Revolt of a TV Genius

Production on the show resumed after two weeks, but the troubles continued. Whedon is a boyish-looking 44, but when I visit the set he looks rumpled and fretful, tugging at the buttons of his shirt until the threads break. Perhaps because of the competing visions for Dollhouse, the first few episodes lack the offbeat charm of Whedon's early work, that trademark combination of emotional depth and wisecracking geekiness. Frustrated by years of squabbling, Whedon decided that it would be his last TV show. The future, he felt, lay in the online series he had shot while the writers' strike held up work on Dollhouse. "With Dr. Horrible, I had a glimpse of the thing that we all strive for — which is to be able to make things the way you conceive them and not have them developed out of existence."

But Whedon had more ambitious goals for Dr. Horrible than just making a weird sci-fi musical. "I wanted to make a statement about the Internet — to say that people will watch this in whatever format it appears," he says. To make it work, he kept Dr. Horrible low-budget: He funded the $200,000 production himself, cashed in favors for what he couldn't afford and promised every actor a generous cut of any profit. Neil Patrick Harris agreed to play the starring role, a buddy's house was used as the doctor's lab, and a local laundromat served as another location.

Then Whedon took his biggest risk: He streamed the first three episodes online for free — a week before selling them on iTunes. To nearly everyone's surprise, the plan worked. Last July, in its first weeks on iTunes, Dr. Horrible occupied the top three spots on the TV-downloads list. Suddenly, Whedon was Hollywood's poster boy for popular — and profitable — online entertainment. "It proves that Internet video can be a place to experiment and attract an audience," says Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst with Forrester, a research firm.

Now, even if Dollhouse is a hit, Whedon plans to start what he calls a "microstudio" to produce and air stuff online. His goal, he says, is to "Roger Corman my way onto the Internet" — imitating the legendary director of B movies by creating material that is "cheap and fast and dirty."

During a break on the Dollhouse set, Whedon jokes that "all of my stories lately involve massive corporations that are destroying the wills of the people who work for them." But he is dead serious about his new business model. "If we don't start building this system ourselves, the studios will figure it out, and they'll own it," he says. "Then it'll be too late. It'll be another medium where we're not free to do it our way."

[From Issue 1072 — February 19, 2009]

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