Firefly/Serenity
Fans Raise Money for Charity
Joss
Whedon fans have a reputation for being ardent followers of the renowned
television producer—from building thriving online communities
around his shows to passionately voicing their support for his projects—while
likewise demonstrating a flair for “giving back” to the
world at large. In 1998, for instance, fans from the Buffy the Vampire
Slayer Bronze Posting Board organized a get-together that turned
into an annual event throughout the show’s seven-year run. Dubbed
the PBP
(Posting Board Party), the weekend extravaganza featured hundreds of
Buffy aficionados mingling with the cast and crew of the series
while raising money for the Los Angeles Chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
In 2004, blood drives were organized as part of a campaign to save spin-off
Angel from cancellation, and last year pizzas were delivered
to the picket lines of striking members of the Writers Guild of America
courtesy of the weblog whedonesque.
Arguably the most impressive example of this ongoing sense of “community,
support and service,” however, centers around Whedon’s third
television outing, the short-lived Firefly; for three straight
years now fans from around the world have organized a series of Can't
Stop the Serenity (CSTS) fundraisers
benefiting women’s rights advocacy organization Equality
Now and featuring viewings of Serenity,
the big-screen adaptation that Whedon wrote and directed in 2005.
Both a stand-alone story as well as a continuation of the Firefly
narrative, the film (like the series) follows a rag-tag group of space-scavengers
500 years in the future who live on a Firefly-class ship called Serenity.
Their captain, Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, served in a civil
war between the Alliance, who sought greater control over the numerous
planets the human race had populated, and the Independents, who wanted
more autonomous freedom. Reynolds was on the losing side of the Independents
and now keeps the “autonomous freedom” flame burning by
adopting a mantra of “find a crew, find a job, keep flying”
while trying to remain outside the reaches of the Alliance.
The series makes an apt metaphor for the online fanbase the show has
attracted. The FOX network mishandled Firefly from the start,
advertising the series as a “quirky adventure” when, in
reality, it was a stark psychological examination of surviving on the
edges of society and civilization. The series was also given a Friday
night death-slot, and FOX’s commitment to Major League Baseball
led to a disruption of the show’s schedule. Firefly was
eventually cancelled in December 2001, after only eleven aired episodes.
But where most television stories end, Firefly’s had
only begun. A “Save Firefly” movement quickly developed—with
fans even adopting the term “Browncoats,” as the Independents
were known, for themselves—and Whedon became just as determined
to not let the series die. International markets soon contacted FOX
about acquiring Firefly, despite the cancellation; the complete
series, including three unaired episodes, was released in December 2002
and went on to sell over 500,000 copies. Swayed by the intense fan support,
as well as Whedon’s own passion, Universal Pictures gave a greenlight
for Serenity, the movie. Although far from a motion picture
blockbuster, the film gained even more fans and became a best-selling
DVD of its own.
Again, most stories would end there. But Christopher Frankonis, a Firefly
fan and blogger who goes by the moniker One True b!X, had different
plans. “Late in 2005, a group of Browncoats were leaving one of
the last big screen showings of Serenity,” Anna Snyder,
herself a Browncoat, told the Portland
Mercury of how the fundraiser began.
“And the One True b!X was thinking, ‘Hey, maybe there’s
a way we could get the movie on the big screen again, just for fun.’
And that morphed into, ‘Well, if we could do it to raise some
money, that would be great.’ Which then became, ‘Hey, let’s
organize a charity screening and let’s see if we can get other
cities involved.’”
Can’t
Stop the Serenity featured forty-seven showings of the film in five
countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United
States) that year and raised $65,000 for Equality Now, a personal favorite
of Whedon. The event continued in 2007 with forty-six cities participating
and $115,000 raised; fifty-five CSTS events are planned for 2008, with
the goal of raising an additional $155,000. Most were held the weekend
of June 20th in order to coincide with Whedon’s birthday, which
falls on June 23rd.
The recipient of the funds—Equality Now—was founded in 1992
by Jessica Neuwirth, Navanethem Pillay and Feryal Gharahi to bring attention
to the gender disparity in the human rights movement. The organization
addresses such women-centric issues as domestic violence, rape, female
genital mutilation, trafficking, and reproductive rights. Neuwirth was
a former student of Lee Stearns, the founder of the first Amnesty International
chapter run exclusively by high school students and mother of Joss Whedon.
“They’re pretty young,” Cate Steven-Davis, who organized
the 2008
Pittsburgh CSTS event, says of Equality
Now. “They just started in ’92, but they have really come
behind us in a big way. Our contact there, Amanda Sullivan, has just
been really generous with us and really great. Equality Now is the type
of organization that doesn’t tip-toe around things. They say ‘this
is a problem, what can we do’ and they do it. And I admire that.”
So how does a little-watched television show cancelled after eleven
episodes almost seven years ago attract such a large fanbase and become
an annual fundraising forum for women’s rights? The credit obviously
goes to Whedon, who—while never creating a television-rating hit—has
garnered a reputation for intelligent and realistic narratives that
resonate with both fans and critics alike. Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
despite the name and concept of a female high school student fighting
vampires, was in actuality a metaphor for both growing up and coming
of age. The show’s spin-off, Angel, centered around the
concept of redemption as well as surviving in the world once one sets
out on their own. The characters, albeit “supernatural,”
were the types that the audience could relate and learn from. The same
holds true for Firefly.
The biggest testament of Whedon’s ability to craft narratives
that resonate so strongly with viewers is the fact that his extensively
large fanbase is not “all-inclusive.” Buffy fans,
for instance, did not necessarily become Firefly fans, and
many Firefly fans have never watched Buffy. Even some
of the most actively-involved Browncoats had not seen a single episode
of any Whedon television show before Serenity was released.
Steven-Davis is one of them.
“I had never seen Firefly and saw the movie and said
‘That was great. I here there’s a TV show, I should check
that out,’” she says with a laugh. “And I did and
got involved in the fan community and just kind of fell in love with
everything and really wanted to be as involved as possible.”
When Steven-Davis first heard about CSTS in 2006, she teamed up with
another local fan, Kiersten Ball, to organize the Pittsburgh version.
The two repeated the process in 2007, with Steven-Davis flying solo
in 2008. “It’s a lot of work, more than I anticipated,”
she says of organizing the local event. “We have a global organizer
who helps a lot, getting sponsors. And a lot of the stuff you see in
the raffle was donated from the global sponsors. But there was a lot
of work; finding the venue was kind of hard, thank goodness someone
at the library actually contacted me and offered the space. Just pulling
it all together, trying to raise money and not lose money. It’s
challenging but at the end of the night every drop of sweat was worth
it.”
Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity have found a way to beat the
odds with the simple philosophy of “find a crew, find a job, keep
flying.” Firefly/Serenity fans, meanwhile, have
likewise defied conventional-wisdom by building a flourishing online
community centered on a failed television show. A popular slogan among
Browncoats is “Done the Impossible,” which is the title
of a DVD
documentary that tells the story of
how the motion picture Serenity became reality because of the
efforts of that community. As the annual CSTS charity events demonstrate,
however, Firefly/Serenity fans are far from “done”
with the “impossible.”
Anthony
Letizia (June 23, 2008)
