it’s about. “His lectures were absolutely brilliant. They had not only the complete understanding and the ability to clarify and delineate, but also they had a kind of poetry that showed how his heart and soul really understood the medium, as well as his brain,” she explains. “He wasn’t just intellectually sharp about film, he was also emotionally, creatively sharp about it.”
Each lecture Joss did taught him something new. With Otto Preminger’s noir
Where the Sidewalk Ends
, he and his co-TA learned how to think quickly, as they were only able to screen the film simultaneously with their talk. He returned to Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, and explained to the students why it’s such a polarizing movie—discussingHitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren and how he saw her, essentially, as a prop in the film. “I had an old photograph of him that I’d gotten from a book, of him marking her leg with chalk to show the cameraman where he wanted the frame to end,” Joss says. “That was amazing; she was like a piece of set [decoration].”
In his lecture on
Rear Window
(1954), Joss described Jimmy Stewart’s character using a term familiar to
Buffy
fans. He called him the Watcher—someone who views life as a movie, who thinks that simply watching the goings-on of the couple across the way through their window can’t hurt him. But it does hurt him, both physically and, more importantly, emotionally. It’s a theme that Joss would revisit in the relationship between Buffy and her trainer/mentor Giles on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. In the first episode of the series, Buffy pushes him to take action against vampires himself. “I-I’m a Watcher,” he says, stumbling over his words, explaining that he hasn’t the skill, that it’s not his role in life. There is both a sense of safety and a resigned sadness in his declaration. (Giles’s cover job as the librarian at Buffy’s high school also has roots in this period of Joss’s life; while at Wesleyan, he worked the desk at the university library.)
Another hint toward Joss’s breakthrough series came in his junior-year film project, which was about a girl who goes to the prom and finds out her date is a vampire.
A Night Alone
had its premiere on Sunday, May 11, 1986, at “Wesleyan Presents: The Student Films and Videos of 1986.” Joss both designed the event’s poster and took the black-and-white noir detective photo featured on it. For one dollar, attendees watched several 16 mm student films, including Michael Bay’s
My Brother Benjamin
, which won an award. It would be one of the only times the public had the opportunity to screen Bay’s or Joss’s film. At Wesleyan, the students fund their own films and thus have all ownership rights to them.
To this day, Joss refuses to let anyone screen
A Night Alone
, because he feels that it was poorly made. While Wesleyan’s film program was exceptional on theory and history, it was sadly lacking in production offerings. “Pretty much what I had learned in our one production class was: Don’t drop the camera. It’s really expensive,” Joss says. “That film was a hot mess.”
Basinger had a far kinder assessment of her two students’ work. “They both showed great talent for undergraduates in a liberal arts college that has one brief semester in production and who made their own projects. They are both distinctive. In Michael’s case, his is a Michael Bay film: It’s beautifully shot and edited, it’s a fluid forward movement of action, and you could put it up anywhere,” she says. “Joss’s was a narrative, and he had amateur actors. So you have a rougher thing, but you very definitely have an intelligent, amusing piece of work that is clearly a Joss Whedon film, with clearly a Joss Whedon character and story.”
The following year, Joss made another movie that he liked much better. This one wasn’t done for school credit but instead to “ward off the evil spirits” of
A Night
Each lecture Joss did taught him something new. With Otto Preminger’s noir
Where the Sidewalk Ends
, he and his co-TA learned how to think quickly, as they were only able to screen the film simultaneously with their talk. He returned to Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, and explained to the students why it’s such a polarizing movie—discussingHitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren and how he saw her, essentially, as a prop in the film. “I had an old photograph of him that I’d gotten from a book, of him marking her leg with chalk to show the cameraman where he wanted the frame to end,” Joss says. “That was amazing; she was like a piece of set [decoration].”
In his lecture on
Rear Window
(1954), Joss described Jimmy Stewart’s character using a term familiar to
Buffy
fans. He called him the Watcher—someone who views life as a movie, who thinks that simply watching the goings-on of the couple across the way through their window can’t hurt him. But it does hurt him, both physically and, more importantly, emotionally. It’s a theme that Joss would revisit in the relationship between Buffy and her trainer/mentor Giles on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. In the first episode of the series, Buffy pushes him to take action against vampires himself. “I-I’m a Watcher,” he says, stumbling over his words, explaining that he hasn’t the skill, that it’s not his role in life. There is both a sense of safety and a resigned sadness in his declaration. (Giles’s cover job as the librarian at Buffy’s high school also has roots in this period of Joss’s life; while at Wesleyan, he worked the desk at the university library.)
Another hint toward Joss’s breakthrough series came in his junior-year film project, which was about a girl who goes to the prom and finds out her date is a vampire.
A Night Alone
had its premiere on Sunday, May 11, 1986, at “Wesleyan Presents: The Student Films and Videos of 1986.” Joss both designed the event’s poster and took the black-and-white noir detective photo featured on it. For one dollar, attendees watched several 16 mm student films, including Michael Bay’s
My Brother Benjamin
, which won an award. It would be one of the only times the public had the opportunity to screen Bay’s or Joss’s film. At Wesleyan, the students fund their own films and thus have all ownership rights to them.
To this day, Joss refuses to let anyone screen
A Night Alone
, because he feels that it was poorly made. While Wesleyan’s film program was exceptional on theory and history, it was sadly lacking in production offerings. “Pretty much what I had learned in our one production class was: Don’t drop the camera. It’s really expensive,” Joss says. “That film was a hot mess.”
Basinger had a far kinder assessment of her two students’ work. “They both showed great talent for undergraduates in a liberal arts college that has one brief semester in production and who made their own projects. They are both distinctive. In Michael’s case, his is a Michael Bay film: It’s beautifully shot and edited, it’s a fluid forward movement of action, and you could put it up anywhere,” she says. “Joss’s was a narrative, and he had amateur actors. So you have a rougher thing, but you very definitely have an intelligent, amusing piece of work that is clearly a Joss Whedon film, with clearly a Joss Whedon character and story.”
The following year, Joss made another movie that he liked much better. This one wasn’t done for school credit but instead to “ward off the evil spirits” of
A Night
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