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Joss Whedon’s leaked ‘Wonder Woman’ screenplay is mindblowingly sexist

Pie and Beans

Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
Internet archiving used to travel back 11 years and call someone shit is often the most petty use. I mean I'm no fan of Whedon's work recently, but Hollywood be weird man. Sometimes you have to write scripts with giant spiders in them because the dude hiring and firing you has a REAL BIG HARD ON for giant spider battles.
 

strafer

member
ofE9fgl.gif

Even the women are thirsty.
 

Sotha Sil

Member
The guy who made Dollhouse is sexist? I'm shocked.

Whedon has never has been the feminist his most ardent fans claim he is.

It's a bit of a "pick your battle" fallacy of sorts. He's so much better than many that progressive people don't want to look at (or mention) his very blatant flaws. His "sexy teenage girls are my spirit animal" schtick has always felt a bit off to me. Not a fan of his "message".
 
Internet archiving used to travel back 11 years and call someone shit is often the most petty use. I mean I'm no fan of Whedon's work recently, but Hollywood be weird man. Sometimes you have to write scripts with giant spiders in them because the dude hiring and firing you has a REAL BIG HARD ON for giant spider battles.

Exactly. It's NOT Whedons fault. It's the fault of the guy he was supposedly gonna show the script to. I have a feeling Whedon was grinding his teeth as he typed that garbage.
 

Sotha Sil

Member
Exactly. It's NOT Whedons fault. It's the fault of the guy he was supposedly gonna show the script to. I have a feeling Whedon was grinding his teeth as he typed that garbage.

While tearing off his shirt out of self-loathing in a crowded restaurant, no doubt
 
Internet archiving used to travel back 11 years

lol yes back in the year 2006 it was fine to stare at women and exclaim that "It's like Christmas". compare this to Michael Bay who was filming Transformers at this time. at least when Shia LeBouf is oogling Megan Fox he doesn't say "It's like Christmas" give me a break w this juvenile bs.

Exactly. It's NOT Whedons fault. It's the fault of the guy he was supposedly gonna show the script to. I have a feeling Whedon was grinding his teeth as he typed that garbage.

ah yes, "I was only doing my job", great excuse. well, he was being paid, what do you expect him to do, NOT write like it was an episode of the Man Show?
 

anaron

Member
Whedon's two best shows are Firefly and Angel—the shows in which he actually centers the narrative on a guy & his friends, and proceeds forward from that point.

If Justice League is Batman's movie (and it probably is) whatever he adds to it will probably be just fine because Angel really isn't much more than Vampire Batman in Los Angeles.

Ew. Buffy will always be his best work bar none.
 
Excellent rebuttal.

I mean, "BUFFY IS THE BEST" isn't much of an in-depth analysis, and in turn, my "Angel & Firefly are the best" isn't super-well-explained either.

BUT IF YOU WANT A RANKING THREAD

Whedon has a relatively short attention span, really. And if a project doesn't have 100% of his focus, the quality will diminish rapidly depending on who is left in charge.

Buffy's first season is rough, which is to expected because he wasn't used to running a show. But seasons 2 & 3 were pretty goddamned good. 4? Not so much. 5? Came back strong.

6&7 can take a fuckin walk, for the most part.

Over the course of Buffy's run, even in its best seasons, the quality was sorta/kinda inconsistent. This is to be expected when you hang your show on Sarah Michelle Gellar's acting.

But when Whedon turned his full attention to Angel, not only did Buffy suffer a little, but Angel took off. Angel started at a higher level of quality, and maintained it for longer. Boreanaz was a better lead, and the support was better still, and when Whedon left THAT show to wrap up Buffy and start Firefly, the quality didn't dip as strongly.

And then there's Firefly, which had the benefit of Whedon being a pro at showrunning, and knowing EXACTLY what he wanted to do from jump, as opposed to both Buffy and Angel, where it took a little time to find a groove. Firefly being canceled in the middle of a season and ending with a movie was probably best case scenario, honestly. No time to burn out, get distracted, or diluted.

Buffy: Much more groundbreaking, way more uneven.
Angel: Much more consistent + higher highs (best ending, too)
Firefly: Best execution, most assured storytelling.

I honestly think the deification of King Joss in the mid 2000s, the resurrection of his dead show, and the constant calls to throw him at literally ANY "geek" property (and his finally being gifted one, and it being the fuckin' AVENGERS) dulled him.
 

anaron

Member
SMG was incredible as Buffy though? Like she's been fairly mediocre of late but she nailed that shit throughout seasons 1-6.

And Angel while having brilliant highs, is easily his most inconsistent work - the season arcs almost never come together in a fully satisfying way, the show has some of the weakest characters in Gunn and Fred, the most annoying and horrible screen stealing characters through Kate, Connor, Eve and eventually Spike, the generally horrible treatment of the female characters (Cordy) and the sausage fest the show generally is.
 

Ephidel

Member
Wait, what?
You managed to miss that one? Lucky.
I never actually watched the special where it was "revealed" (I don't even think it aired here, though I could be wrong) but there's an article about it here - http://io9.gizmodo.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make
And executive producer Tim Minear explained about one episode that Joss Whedon pitched early on:

She had this magic syringe. She would take this drug. And if she were, for instance, raped, the rapist would die a horrible death. The story was that she gets kidnapped by Reavers and when Mal finally got to the ship to save her from the Reavers, he gets on the Reaver ship and all the Reavers are dead. Which would suggest a kind of really bad assault. At the end of the episode, he comes in after she's been horribly brutalized, and he comes in and he gets down on his knee, and he takes her hand. And he treats her like a lady. And that's the kind of stuff that we wanted to do. It was very dark. And this was actually the first story that Joss pitched to me when he asked me to come work on the show. He said, 'These are the kind of stories we're going to do.'
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
A plotline in S2 would have been Inara gettig raped by the Reavers and using something in her that would've killed them. It was...intrresting
Yeahhhh um, I guess it maybe could have worked in a more dramatic show, but Firefly being more lighthearted worked just fine, hah. Glad they didn't do this.

It was weird re-watching Serenity lately. The movie is way darker in tone than the show was.

It's a show with lower lows than higher highs.
Can't agree with that at all.
 

Veelk

Banned
You managed to miss that one? Lucky.
I never actually watched the special where it was "revealed" (I don't even think it aired here, though I could be wrong) but there's an article about it here - http://io9.gizmodo.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make

Yeah, that's pretty horrible.

I still maintain that anything before the final draft is inconsequential since that's the place where you're bullshitting until you make it right, but sheesh.

I'm hoping that he has someone or another to just sit him down and let him know when he's gone off the deep end with his writing.
 
You managed to miss that one? Lucky.
I never actually watched the special where it was "revealed" (I don't even think it aired here, though I could be wrong) but there's an article about it here - http://io9.gizmodo.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make

Ah so it was a spec pitch to indicate tone and they never did it, instead they did Bushwhacked and later Heart of Gold.

So it's almost like writers sometimes have bad intial ideas that need to be refined and rewrote a few times to get a good final result.
 

MisterHero

Super Member
I mean, "BUFFY IS THE BEST" isn't much of an in-depth analysis, and in turn, my "Angel & Firefly are the best" isn't super-well-explained either.

BUT IF YOU WANT A RANKING THREAD

Whedon has a relatively short attention span, really. And if a project doesn't have 100% of his focus, the quality will diminish rapidly depending on who is left in charge.

Buffy's first season is rough, which is to expected because he wasn't used to running a show. But seasons 2 & 3 were pretty goddamned good. 4? Not so much. 5? Came back strong.

6&7 can take a fuckin walk, for the most part.

Over the course of Buffy's run, even in its best seasons, the quality was sorta/kinda inconsistent. This is to be expected when you hang your show on Sarah Michelle Gellar's acting.

But when Whedon turned his full attention to Angel, not only did Buffy suffer a little, but Angel took off. Angel started at a higher level of quality, and maintained it for longer. Boreanaz was a better lead, and the support was better still, and when Whedon left THAT show to wrap up Buffy and start Firefly, the quality didn't dip as strongly.

And then there's Firefly, which had the benefit of Whedon being a pro at showrunning, and knowing EXACTLY what he wanted to do from jump, as opposed to both Buffy and Angel, where it took a little time to find a groove. Firefly being canceled in the middle of a season and ending with a movie was probably best case scenario, honestly. No time to burn out, get distracted, or diluted.

Buffy: Much more groundbreaking, way more uneven.
Angel: Much more consistent + higher highs (best ending, too)
Firefly: Best execution, most assured storytelling.

I honestly think the deification of King Joss in the mid 2000s, the resurrection of his dead show, and the constant calls to throw him at literally ANY "geek" property (and his finally being gifted one, and it being the fuckin' AVENGERS) dulled him.
Thanks for that. While I agree with much of your summary, I would take the "groundbreaking" seasons over the series that was more consistent. Plus I'm biased towards the former cast.

In retrospect (and back to the thread), I guess I can't expect that kind of quality from everything he does, even this WW script.

I'm coming around to the negative responses to the script, but he's earned enough benefit of the doubt from me. And again, it would be interesting to see how the studio reacted to certain choices. Before dropping it completely, of course.
 

LionPride

Banned
Yeahhhh um, I guess it maybe could have worked in a more dramatic show, but Firefly being more lighthearted worked just fine, hah. Glad they didn't do this.

It was weird re-watching Serenity lately. The movie is way darker in tone than the show was.


Can't agree with that at all.
I'm just more of an Angel fan, always have been. Cordy's character arc through the Jasmine shit was litty

I love Gunn

Wes the God

Fred the GAWD

Just liked it more
 
Welp.

Looks like Whedon is back to his Asshole Phase.

This honestly should not be surprising. He's a Fedora Feminist, and always has been. Dollhouse was a giant soap box for him to talk about how men are horrible. Hell, Firefly tried so hard to make fun of sexism that it actually came off as being sexist to both men and women.

So would it be the readers fault for misunderstanding Whedon then? Or would he actually admit blame to writing shit?

This is the guy that, to a room full of people at Comic-Con, told them to quit being mean to Dawn.
 

ZeoVGM

Banned
I'm just more of an Angel fan, always have been. Cordy's character arc through the Jasmine shit was litty

I love Gunn

Wes the God

Fred the GAWD

Just liked it more

Angel is tied with Breaking Bad, in my mind, for having the greatest character development in television history.
 
a fictional character behaving a certain way does not mean that its writer is advocating that people should behave that way

the quoted screenplay is different, but i don't know how much value there is in drawing conclusions from some lines you saw on a completed TV show
 

Random Human

They were trying to grab your prize. They work for the mercenary. The masked man.
Welp.

Looks like Whedon is back to his Asshole Phase.

This honestly should not be surprising. He's a Fedora Feminist, and always has been. Dollhouse was a giant soap box for him to talk about how men are horrible. Hell, Firefly tried so hard to make fun of sexism that it actually came off as being sexist to both men and women.

I'm not sure which of these is making me go "Hmmmm" harder.
 

DocSeuss

Member
If Jenkins' film hadn't been made, lacking the comparison, a large number of people wouldn't have even realized how sexist the script was ... Possibly myself included.

I'm beginning to believe that Wonder Woman may end up being the most important super hero film made. I'm a huge fan of the MCU, but Wonder Woman was, well, wonderful.

Do you think people are really that dumb?

I mean, just throwing it out there, but the movie didn't get made. This definitely wouldn't pass most scriptreader's muster, and, lo and behold, it didn't.
 
These receipt blog mentality becomes more vindictive by the day.

Some of the assertions in this thread about him as a person, based on a first draft scrambled out over a decade ago, really warranted?
 

Dead Man

Member
This is the goods



He sure is something, yes.



I'm guessing the script he's talking about below is NOT Batgirl.



I'm thinking some creative license is being applied here (sorta like how Mark Waid went into a fugue state and started quailing & yelling out-of-body at Man of Steel) because the mental image of shirtless Joss Whedon heaving and sobbing over a screenplay in an empty restaurant is...

...it's somethin, alright.
Jesus. That is not a well adjusted human being.
 

ReiGun

Member
These receipt blog mentality becomes more vindictive by the day.

Some of the assertions in this thread about him as a person, based on a first draft scrambled out over a decade ago, really warranted?

People have been clocking Joss on the more problematic elements of his work since Buffy. This is more another thing to add on to the pile, really.
 

RawNuts

Member
(Especially their feet. Diana is barefoot in scene one, and we get several foot updates later on.)
This part is killing me.

You know people are trying to work in fetish shit when they focus on specific details like this more than other things. I learned that when taking art requests from people.
 
And Angel while having brilliant highs, is easily his most inconsistent work - the season arcs almost never come together in a fully satisfying way, the show has some of the weakest characters in Gunn and Fred, the most annoying and horrible screen stealing characters through Kate, Connor, Eve and eventually Spike, the generally horrible treatment of the female characters (Cordy) and the sausage fest the show generally is.

Yeah, I don't know how anyone could call Angel consistent outside of the super divisive season 4. All the other seasons frequently veer between "That was amazing" and "Holy shit that was terrible". Some of the episodes in the first three seasons are just atrocious.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Welp.

Looks like Whedon is back to his Asshole Phase.
Back? That script is 11 years old.

This honestly should not be surprising. He's a Fedora Feminist, and always has been.
WTF does that even mean?

Dollhouse was a giant soap box for him to talk about how men are horrible. Hell, Firefly tried so hard to make fun of sexism that it actually came off as being sexist to both men and women.
What on Earth are you talking about?

What an utterly baffling post. o_O
 
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