So, here's my idea: Let's make dozens and dozens of Youtube-videos promoting Dollhouse and actually having something to do with its premise. I thought, if everyone explained what he or she would actually like to explore with a doll, then we can show the range of the premise and the intriguing storylines this show could explore. What fantasies would people like to live out with a doll? If you were very rich and very connected, what would you pay the Dollhouse to do for you? Which engagements and personality imprints would fascinate you most? What story would like to see in the show? (Somewhere in this description the word "viral" definitely has a place. :)

So, here's my first shot:



Yes, I really desperately wanna see what other people would hire an Active for.

(Nicht, dass sich die deutschsprachige Leserschaft nicht angesprochen fühlen sollte...)

Das sollten wir wohl nicht verpassen:

SyFy Radio airs the full interview with Jane Espenson, which includes talk about the new Joss Whedon series "Dollhouse" and other aspects of her career Wednesday, Dec. 17 beginning at 10 p.m. ET at SyFy Radio.

Das SyFy Portal hat Joss befragt, und das sehr herzerwärmende Interview ist wieder eine Selbstanschuldigung.

Vigils may already have started for Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" series following the announcement that it will occupy Fox's Friday night slot-of-death, but the show is not out for the count. Not by a long shot.

And according to Whedon, he is to blame for any failures of the series.

"The fact of the matter is that I've made some rookie mistakes – actually worse than rookie mistakes – about what I was doing with the show, especially considering that I've worked with Fox before," he told SFX. "Looking back I go, ‘Oh, of course they would have wanted this and I don't know why I thought they'd let me do that.' The hard part has been to find the show somewhere in between my intentions and their expectations; to still find the show that I wanted to make. We did that and now things are running smoothly, but whew, doggy."

Despite the story changes and slight re-tooling of the show, Whedon promises a solid adventure series that borrows from all genres as Echo (Eliza Dushku) slowly comes to terms with her own Humanity at the hands of an almost hostile agency determined to keep her nothing but a doll. And if he has his way, there will be a serialized element alongside the adventure-of-the-week formula.

"I don't enjoy a show that only gets you to watch the next one; where they're trying to come up with something more outlandish every five minutes. I've always believed in a show where every episode contains something that's resolved and the mythology surrounding that becomes what the audience is interested in regardless. Its legitimate for [the network] to say, ‘start out in this fashion where people can come on board anytime and then let the characters who inhabit the world take over the narrative gradually.' By Season 5 of ‘Buffy,' you have a lot of backstory you need to know, but compared to Season 1 it's much more fulfilling and mature. But you need people to get there."

When the series launches next year, there are high hopes – shared by both Whedon and his many fans – that the show will become a success. But according to Whedon, the success of a series isn't measured in the numbers it brings in on a weekly basis … it's the show's fans that count.

"I've had a similar thing happen on every single one of my shows, to a greater or lesser extent," Whedon said. "And in every case, the show that came out of it found an audience – even if it took being cancelled to do it. I'm aiming for the stars with this one – a show that runs for more than a year."

Großartig, einfach nur großartig.

Damals wurde noch mehr erzählt:

And now these two guys are working together on Joss Whedon's new show, Dollhouse. Joss is a well-known fan of Battlestar, so has he been trying to find out from them who the final Cylon is? "He’s a huge fan. He’s asked a couple of times, but it’s a game," said Penikett. "He doesn’t really want to know, he’s banned everyone on the set from talking about it. He says Battlestar is the best thing ever made, and that he aspires to make television like it. He and Ron are very similar, particularly in smarts. They’ve finally met for lunch, after all this time!"

Link

Ziemlich cool, und auch an einigen Stellen ziemlich überraschend. Dass es "B-Stories" im klassischen Sinn manchmal geben wird, war mir nicht klar. Aber lest selbst:

Joss Whedon is no stranger to success. After the phenomenally successfully Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, Whedon has treated viewers to the short-lived but well regarded Firefly (and subsequent movie Serenity) and the musical superhero spoof Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. His latest project is Dollhouse, which paints a future where “Actives” (or dolls) have their personalities wiped and reprogrammed in order to carry out different assignments. Abbie Bernstein caught up with Whedon to find out how the show came about.

What’s Dollhouse about?

It’s about a girl trying to figure out who she is, while she’s imprinted with every personality you can imagine. It’s about acting, living, being a woman, being everything. Let me put it this way – when I thought it up and launched it at Eliza [Dushku, who executive produces with Whedon and plays main character Echo], the first thing she said was, “Oh, my God, it’s my life!” And she meant mostly as an actress, but then we realized it didn’t just mean that.

It’s a metaphor for everybody. If it isn’t, you’re missing something. The idea is, we all have certain assumptions about who we are, based on what we were told when we were little and what we think we’re supposed to do. And we have a lot of assumptions about what is good, and what about us is not good, and what’s sinful and what’s saintly, and we’re often wrong about all of them. Dollhouse is basically about breaking all that down and exploring it and finding out what it really means to be a human being.

How did Dollhouse come into being?

To me, Eliza is like watching a meteor shower. I’m just amazed. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s always been a star. But being a star and being a human being are two very different things. And over the 10 years, we’ve spent time becoming friends, but I’ve also watched her deliberately and painfully take control of her career and the way in which it’s going, the things she is portraying, and you don’t see that a lot.

I see it with Felicia Day doing The Guild on the internet, saying, “Nobody’s going to make my way, so I’ll make my own way,” and Felicia is smart enough to pull that off. The two of them share that. Eliza – when I first sat her down, years ago, to say, “Stop making bad movies!” she said, “We don’t set out to make them bad – I don’t know what to tell you.” But we talked about her agency, her choices. And it was a bleak landscape.

I seem to be the guy who spends his life saying how hard it is for beautiful young women – but it is hard to be an ingénue in this town. We got together a few years later, [but the people around her] insisted she do the big-budget thing, so nobody wanted to know what Eliza thought, except Eliza.

And when we got together for lunch this time, she was like, “I’ve made a deal, I don’t expect to write or control a show, but I do need to control the quality of what I’m doing and the image of what I am, and I want to make meaningful, decent, political, feminist, real, fun, sexy, interesting TV.” Those were all on her list. And I said, “There’s only one man for that job!” [laughs]

In the course of the conversation, the idea of Echo came to me from that exact thing. The story of Dollhouse is the story of somebody trying to figure out who she is while everybody tells her what they want her to be. That is the story of Eliza Dushku, and watching Eliza do that has been one of the great joys of my career. She’s always been an intellectual equal. She’s always been a seeker. I’m still trying to figure myself out.

That’s another point of the show, is that the people who control the Actives, the dolls, are just as much in need of understanding what they are as the dolls.

When you and the writing staff are creating personas for Echo, do you think, “Boy, this would be a really cool identity, but who on Earth would want them to do this and why?”

”Who would want them to do this and why?” is sort of what keeps it interesting every week. Sometimes it’s somebody extraordinarily nefarious and sometimes it’s somebody very decent, but usually, it’s all the way in between. I mean, as long as nobody gets hurt, as long as the Actives are not harmed, everything’s good, everything is game. Some people would abuse that and some people need it.

Ultimately, you’ll find the one thing that every episode has in common is that Echo is the person you need at that point in your life to either turn your life around, to give you the moment you thought you’d never have, or to pull you out of a place you think you can’t get out of. Or to rob the bank. Whatever it is, she’s a kind of life coach, without even meaning to be. She’s always the perfect person for whatever it is you need.

Sometimes there will be B stories – we’ll always see the workings of the Dollhouse, but we’ll also see other Actives on other engagements, and sometimes they’ll just be B stories, sometimes they’ll cross over or sometimes they’ll just connect thematically.

How did you determine who the other characters around Echo should be?

The first thing I said to Eliza, before I’d even created the show, was, “You need an ensemble. You can’t be in every scene – it’ll make you nuts. You need a genre show and you need a big ensemble. You need a premise that’s bigger than just you, so that if you need to stand down and get some rest, you can maintain after a certain time.”

To that end, there was more than one Active. Then you work out the idea of the place [the Dollhouse]. You need a programmer, you need someone who runs it, you need someone to back her up, her handler, and you need somebody to save her, who’s trying to find her.

Then Dr. Saunders, who’s played by Amy Acker, was created after I pitched the show. It was, “We need this voice in the Dollhouse, to counteract Topher the programmer.” So it was all very organic. It was just the obvious people that would be in Echo’s life. It wasn’t like, “I need my wacky sidekick.” There was nothing cynical about the way they came in – they were all just what they needed to be, and then I found the actors who had that same quality. I feel again that same thing I had on Firefly of, “These guys have always been doing this, nobody else could’ve.”

There’s a lot of anticipation about Dollhouse in the online fan community…

Sometimes there’s a backlash against fans – “Oh, they’re going to make everybody else not watch.” Well, that’s not the case. The only person who can really do that is me. If people come, if they give it a fair shake, I will do my best to entertain them. And everything else will fall by the wayside.

Can you say anything about Cabin in the Woods, the feature film you’re producing that Drew Goddard will direct?

It’s a horror movie. Some teenagers may meet with violence!

Dollhouse starts airing on Fox in February 2009.

Link

Auch interessant, dass er die Fans rausnimmt aus der Backlash-Verantwortung. Aber für mich der absolute Höhepunkt:

I feel again that same thing I had on Firefly of, “These guys have always been doing this, nobody else could’ve.”

Das bitte einrahmen und an die Wand hängen.

Ein Interview, das mich einfach nur jauchzen ließ:

There was an outcry heard 'round the Web among Joss Whedon devotees after Fox announced it was sending his heavily anticipated TV series "Dollhouse" to Friday nights.

But in an interview Wednesday morning, Whedon said that Fridays are "a better fit" for the show.

"It's not a slam dunk, 'We love everything you're doing' slot. Everybody knows that," he said. "Dollhouse" will air Fridays after new episodes of the similarly sci-fi-themed drama "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Whedon says he trusts the network. "The executives I’m dealing with are canny guys."

By canny, does he mean Fox has given him assurances that it will be patient with the show? More or less. "They’re bringing down expectations regarding how big of an audience they think it will bring in the beginning, and then as the show progresses. They need to do that."

“Dollhouse” revolves around a team of programmable people — or dolls — with various skills and abilities rented out for assignments by high-paying clients. Early on, one of the dolls, Echo (Eliza Dushku), begins to become self-aware.

The show's troubled production has already branded it as perhaps an overly complicated project, which may have sent it to Friday nights. Whedon admitted the show "is not simple" but added "we're not trying to lecture or bore people either. It's fun. It's designed to entertain, but in a way that plays on a lot of levels."

That said, Whedon says he anticipated the Friday move — and not as a bad thing. "If I were an executive, I would have put it on Friday too, honestly, and not as a dig. The people who want this will find it, and hopefully more will as well. Fox is aware that TV just doesn’t exist the same way. People watch it online, on DVD, on their TiVos. It’s not the end of the world, but of course everyone's been predicting the end of the world for 'Dollhouse' since it was announced."

Whedon also noted that while Fox executives will likely have to wait patiently for building returns on the show, he hopes fans will be just as patient with the story line. "We’re trying to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. And not just in an 'Oooh, we’re heavy with mythology' way. Dare I say we're reaching for something more philosophical? Am I allowed to say philosophical? Or does that just mean my show will fail?"

"Dollhouse" premieres Feb. 13 at 9 p.m. on Fox.

Erste Review der Dr. Horrible DVD:

As for special features, the centerpiece of the DVD is definitely Commentary! The Musical, a full-length commentary track that is a completely original musical in its own right. Redefining post-modernism (”I think you just broke the ninth wall” is a remark made towards the end), Commentary! is actually a fun, behind-the-scenes glimpse of the production, heavily laced with inside jokes set to music very nearly as good as that in the actual production. There is an entire ballad about the video game Ninja Ropes, which they all played on their iPhones while on set (Nathan Fillion holds the high score), and co-writer/Groupie No. 2 Maurissa Tancharoen sings a song about how she didn’t get cast as Penny because “no one’s Asian in the movies.” Commentary! gets so caught up in its own fun that it only syncs up with the action on screen a few times, but the end result is tongue-in-cheek good fun, the sort of friendly jibing that invites audiences to feel included simply by letting them in on all the jokes. Most amusingly for those in the online video world, a major running gag revolves around Felicia Day’s fanatical promotion of her series The Guild, which is worked into the lyrics of at least one song. “I have dozens of fans! Bakers’ dozens!” she protests toward the end of Act 1.

Spoiler TV bringt uns eine Q&A:

Etwas runterscrollen:

From memory, he said that everyone on the set of Dollhouse were actually really concerned when they had to re-shoot the pilot, they knew the project was in real trouble. However they have now shot 10 episodes and they are just keeping their fingers crossed. They could have done without getting the death slot on Friday evening though. Mark was pretty convinced that they wouldn't have gone this far if they were going to kill it early.

I asked Mark if he thought that Tahmoh could run as a leading man and he was emphatic saying definitely, he's the best thing about Dollhouse (they are both in it BTW).

They both thought that Joss' scripts were very densely written, quite hard to say actually and very hard to alter or play around with. They basically have to go word for word, pause for pause. Unlike BSG, there really isn't much scope to alter things on set because that could lose some meaning. They also both thought that the last 3 scripts they shot were cracking good.

So, Joss ist also ein strenger Writer (würde man nicht glauben, wenn man bedenkt, dass von allen Firefly-Drehbüchern, seine am meisten von der endgültigen Folge abweichen...). Und woher weiß Mark Sheppard was über die letzten 3 Scripts? Etwa doch in mehr als nur 3 Folgen dabei? Auch gut zu wissen, dass 10 Folgen schon im Kasten sind.

Edit: Moment... 10? Aber Folge 10 sollte doch erst am 16. Dezember in Produktion gehen....

Neues Shooting mit allen Fox-Stars, und ein paar neue Bildchen unserer Dollhouse-Schönheiten sind auch dabei. Im Making of haben Tahmoh und Fran sogar Sprechrollen! (Enver's Rolle wurde aber offenbar irgendwie nicht richtig kommuniziert...)

Ein weiteres Eliza-Interview, das sogar was neues einbringt:

CraveOnline: Are there any personalities or activities you're trying to get written into the script?
Eliza Dushku: We're really trying to get Fox to approve a story about boy soldiers in Liberia, but we don't know how we're going to shoot that. And Fox finds it a bit disturbing and racy, but we're pushing for it.

Von wegen "dumbing the show down".

Ich schlag euch einen Deal vor. Ich werd von nun an nichts hinzufügende, sondern einfach sinnlos und falsch zusammentragende "Dolllhouse ist in Trouble"-Nachrichten nicht mehr verlinken.

overblown anti-hype, indeed.

Der an sich immer lesenswerte sablog.de hat gerade eine wahnsinnige Linksammlung zu Making Ofs und Bonusmaterialien der vielen nie sonderlich erfolgreich gewordenen Tim Minear-Serien. Wem grad fad ist, unbedingt durchklicken und staunen. Als alter Minear-Fan tut mir insbesondere das große Schweigen über The Inside weh, das mit Abstand beste Crime-Prozedural, das ich je gesehen habe.

Dr. Horrible-DVD und jenes Interview haben auch grad ne mention.

dollrific hat ein Vögelchen:

Speaking of early payoffs, a little birdie tells me that the "rogue" doll, Alpha's, backstory gets some major attention as early as the third episode, "The Target". The "incident" that the Dollhouse people have been covering up? It was wicked bloody, and we'll see it in flashbacks.

Ich hab das zwar so verstanden, dass Alpha schon in 1x02 "Gray Hour" eine ziemlich wichtige Rolle spielt (so von wegen remote-wipe und damit erst das Dilemma der Folge herbeibeschwören), aber offenbar wird dann bei 1x03 "The Target" so richtig in die backstory investiert.

Kann nur gutes heißen, natürlich. Ich schätze auch, das ist der Incident, der Dr. Saunders ihre Narben gab. Und Alpha's Flucht. Wir können das ja spaßeshalber Incident I nennen.

Ein herzliches, wunderschönes Interview mit dem werten Joss über Stricken und so, in dem sogar Dollhouse vorkommt, das aber an sich höchst lesens-/hörenswert ist:

KW: Looking ahead to Dollhouse, which sort of, from the trailers we've seen, has a bit of a slick look, should crafters be looking forward to any sort of things that will inspire their hands to make something?
JW: Hard to say. The, you know, the operation's very sleek, but at the same time, the world they live in is very spa-like, Eastern, and yoga-matty. So, there may be touches in there. I mean it's a little more wicker than actual loom-work. But we were going for a very natural, earthy environment for them inside of a kind of a laboratory feeling. So it's working across surfaces. The viewer will see a little of them in there. I doubt we'll find anything as iconic as the Jayne hat. I can convince Eliza [Dushku] to do a lot of things but that might not be one of them.

KW: No? But maybe she'll knit or crochet or decoupage in one of the episodes?
JW: Obviously decoupaging is too racy for Fox. So, I mean, they couldn't allow that.

KW: There's whoops and cheers from decoupagers everywhere now.
JW: It's just Standards and Practices, they draw the line at this kind of thing.

Und am Ende wird's dann ganz süß:

KW: Do you have a favourite handmade gift you've either given or received, or both? Not that they would be the same gift.
JW: It wasn't given to me, but when my son was born, actually, Eliza, a few years ago, gave him a Bishop Tutu doll, which she had gotten in South Africa. It's really cool. He has little glasses, and every now and then Bishop Tutu will suddenly show up again, hanging out with whatever they're playing with. So, I thought that was pretty nifty.

KW: That is pretty great. Joss Whedon, thank you so much for talking with us today.
JW: Thank you. Oh!

KW: Yeah?
JW: You know what?

KW: What?
JW: I've got one other. Dichen. Dichen Lachman is Sierra on our show.

KW: Yeah?
JW: On Dollhouse. Her mother sent me—it's not actually very crafty, because it's just a string with a knot in it, but the string was blessed by the Dalai Lama, and one of his monks tied the knot. She sent it to me as a present of good will because I work at Fox—I mean, in Hollywood. It doesn't really qualify as a craft, tying one knot in it, tying it around my wrist to make a bracelet, but I love it [muffled].

Also was für Connections dieses Dollhouse-Set hat! Und man beachte auch, wie crafty das erste Dollhouse-Merchandise ist...

Transkript - Audio - Notes

Eliza-Interview über "Nobel Son", inklusive Dollhouse-Part.

What about Dollhouse, which starts in February?
It's really exciting, I love it. Joss Whedon is my friend and my hero, and we came up with this show together. I'm an executive producer on it, and it's really a he-and-I team love project. We're on episode seven out of thirteen, and I've already played twentysomething different characters, because I play different characters every week since we're imprinted with these disparate personalities. And I ride motorcycles and bow-hunt and river-raft and do all these crazy things every week — it's just awesome.

How much do you get to train for those crazy things?
Maybe an hour. [Laughs] It's like the day before, Joss will say, "I'm going to throw you off a roof," and I say, "Cool, let's do it!"

Die mehrfache Erwähnung lässt übrigens nur darauf schließen, dass sie derzeit tatsächlich Folge sieben drehen. Wie sichd as ausgehen soll, dass sie am 16. Folge 10 angehen wollen, ist mir schleierhaft, aber ich schätze mal, die Intreviews wurde schon vor ein, vielleicht zwei Wochen geführt, und in Wirklichkeit drehen sie gerade Folge 8 oder schon 9.

Außerdem: Eliza ist nicht nur producer, sondern executive producer!

Joss' und Drew Goddards The Cabin in the Woods kommt wohl doch etwas später als erwartet:

Meanwhile, the Joss Whedon-produced, Drew Goddard-directed CABIN IN THE WOODS, of which we really know nothing about (other than, you know, it's probably set in a cabin in the woods) has been pushed all the way from 10/23/09 to 2/5/10. Yikes! This is most likely due to the fact that it was going to square off against SAW VI and for better or worse, you just can't do that. These SAW movies automatically make about $30 mil opening weekend, so it's a wise move for the CABIN to relocate. Still, it's pretty hard to get excited about a movie that's coming out in 2010.

Link

Produktion soll übrigens nächsten Februar/März anfangen, also quasi lückenlos an Dollhouse anschließen. Außerdem nutze ich die Gelegenheit einfach, um J.J. Abrams nochmal auszulachen, und um auf das großartige It's Own Sub-genre hinzuweisen, wo The One True b!X ungefähr das macht, was ich hier seit März mit Dollhouse betreibe: Ein schier unendlich weit entferntes Whedon-Projekt herbeizubloggen. Noch schlimmer dürfte die Sache wohl nur für What is Mia Made of sein.

Und das alles Dank der The Dan Band!

Und zwar, again, bei Amazon.com. Erscheint schon am 15.12., also wenn man für Porto viel zahlt, schafft es die sogar noch zu Weihnachten rechtzeitig her.