and a really nice song. I really love that show and Adam wasn’t exactly unhappy either. For some reason he felt good about the episode. He’s an amazing character and to get underneath without sort of lying, without saying he’s the sweetest thing that ever lived. He’s basically somebody who’s decent enough to be frustrated at the fact that people think he’s more decent than he is. That, to me, is a fun character. TIM MINEAR: We had interviewed a bunch of writers at the beginning of the year. Ben came in. He had created The Tick and now he’s on Angel. So he came in, pitched a bunch of ideas that weren’t actually right for the show, but I knew immediately that we should hire this guy. He was really funny and really smart and I just thought, “Okay, this guy’s perfect for Firefly.” And it turns out I was right. He came up with the idea for that episode, but it’s not that often actually that somebody just comes up with a right idea for an episode of the show. Usually it’s Joss who comes up with the basic idea, but I remember that Ben had come up with the idea of Jayne as Robin Hood, basically, or a Robin Hood that didn’t mean to be Robin Hood. And then there was the whole idea that there were mud farmers – everything about it was just perfect. You know, when Firefly got cancelled, I said, “Ben, you have to come to Angel with me,” which I wish I hadn’t done because I wish I’d brought him over to Wonderfalls.

MORE! And you can also find it at http://64.5.52.62/~cfqcom/nuked/modules.ph...article&sid=180 ! Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 3 Behind-the-Scenes Episode Guide with Joss Whedon & Tim Minear, by Edward Gross “SHINDIG” Official DVD Summary: In order to secure a job transporting cargo off-planet for a client, Mal attends a social event where a dance with Inara leads to him being challenged to a swordfight in defense of her honor. JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: “Shindig” was supposed to come along a little bit later than it did, because we sort of looked at it and thought, “All of a sudden we’re into hoop skirts, people might still be wondering about horses. Have we gone too far?” Any chance to feature Mal and Inara going at each other is very important to me. Those guys are just delightful together. The thing that blew me away the most in this was Jewel in her big old dress, which was just about the cutest thing I’d seen in a long time. The way she plays it, she is just so adorable. It’s happened with all of them, but it was a moment for me when I said, “Oh, okay, she’s a star, too.” And, hey, floating chandelier – what more could you ask for? CFQ: I love the juxtaposition of images on this show. Some time ago we had discussed that great image in “Serenity” of people on horseback racing for a starship. In “Shindig,” you’ve got a swordfight in the middle of everything else. JOSS WHEDON: The whole point of the show is that we take our cultures with us. They mutate and meld and disintegrate, but they’re always there. If you have a world that doesn’t have roads, you’re not going to use a car, you’re going to use a horse. If you are in a civilization that is new, you’re going to take the oldest traditions because you need something to hold on to. If I ever said the show was about anything, it was about the way we create civilization in a void. What each one of us brings with us that we need, which we touch on sometimes. It gives you a chance to tell what is ultimately a big immigrant story, which is really what America was. CFQ: So this is really your opportunity to retell our history. JOSS WHEDON: The Civil War is what started the germ of the idea. It was based on Reconstruction as an era. The great thing is you can read about freedom fighters through history and it’s applicable. All of history gets mashed up and served out. That’s how the world works and it’s really fun to go backwards to more general things. CFQ: It’s interesting and necessary in a show like this, because you need to know that there is some heart beneath the superficial things. JOSS WHEDON: Anybody can make a cool spaceship but that really doesn’t cut it. It really is always in the execution. Let’s face it, the question you have to ask is whether or not there is talent and heart. You can make something like Resident Evil, which I think is quite good, or you can make Underworld, which I think is the scourge of a nation. Two nations, actually, because Kate Beckinsale is British. Filmmaking as a whole should be shut down and punished because that film got to be made. It’s not a thing a gentleman would say, but what the hell? TIM MINEAR ON “SHINDIG” “Shindig” was the hilarious Jane Espenson. Vern Gillum directed, I think really well, I loved the dancing in that episode. Just a fun, romantic episode and it also gives you a lot of Inara/Mal banter. One of the fun things about Firefly is that we kind of got to go and do Gone With the Wind with the costumes and swordplay. And of course the return of Badger, the Cockney scoundrel from “Serenity.” It was fun to see him back. Overall, just a fun episode on a lot of levels. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “SAFE” Official DVD Summary: When Simon is kidnapped by a group of villagers in need of a doctor, Serenity is forced to make contact with an Alliance ship in order to seek medical help for the critically-wounded Book. JOSS WHEDON: This was an example of things not going the way that we wanted originally. We had a completely different bunch of flashbacks with a completely different bunch of actors. The message of the thing was very important to me, which was the idea of Simon realizing that he had found a home; that a real parent isn’t somebody who’s extremely great, but only when it’s convenient. It’s somebody, no matter how rough they might be, will never let you down. That’s sort of what Mal becomes in that episode, and that meant a lot to me. It showed a lot about why Simon was so protective of his sister. But we did the flashbacks and they were just sort of histrionic and just didn’t feel right, and we didn’t have the one with the two little kids. It started out with River already in trouble, and I said, “Let’s see the two of them together.” Then we couldn’t get the original people who had played the mother and father, because they had booked something else, so we had to cast that again. It was all very complicated and strange. And then we felt, “We’ve got our big damn heroes, we’ve got the crucible, we’ve got the witch hunters and, generally speaking, everything is coming together. But, we could really use a shot of humor.” So I said, “Lock the thing, give me 30 seconds in this act and 15 seconds in the next act and I’ll write some Jayne scenes and we’ll do them to time.” So at the last minute, days before we were supposed to air, Adam Baldwin came in and did his going through Simon’s stuff scene, knowing that he had about 16 props he had to work with one after the other, and exactly 30 seconds to accomplish everything. That’s the time you’re very glad for professionalism. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the series. It’s hilarious and it helps thematically the idea that they might leave them behind, they’re not a part of the group, and then his thing about, “Glad you’re back.” Just hilarious. You know, sometimes we get cuts and hate it, and it’s because we haven’t communicated with the director of they haven’t captured what we’re looking for, or we structurally we were missing a piece and just didn’t get it until we saw the cut. You never know, even if you’re on set a lot, something can come out wrong. The other exciting thing about “Safe” is that it had River dancing, which is fun and was one of the first moments where we could look at her and say, “Oh, she’s not miserable all the time.” TIM MINEAR: This was kind of a troubled episode initially. I remember we shot the episode and Joss and I hated it. We kind of blew it on the script, we weren’t crazy about the way that it was shot and there were certain wardrobe elements that we didn’t realize was going to happen until we saw it on screen, like big floppy hats and scarves. So we actually put it on hold for a while and returned to it. Later, Joss wrote a bunch of new scenes. For instance, the fans will recall where Jayne is rifling through Simon’s room after Simon has been kidnapped, and it’s a hilarious scene. That was actually added, because the show came in short after we ended up cutting all the stuff that we hated. We went back and wrote some new material and shot new scenes. By the time we put it all together, we were pretty happy with it. TOMORROW: “OUR MRS. REYNOLDS” & “JAYNESTOWN”

Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part 2 Source: http://64.5.52.62/~cfqcom/nuked/modules.ph...article&sid=169 Behind the Scenes with Joss Whedon and Tim Minear, by Edward Gross THE TRAIN JOB Official DVD Summary: Mal has second thoughts after discovering that two boxes of Alliance goods his crew has been hired to steal are full of badly-needed medical supplies headed for the mining town of Paradiso. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: “The Train Job” is a funny little piece and generally tends to be discounted, though I like it a lot. The network said, “We don’t like the pilot, write another one.” It was Friday afternoon around 5:00 and they said, “You know how we wanted you to pitch us a story to give us an idea of what the show would be like? Actually, we want you to write a new pilot that’s one-hour long and it has to be on our desks before we get into work on Monday.” So Tim Minear and I looked at each other and said, “Okay.” CFQ: That was the full force of the response, huh? JOSS WHEDON: Well, in two days we wrote “The Train Job,” which had the extraordinarily difficult and ultimately self-defeating task of trying to introduce nine people who have already met to an audience without making it sound really, really hokey. As a result, a lot got lost on people and the resonance of the relationships disappeared. In the pilot, we really let things sit and take their own time a little bit. That was sort of a mission statement for the show, because it wasn’t originally going to be as action-oriented as it ended up being. I told Fox I didn’t really think we could afford that. That’s why we were doing a drama in space and why we have so many people, with some action and, obviously, humor. And they were, like, “Okay, so when you say drama, do action.” So “The Train Job” just didn’t have the time necessary to make you care about all of these people. You just sort of saw them go by in a flash and hoped you picked up who they were and what they did. But I still think the episode was extremely fun and funny and has a really cool floating train in it. CFQ: And a great ending in which Mal kicks the guy into the ship’s engine. JOSS WHEDON: Yes, and that also represents a sea change based on notes. I never would have killed somebody in a gag. The reason I do it in the pilot is that it follows a lot of soul-searching about what they’re going to do with this guy, then the moment comes and Mal decides a decision has to be made and he shoots the guy. In “The Train Job,” I did it as a joke and was saying, “Okay, we’re going to be killing folk.” The studio said, “We want a larger than life villain,” so I gave them one and then I kicked him into the engine. It was just a joke on all of those conventions and it was really fun and beautifully rendered. CFQ: Come to think of it, I remember watching an earlier cut of the pilot, “Serenity,” that did not have the big action/war opening. Was that another network “requirement”? JOSS WHEDON: That was a circumstance where their notes very much jibed with my own. I looked at the beginning I had shot and was, like, “Okay, I’m depressed. This is bringing me down.” Originally the idea was that we saw a sort of defeated Mal and it wasn’t until late in the two-hour episode that we really learned who he used to be and how he got to be the guy that he is. The network came back with, “No, no, no, no. We want to love him from the first moment,” and I had felt, “Well, I need to open with a bang. It is TV and you do want to keep them in the seats,” so I sort of switched the idea to let’s see him before and after. Before he’s a God-fearing, hope-giving great leader, and we get to see the moment of his disillusion as opposed to the audience hearing about it. So our thoughts were pretty in sync and we went out to the Valley and got ourselves our action on. I don’t consider that as something that destroyed the show; it was something that was my idea. CFQ: The truth is, not every network note is going to be pointless. JOSS WHEDON: Yeah, I know, but that’s something you have to learn and always remember. You can’t just close your ears like some show runners do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIM MINEAR Q&A TIM MINEAR: I would say that the most compromised episode of any of them was “Train Job,” and it’s not like we’re ashamed of that. If that came in as the second or third episode after the pilot and was kind of a light-hearted heist episode, people would have loved it. A lot of people liked it fine and a lot of people like it more now that they’ve seen the rest of the series, but coming into the series with that episode was awkward and it confused people. By the way, if it was the second or third episode after the pilot, you wouldn’t have a first act where everyone was going, “Hello, my name is…” You wouldn’t need that. CFQ: I understand how and why “The Train Job” came together the way that it did, but what’s your feeling about the episode? TIM MINEAR: I actually like the episode. It will never be my favorite episode, but I like it plenty. Actually, I probably like it more than a lot of people, because now that the pain of that weekend is over and the fond memory of being punch drunk with exhaustion and going up to Joss and saying, “I don’t want to write the action scenes. Can’t I take some action scenes from one of my Angel scripts and change the names?” And he was all for that, because we both hate writing action scenes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “BUSHWACKED” Official DVD Summary: After encountering a booby-trapped spacecraft carrying the lone crewmember of a horrific Reaver attack, Serenity is boarded by an Alliance Commander looking for Simon and River. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JOSS WHEDON Q&A JOSS WHEDON: First of all, the episode scared the shit out of me. Minear, of course, who creates such a beautiful frame, particularly that shot of River as she wanders into the ship like she’s in a fairy story. Love all that. The thing I remember about that is that I have always been extremely strict with my actors about dialogue. To the very comma. I will go nuts on them. But when we got to the basketball scene in this episode, we had a bunch of scripted stuff. I was saying to Tim, “You are going to turn the cameras on them and let them play for a while, right?” Tim is, like, “Yeah, totally.” And we ended up throwing out all of the scripted stuff and only using the improv stuff while they were playing. All of that was just them having a great time, which they really were. We let Alan go on and on in the interrogation scene, and we used some of that stuff. That kind of looseness and trust and freedom is a new thing for me. I’m a very controlling filmmaker. That’s just an example of the way we liked to make the show and how much that set was a creative place. That’s a huge deal for me. It’s not that we used anything that was out of character, but they never were out of character. They were making us laugh. Of course we didn’t tell the cameramen what they were going to do, because we didn’t know. So the reason it felt so real and had such joy at the beginning is because it is. The other thing I remember about that episode is that they, for some reason, felt the need to have real food on the set, so we had rotted beans in that kitchen set on the other ship. Sorry, but no art is worth that. CFQ: Tim Minear wrote and directed this episode. How difficult was it for you to let go of your baby and let someone else take control? JOSS WHEDON: I didn’t direct the first Buffy, though I directed parts of it. The executive producer is responsible for everything, but he doesn’t have to create anything. He just is responsible for it. If it’s good, good, he was doing his job. Sometimes that means letting other people do their job and that sometimes means telling them how. There’s not a story in that show that I didn’t break significantly, but if there’s any single person in the universe that I trust, it’s Tim Minear. He really is as talented a writer and director as I’ve known, and was with me from pretty much the start. He was somebody I felt that I could – and I had to because I had two other shows and was determined to keep the quality up on them – turn to and walk away when I had to. I didn’t get to be there when they shot the basketball scene, I’m sorry to say, because I was back on Buffy. Sometimes things happened on Firefly that I didn’t approve of. You fix those with reshoots and edits the best you can, but the problems always came from outside. Tim was never outside, he was always in the heart of the thing. CFQ: I was heartbroken when he left Angel. JOSS WHEDON: It was not something that I wanted to do, to take him off of Angel, but I was convinced, and I think rightly, that if I didn’t have him on Firefly, I would never be able to leave because I wouldn’t have that lieutenant, and then Buffy and Angel would have suffered enormously. Ultimately I felt it was something that I wanted to do and something that Tim, though he never asked for it and never would have, very much wanted, because he loved Firefly the way that I did. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIM MINEAR Q&A CFQ: Let’s leave “The Train Job” behind and move on to “Bushwacked.” TIM MINEAR: That was the first one that I wrote by myself and directed. The Reavers, who made their non-appearance in the pilot, were fascinating to me. Again, in the first couple of episodes we felt as though we had to constantly reintroduce everything, because we didn’t have the luxury of the two-hour pilot to explain things to people. This was a way for me to do several things things: to introduce the crew again and what their relationships were to one another; to introduce the barbarians on our show, which were the Reavers, and the closest thing to an alien life form on Firefly, though, of course, they’re really human; and to introduce the Alliance. So, really, the story is about how our crew on Serenity makes their own civilization out there in space. The question is, what is civilization? They’re stuck between these two extremes; this behemoth bureaucracy, which is the Alliance, and this completely savage, lawless group known as the Reavers. The two extremes of civilization and barbarity. And our people have found kind of a medium place where they don’t go too far in either extreme, because either extreme is mass murder. That’s really what that story was about. I just had a great a time making that episode. There’s a sequence in there that’s one of my favorite things that I’ve done, which is the interrogation sequence. It’s all intercut and it was a way for me to, again, let the audience know who these people are. The interrogation is a great device to use, because somebody is there literally asking questions. It all builds up to the question I was asking in that part of the story, which is where Simon and River are hiding. Everyone is being interrogated and the commander of this Alliance ship is asking where this brother and sister are and we see these people tearing Serenity apart. The camera pulls out through the top of the ship and we see them in space suits, hanging on to the edge of the ship and the camera just keeps pulling back until they’re tiny and Serenity is tiny and we see a dock at the bottom of this tremendously large Alliance cruiser. That was three elements and Loni Paris [visual effects supervisor] totally deserved his Emmy to help me create this shot which you just don’t see on television. CFQ: After having been involved with Angel for so long, was it strange to be on a different set, directing a different group of actors or was it more freeing? TIM MINEAR: It was freeing. It was fantastic. I thought it was going to be incredibly daunting to sit down and try to write these nine new voices, but I think I got the hang of it right away. It was incredibly easy for some reason. As far as directing, that was really freeing, though the directing was as different as the writing was. Angel is slicker in a way; it’s a lot of cranes and dollies and not a lot of hand-held stuff. It’s a beautiful style that I love, but this time I got to come in, everything was hand-held and I jumped the line and got to go all over the place with the camera in a way I never really could on Angel with zooms and things that you haven’t seen since the ‘70s. COMING TOMORROW: “SHINDIG” & “SAFE”

Here is an AWESOME Q&A with Joss and Tim about Fox and Firefly. READ! CREDIT: http://64.5.52.62/%7ecfqcom/nuked/modules....article&sid=166 Firefly: The Firefly Episode Guide, Part One Joss Whedon and Tim Minear take fans through every episode of the short-lived series now available on DVD. by Ed Gross For the 2002-2003 television season, the Fox network had had an internal debate over renewing James Cameron’s Dark Angel for a third season, or picking up Joss Whedon’s new science fiction series, Firefly. Ultimately they chose the latter, but more or less gave up on it before it even hit the airwaves, most notably by rejecting the show’s two-hour pilot and demanding that Whedon and co-executive producer Tim Minear write and create an episode that could serve as the first episode. This was not a good first step and, indeed, it felt as though to a large degree the network had abandoned the show even before it made it to the air. Now the complete series is being issued on DVD in a box set available on December 9th, and to herald its arrival, both Whedon and Minear have agreed to discuss the making of each episode with CFQ. Their views will be presented each week day beginning today until the show reaches stores. For those unfamiliar with Firefly, the show’s official DVD description is as follows: “Five hundred years in the future, there is a whole new frontier, and the crew of the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity is eager to stake a claim on the action. They'll take any job, legal or illegal, to keep fuel in the tanks and food on the table. But things get a bit more complicated after they take on a passenger wanted by the new totalitarian Alliance regime. Now they find themselves on the run, desperate to steer clear of Alliance ships and the flesh-eating Reavers who live on the fringes of space.” CFQ: Looking at the fact that you’ve got this box set of Firefly coming out, is there a certain sense of vindication on your part? JOSS WHEDON: Big sense of vindication. Not just because there are episodes that nobody in the States got to say, but it represented someone in the Newscorp Corporation saying that we had something worth selling. And it came from, I’m told, the foreign markets just sort of going, “Well, where is it?” Fox said, “Well, we sort of cancelled it.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but where is it?” The fact that that desire is out there is a huge thing, but it’s also the fact that anyone can now pick it up and see what it was we were doing, when so people got the chance when we were actually doing it. So it’s enormous vindication and surprising. TIM MINEAR: We actually got an “A” in Entertainment Weekly. Now does that provide vindication? Let’s put it this way: I finally agree with one of their reviews. Their feeling was that it was smart, cool and that the extras were really nice, and that there were three unaired episodes, which would be like “crack to the Firefly fans.” As a DVD enthusiast, I’d buy it. CFQ: It seems to me that the following for the show really seems to have been growing since the cancellation. JOSS WHEDON: Even on the Internet its following has increased since after it was cancelled, which is….bittersweet. Last week it was particularly gratifying when they got it over in England and I got to see posts from people watching it for the first time, and in the right order on a regular schedule. CFQ: I don’t think you can really blame the audience. I think Fox bungled this one. JOSS WHEDON: I don’t blame the audience. According to reporters, some people liked it and some people hated. I don’t know who actually hated it. I’m sure there are people who did because it didn’t work for them, but it was never a question of people hating it, it was a question of nobody seeing it. The fan base was as devoted as Buffy’s was after three years in the space of 11 episodes. It was sort of amazing. It didn’t surprise me that much, because I loved the idea for the show, but when we were putting the show together and making it, I felt it was extraordinary in a way that I had never felt about anything I’d done. More than any single thing. The cast jelled. The show, creatively, just looked and felt the way I wanted it to. It didn’t feel like it was the first year. It felt like we had found our footing from day one, and I’d just never been with a bunch – both cast and crew – who made me feel that this was meant to be in such a strong way. In truth, it’s not as easy a sell a concept as Buffy – young girl fights vampires. Boom! You get it. Now you get it everywhere. This was a little different, but to me it was the most grown-up, fulfilling and best experience I’ve ever had. That’s why I’m desperately trying to keep it going. TIM MINEAR: It didn’t surprise me, in a way, that the show didn’t find an audience by the time we started airing. First of all, it was the weirdest thing on TV, in many respects. Is it a space show? Is it a western? Is it a Civil War show? Is it a comedy? Well, no, it’s a Joss Whedon show, so the answer is yes to all of those things. But when Fox refused to air the pilot, I knew we were screwed. CFQ: What are the odds of a movie version? I know there was the whole announcement that Universal was going to make a movie…. JOSS WHEDON: That was a little premature as there is no green light. I can’t play the odds, I can’t really count the odds. They’re not bad. The interest is genuine. It’s up to me to turn out a script that’s worth making, which is what I’m busily trying to do. I’m dealing with good, smart people, which is both good and bad. It’s good because of the interest they’ve shown, but it’s bad because I can’t pull one over on them. So it’s really up to me to see if that works and I should know soon. CFQ: It’s fairly unusual for a studio like Fox to relinquish the rights for another studio to pick it up. JOSS WHEDON: It was extremely gracious of them and unexpected. A lot of people were, like, “Nobody would do that.” I think they felt bad that it didn’t work out, however that may have happened, and didn’t want to get in the way of something they knew I was that passionate about, which I really, really appreciate. I do have a contract with them, and you could say this was smart business. People can do smart business in two ways, and one of them is the gracious way, which is as rare as it is beautiful. CFQ: In putting together the DVDs, obviously you sat down and rewatched the entire run of the series again. Overall, what was your feeling in retrospect? JOSS WHEDON: Overall, the more I watched, the angrier I got. I think some of the best stuff we’ve ever done is in that show. Seeing every episode, some are better than others, especially because you’re dealing with so many facets of creating a science fiction world on television. There’s budget, you can be a little uncertain about the chemistry of certain costumes or ideas or traditions. Some things register better than others. I see them and I think, “This is really cool.” I’m just a big fan geek as always. Every one of them has something in it that makes it really worthy, and that’s pretty much the goal in television. And a couple of them are classics. Actually, my favorite episode was not written or directed by me, which is annoying, but we’ll get to that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE FIREFLY EPISODE GUIDE “SERENITY” DVD Plot Description: The crew of Serenity is eager to rid themselves of an easily traceable cargo they salvaged from a vessel adrift in space, totally unaware that a passenger has brought an even more dangerous cargo aboard. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JOSS WHEDON Q&A CFQ: In turning to the episodes themselves, I’d like to get your feelings about them, beginning with the pilot, “Serenity.” JOSS WHEDON: The infamous pilot. For me, the strength of the thing was in its pilotiness, which is different in being a two-hour pilot than any movie. You’re sort of introducing people to a world, asking a lot of questions that you’re not going to answer and setting everything up. I love the way it did that. It captured exactly what I was looking for and was the first time that I got to realize that all of my actors were extraordinary and embodied the people they were playing to a frightening extent. Everything was so easy, which should have been my first warning. Everything went so well. The director of photography, David Boyd, is an extraordinary guy who was thinking exactly along the lines that I was. When stuff was coming out too pretty, he swapped up the lenses for some old Panavision lenses so we could get ourselves some good flares. My whole mission statement was a sort of ‘70s Western kind of feel to it, which is very much a lot of TV shows nowadays with a lot of handheld and sloppiness. That was done to get away with the science fiction kind of pomp, the stately, sterile morality tales that I just thought were a little dull. I wanted to do something that felt very contemporary and the way we were able to experiment – some of the prettiest frames I’ve ever had the opportunity to make are in that show. And of course when we were working on the set, we were working over the tank they had dug for Alien Resurrection, so I felt like there was an exorcism of sorts going on. CFQ: You brought up the handheld approach. Some of the shots in the pilot, where the camera would suddenly snap into focus to see a spaceship, reminded me a bit of September 11th and that footage taken from the street, when the photographer suddenly raises his camera and there’s the first jet that hit the Twin Towers. JOSS WHEDON: That was the idea and the guys totally got it. It never felt like, “And now, an establishing shot. And now, the story. And now, the establishing shot.” It was always meant to look as dirty and found and, “Oh, there happened to be a camera there” as possible, while still controlling everything people are seeing very specifically but pretending that you’re not. CFQ: I know for the sake of realism you didn’t want to have sound in space, but did that become a continuing criticism during production? JOSS WHEDON: Most people were very excited because it had been so long since anybody had remembered that rule. There was one time when I looked at something and said, “Sound would have helped the clarity of this,” but apart from that you can really accomplish from music what you get with sound. CFQ: Who was the last person to have done that, Kubrick with 2001? JOSS WHEDON: I’m sure it was done between that and Star Wars, but if you were to look at bench posts, I think that would be the last major attempt. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIM MINEAR Q&A TIM MINEAR: I thought the pilot was incredible and complex. People are going into science fiction television, particularly anything with space ships, with certain preconceived notions because of Star Trek and everything else. You really needed those two hours to orient yourself to this Western future where there weren’t bumpy-headed aliens. There were nine characters that needed to be introduced and a whole sort of political backdrop that needed to be understood. It wasn’t all that complex, but you had to at least understand that Mal fought in a civil war and was on the losing side and that a large, totalitarian, Alliance government had taken over. You had to understand all of those things to understand the show. But Fox didn’t like it, and when I found out that they didn’t like the pilot, I kind of knew that we were doomed. If the network can’t embrace the DNA of the thing that they bought, they’re going to have a really hard time promoting it and selling it to the audience. So there was kind of a stink put on the show because people knew that they had taken the pilot out of rotation; that Joss had written and directed this two-hour expensive television pilot, and for some reason the network didn’t want to air it. And it’s not because it bashed Ronald Reagan [laughs]. They honestly didn’t think it was very good. So suddenly the show, before we ever shoot the first regular episode, is labeled as troubled. Then the problem was that they couldn’t look at this two hour pilot and imagine what an hour episode would look like, and they wanted a little more humor, more action, they wanted the captain to be a little more likable. They wanted us to pitch them some ideas. Joss and I joked, “We should write a script over the weekend to serve as an example of a one hour episode.” CFQ: But that’s exactly what you ended up doing, right? TIM MINEAR: We ended up doing that because they asked us to and we were, like, “You’ve got to be joking; it’s impossible.” So we broke the story [for “The Train Job”] really fast where he wrote two acts and I wrote two acts, and we were up for two days and on Monday morning it was on their desk. Look, we were producing two television series out of that building [buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel], and it’s not the first time that we did an all-nighter to get a script written. CFQ: But this was a new show. It’s not like you can say, “We’re doing an episode of Angel, let’s crank one out.” Now you have to introduce this show in a one-hour format. TIM MINEAR: That’s true. It wasn’t easy and it was flawed because of that. But, if we hadn’t done it, they wouldn’t have picked up the show. We thought it was a given that they would pick up the show, that there wasn’t a question. Suddenly there was a question and then there was a big question, and then it was all about, “We have to do whatever we have to do to get this thing picked up so that we can start making episodes.” We did it, but it was a compromise from then on out to some degree. CFQ: It what way? TIM MINEAR: We skewed certain things to please the network, I think, which you do anyway, because they’re the people putting up the money. But the thing is, when you ask Joss Whedon to create a television show for you, it’s going to be in your best interest to just let him do his thing. It was interesting, because there were people in high places at that network who had worked with Joss before, and the more involved I was with Firefly, the more I came to understand that they had a fundamental misunderstanding about what it was that we did. They thought we were comedy writers. CFQ: Are you serious? TIM MINEAR: Yeah, they thought this thing was going to be kind of a wacky romp, which every once in a while it was, because that’s the way we write television. Sometimes things are gut-wrenching, sometimes they’re funny, or whatever. But they seemed to think that because of Buffy possibly, it would be a comedy. The fact that anyone would think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a comedy means…. CFQ: That they don’t watch their own shows, possibly? TIM MINEAR: Definitely. A lot of people couldn’t get past the name Buffy the Vampire Slayer and they assumed it was some sort of campy, Scooby Doo thing and they never quite understood that it was, in fact, totally real, totally about the human experience and that more than making you laugh, it ripped your heart out and then danced on it. That’s what we wanted to do with Firefly. There were much, much darker places that we wanted to go with it, which we never quite got to. But at the end of the day, we got to make the show we wanted to make. Our biggest problem is that in certain factions of the network, they had written off Firefly very early on and we were sort of heading for a cliff and there was no way to avoid it. They just didn’t understand it. The fact is, though, I’m doing Wonderfalls for Fox right now, and they love it. It’s like working for a different network. The thing that killed me about “Serenity” is that it’s so clearly great and the network just decided they didn’t like it. The network had certain notes and certain reasons for not liking it. Joss went out and shot additional footage. He added the battle footage at the beginning, for instance. He went through and found places to lighten things up, add jokes and tighten some areas that might have been a little flat. He answered every single criticism that the network may have had about that two-hour pilot, and they didn’t even look at it. That’s my understanding. Maybe somebody popped in a cassette at home or something, but my understanding is that they put it on a shelf, decided not to air it even after those changes were made. And those changes were made in the hopes that they take a fresh look at it and decide that it was worth airing first and would help support their new television series. From what we know, they never even looked at it. One important thing to keep in mind is that with the things that were changed, Joss didn’t feel he was compromising the show at all. He thought he was making it better, and he did. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IN PART TWO, JOSS WHEDON AND TIM MINEAR DISCUSS “THE TRAIN JOB” AND “BUSHWACKED”

Vince loves Angle - he just happens to love the version of Kurt Angle who acts like a fucking goof.

Some believe that he is a sort of “überhoss”, while others claim such a hoss is only possible in theory." ...now THAT'S funny.

C'mon! Don't just "bump" the thread - you gotta ADD to it... (thank you, I didn't want to have to do it ) Anyways, where were we last on Angel? Oh yes, Lindsey, any thoughts???

Freddie Prinz (?) Jr. in the House of Yes. I mean, yeah, he was da bomb in wing commander and summer catch, but what else has he done? The dude from Rushmore that's not Bill Murray - I'm not saying he's bad, but he's been on a gradual decline since that role (fuck Cool Ethan)... I am being informed now that his name is Jason Schwarzman.

I completely forgot about Randy Savage - he's definitely in the top 5. One of the best sellers in WWE history, and even though he was small, he'd still make you hate him like he was a bully.

Making Money and Entertaining the fans are things one can manipuate, but not control, and have external factors effecting. So I do not look to those things as the definition of good - or at least, what I can make good. Putting on "good" matches, is certainly key - as wrestling should be based around wrestling matches. Being "technical" is always nice to have, as it adds to the visual appeal of the match (ie: Benoit/Angle RR03); crisp, clean moves (see, "technique") are the marks of a well trained wrestler. I don't see how keeping the wrestlers on the roster happy is of any consequence in this regard. What I define as being "good". A good story. One that has little-to-no plot holes. One that is believable. One that is based on a "truth" - in this regard, Benoit wanting the WWE title as opposed to the World Title. One that has some artistic value - that has meaning. Benoit's quest, for example. A story that is tangible, that I can explain. One that goes beyond a single layer - something that has depth to it. Smart writing, that uses history and that uses time and characters effectively. That the characters actually grow, learn, and develop. That this story is reflected in the match itself. That the match is "good". That there is a story in it, that the moves reflect that. That there is selling, a bit of variety, some innovation, a constant pace, build, drama, effective use of moves. That the finish is appropriate to both the story and the characters of the story. That there is resolution.

Well, my idea of "better" has long since passed and would have started after Summerslam. But after Summerslam it fell apart, so then "better" came around after Survivor Series. Which one do you want?

So, you have a scenario in your mind that you want to see, while I happen to find the scenario that is rumored to take place to be not all bad, but I'm wrong for thinking that way? Am I not allow to have an idea of what I'd like to see too? You also "think" that we being "paranoid" has no foundation to it - as if HHH has never done anything of the sort in the past... You're "thinking" at this point in time, has me wondering how much "thought" you've actually put into this. I'm thinking not that much. I never said you can't think that, I just said I can't imagine anyone thinking that - given the circumstance(s). Can't I think that? Am I not allowed to think that? To think like that? It's not my "ultimate dream scenario," but then again, I don't have one because I'm not staying up nights losing sleep over this. Neither am I, infact, I don't think it will even happen. I just like discussing it. But keep this in mind, no matter what YOUR dream scenario is, there's going to be somebody else out there with a different idea of what is best. Yeah, but mines so much better. Quite frankly, I think people posting on here complaining about this are shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, if I'm Vince McMahon and I'm aware of the consensus opinions online about Benoit and HHH, then hear that people online are complaining about the possibility of Benoit beating HHH in the biggest show in WWE history for the World championship, my first reaction is "Fuck 'em." You're saying "Fuck em" about a loyal fanbase who puts enough time and thought into your product to debate the merits of a feud that probably won't even happen for 6 pages? I dunno, that's some sort of commitment they have - might be worth keepin...

And people on here are shitting all over the idea of Benoit winning? Fuck that. Actually, I don't like the idea of HHH/Benoit at all. Anything that falls under the "HHH/Benoit" banner, is bad. Even "the idea Benoit winning". You're mad because it's not the WWE Championship they'll be fighting for... You're mad because it's just some political scheme for HHH to get a win back later... You know what? You're just plain paranoid, delusional and sad. You forgot "right" Why don't people get this? Because when I look at the title I think "WCW". When JR goes on about Flair being a 16 time champion and referring to that belt as a possible 17 time, or whatever, I kinda get the feeling they're connecting the two. Just a feelin... Also, I think this proves that no matter what happens, people will bitch. I wouldn't have bitched with Brock vs. Benoit... you know, provided they didn't give me anything to bitch about... you're acting like this is our fault - we're just reacting... No matter what is ever done, SOMEBODY is going to be pissed off, and it wrecks the fun for everybody else. Well, people a different. They have different responses to different things. That's just the way of the world. We discuss some of those things here - it's kinda expected, this being a discussion board and all. Benoit winning the Royal Rumble, then beating HHH to win the World championship at WrestleMania at MSG. Excuse me for "settling for less than the best," but I think that scenario sounds pretty fucking good Do you actually "think"? Are you actually "thinking" about this? I can't imagine that sounding "pretty fucking good" if you actually "think" about it.