Whedon speaks...

Nerd king Joss Whedon loves you, too



Matt Rivera/msnbc

Joss Whedon on stage Sunday at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

By Helen A.S. Popkin
The first
audience question for Joss Whedon turns out to be a request. The lucky
guy at the front of the queue at the Q&A microphone in room 18abcd
of the Austin Convention Center explains that he is playing SuperBetter! One of his tasks, he claims, is to give Whedon a high five.

Whedon
— the mastermind behind “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (an icon of
hipsterdom), “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog" (a so-awesome Web
series), the upcoming movie blockbuster version of the “Avengers," and
just generally a whole lot of cool — looks stumped.


Maybe he’s unfamiliar with the health and self-improvement game developed by Jane McGonigal
— another highly anticipated speaker at South by Southwest this year.
Perhaps Whedon just couldn’t hear over the cheers of envious audience
members, drowning out the nervous young man’s geeky, awesome, awesomely
geeky request.
Once Whedon groks that the dude wants to slap palms
as part of some quest, however, he's GGG. “Well, I guess we better do
it then,” he responds.
An usher escorts the guy on stage, said
requested high five occurs, and cheers erupt throughout the
capacity-filled venue. There is even more applause outside the hall,
where fans who couldn’t get in in to the main venue sit eight rows of 40
people each deep in front of a huge flat screen, leaving nothing but
standing room for those stuck in Siberia, aka the wide convention center
hall.

Yes. Writer, director and apparent king of the nerds Joss Whedon is that beloved.

In
town for the SXSW Film Festival to premiere “Cabin in the Woods,” a
horror movie that he co-wrote, Whedon may be a more popular draw for the
Interactive portion of the conference. The hoodie-and-Converse wearing
hordes descended upon Austin to talk apps,
open source, the Internet, video games and what have you, but they're
also a Venn-diagram demographic that has long appreciated Whedon’s take
on sci-fi fantasy, even when entertainment executives did not.

And
this was before Whedon got tapped for the job of writing and directing
the much-anticipated movie version of the Marvel ripoff of D.C.’s
Justice League, “The Avengers.” Perhaps almost as much as the
actor-writer-director-icon himself, Whedonverse fandom has suffered at
the hands of capricious network
executives who tried to mess with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” screwed
up the “Firefly” storyline by showing episodes out of order, and
straight-up cancelled “Dollhouse” without, as his earnest fans believe,
giving it a proper chance.

If his acolytes remain bitter,
Whedon, it seems, is not. This is a guy who loves his job so much that
he can’t stop doing it — directing “Much Ado About Nothing” in his home
between the month that “Avengers” wrapped up shooting and the dreary
process of editing it into an actual film. ("I didn't write that one,"
he said of the Shakespeare comedy.) He obviously appreciates his fans,
gamely answering the Whedon-obsessive questions of both interviewer Adam
V. Vary and the audience, even though many of his answers were more
sassy than sincere.

Here’s a few of our favorites:

For
those who have obsessively dissected each and every new “Avengers”
trailer: Who are the bad guys? Skrull? Kree? Those guys from “Starship
Troopers?”

“It’s the Vulcans. I don’t know a lot about the Marvel universe, and I thought there were Vulcans ... we’ll probably get a few emails.”


What was it like on "The Avengers," to have the keys to Scrooge McDucks’ money pit?
“That is in fact who financed the film. They don’t talk about that much."
On “Watchmen” and the “Batman” reboot, and the zeitgeist that we’re over traditional superheroes:
“I’m
not over it! I’m a fanboy. I want to see what’s up with Thor and
Captain America and what he can do with that shield. I’m not ready for
postmodern super heroes.”
On the unlikely team members of “The Avengers”:
“Obviously
I look at the Avengers and go, this team doesn’t make any sense at all,
but I can work with that, because it doesn’t make sense to them either.
They’re extraordinarily dysfunctional people. And they’re in their own
way very isolated. So just being able to tell that very basic story;
isolated people who come together and become more than their parts, is a
meaningful story to me.”
On the possibility of “Firefly” returning to TV:
“I
keep thinking they’re gonna call me. I keep thinking they’re gonna
crunch the numbers and think, oh, we can make money with this! And they
don’t.”

It was all over the news here locally on Saturday. It was pouring down rain and no chance of it letting up.

"Cabin in the Woods" was made three years ago and was shelved because the production company went broke. It was filmed in Canada and I have to say the trailers they showed on local tv don't make me want to run off and see it. But who knows...stranger things have happened then showing up in Austin, Texas on a rainy afternoon to plug a movie...

I think I've had enough of watching a story just to get a Joss Whedon ending(Spike dies/Penny dies/Wash dies....Spike dies again. I can't take that anymore. So, good luck to him and his fans, I'll just be giving anything of his a "pass".

Well I'll give him another chance. He's too far ahead of the curve for having most of his work on mass-market network TV. As the article says, he probably doesn't get along with network honchos that well and the fan base is too rabid and geekish for them to understand.

I don't know if he "discovered" Dichen Lachen but he put her in Doll House which is where I saw her for the first time, and now she's in Being Human. So if he was the first to cast a Tibetan on American TV, that's worth something, aside from her being about the most exotic looking actress out there...

Oh, he has an eye for women, I'll give him that.