Alone
. And again, the project hinted at his works to come: the black-and-white, silent Super 8 film was a postapocalyptic western called
Tombstone
. Joss drew inspiration this time from the George Romero zombie apocalypse movies,
The Terminator
, and the thesis of another of his Wesleyan professors, Richard Slotkin.
In
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
, Slotkin proposed that American narratives were developed from the frontier mythologies created as European settlers pushed farther west into Native American lands. “We just replace [the Indians] with whatever’s alien, whatever’s other. In WWII, it’s the Japanese,” Joss says. “Zombies are just the latest incarnation of Indians. It’s the West all over again. There’s just a few of us, and we’re trying to survive.”
3
CRASH COURSE IN TELEVISION
After graduating from Wesleyan in 1987, Joss faced the question so many young people confront upon leaving college: what do I do now? The film studies grad decided to move to San Diego to become an independent filmmaker.
Broke, he ended up at his father’s house in Los Angeles. He picked up the requisite job for a future film director—video store clerk—and later became the part-time video production teacher at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where his younger brothers were enrolled. Through Jeanine Basinger, he connected with a Wesleyan grad who gave him a job doing research for the Life Achievement Award at the American Film Institute. These jobs did not, however, build up his bank account enough for him to be able to move out on his own.
The disappointing circumstances did have an upside: Joss got to spend time with his father, something he hadn’t done much of since his parents’ divorce when he was nine. That experience, of course, had strengthened Joss’s relationship with his mother, yet Joss was also like his father—himself the son of a writer. And in Los Angeles the bond between father and son, now both grown men, grew deeper.
Still, Joss was determined not to be “3G TV”—a third-generation television writer, as a friend at Wesleyan teasingly insisted would be his destiny. He’d watched Tom’s career fluctuate as any television writer’s does, dependent on being hired for a show and then dependent on the ratings for the show and job to continue. “That freaked me out a little bit,” Joss said. “As a kid, I was like, ‘You know what I want when I grow up? Financial security.’ Who says that? I was always super careful to save money, and just never be in a situation where I had to do something I didn’t believe in in order to make money, because that would just hurt.”Even Tom admonished his son that “under no circumstances write sitcoms, because it was too hard.”
But Joss needed a way to make decent money to get out of his father’s house and into his own space, and hopefully fund the movies he wanted to make. Ironically, the one career path that he had rejected for its instability now seemed like his best chance for a steady paycheck. And despite Tom’s own misgivings, he wanted to support his son and believed in his talent. He felt that Joss’s writing would be a good fit for the sitcom he was working on at the time,
It’s a Living
, which was set in a swanky restaurant atop a Los Angeles hotel and followed the lives of its waitresses. He suggested that his son come in and pitch some ideas for the show. Joss had already spent some time on the set watching production and had taken a liking to one of the two showrunners (the writer/producers in charge of the series), whom he thought was “young, hip, and cool.” He decided to go for it.
“It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” Joss said. “Horrible, just terror, and then it went as badly as any bad-pitched story you’ve ever heard of—and I did it twice. Both times, it was a nightmare. I was so scared.” The experience was made worse by
. And again, the project hinted at his works to come: the black-and-white, silent Super 8 film was a postapocalyptic western called
Tombstone
. Joss drew inspiration this time from the George Romero zombie apocalypse movies,
The Terminator
, and the thesis of another of his Wesleyan professors, Richard Slotkin.
In
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
, Slotkin proposed that American narratives were developed from the frontier mythologies created as European settlers pushed farther west into Native American lands. “We just replace [the Indians] with whatever’s alien, whatever’s other. In WWII, it’s the Japanese,” Joss says. “Zombies are just the latest incarnation of Indians. It’s the West all over again. There’s just a few of us, and we’re trying to survive.”
3
CRASH COURSE IN TELEVISION
After graduating from Wesleyan in 1987, Joss faced the question so many young people confront upon leaving college: what do I do now? The film studies grad decided to move to San Diego to become an independent filmmaker.
Broke, he ended up at his father’s house in Los Angeles. He picked up the requisite job for a future film director—video store clerk—and later became the part-time video production teacher at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where his younger brothers were enrolled. Through Jeanine Basinger, he connected with a Wesleyan grad who gave him a job doing research for the Life Achievement Award at the American Film Institute. These jobs did not, however, build up his bank account enough for him to be able to move out on his own.
The disappointing circumstances did have an upside: Joss got to spend time with his father, something he hadn’t done much of since his parents’ divorce when he was nine. That experience, of course, had strengthened Joss’s relationship with his mother, yet Joss was also like his father—himself the son of a writer. And in Los Angeles the bond between father and son, now both grown men, grew deeper.
Still, Joss was determined not to be “3G TV”—a third-generation television writer, as a friend at Wesleyan teasingly insisted would be his destiny. He’d watched Tom’s career fluctuate as any television writer’s does, dependent on being hired for a show and then dependent on the ratings for the show and job to continue. “That freaked me out a little bit,” Joss said. “As a kid, I was like, ‘You know what I want when I grow up? Financial security.’ Who says that? I was always super careful to save money, and just never be in a situation where I had to do something I didn’t believe in in order to make money, because that would just hurt.”Even Tom admonished his son that “under no circumstances write sitcoms, because it was too hard.”
But Joss needed a way to make decent money to get out of his father’s house and into his own space, and hopefully fund the movies he wanted to make. Ironically, the one career path that he had rejected for its instability now seemed like his best chance for a steady paycheck. And despite Tom’s own misgivings, he wanted to support his son and believed in his talent. He felt that Joss’s writing would be a good fit for the sitcom he was working on at the time,
It’s a Living
, which was set in a swanky restaurant atop a Los Angeles hotel and followed the lives of its waitresses. He suggested that his son come in and pitch some ideas for the show. Joss had already spent some time on the set watching production and had taken a liking to one of the two showrunners (the writer/producers in charge of the series), whom he thought was “young, hip, and cool.” He decided to go for it.
“It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” Joss said. “Horrible, just terror, and then it went as badly as any bad-pitched story you’ve ever heard of—and I did it twice. Both times, it was a nightmare. I was so scared.” The experience was made worse by
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