Notes on The X-Files PhileFest panel with from last September with the Lone Gunmen: Dean Haglund (Langly), Tom Braidwood (Frohike), Bruce Harwood (Buyers):
Plenty of laughs as Dean nearly-monopolizes the stage.
Dean came up with his TXF improv show when Fox asked him to fill 45 minutes of Q&A at TXF Expo; he didn’t watch the show and he came up with the improv to avoid questions!
Dean auditioned with Gary Jones as Buyers (of Stargate SG-1 fame).
The director of EBE Billy (William) Graham and Tom knew each other from before, Graham knew Tom was an actor and suggested him: “we need somebody slimy, somebody like Braidwood”!
Bruce: TXF was a pre-millennium show, very 90s; 9/11 changed that, it was a new world, the Lone Gunmen would not have been at the Capitol riots.
Personal fandoms: Dean a fan of artist Roger Dean; Bruce of Dr Who, The Prisoner; Tom has an autograph of 1950s Canada Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.
Memories of shooting in the cold, waiting for shooting to begin, having coffee breaks, gathered around hot soup.
Story of how a production assistant was sent to do photocopies of a prop ransom note, he forgot them in a telephone booth, the police was called!
Tom read the ‘Musings of a CSM’ script; the editor told Dean she has that shot of Frohike getting killed by the CSM.
Tom took everyday photos from behind the scenes, has a shoebox with like 46,000 photos; they are physical photos, he has to start scanning them [do it!!!].
A young man who was doing software and screen displays had a server that was running from offshore the UK, outside any national jurisdiction, so he didn’t pay taxes; he was in the Pilot of TLG, and TXF s11.
Bruce: learning tango was hard.
Shooting with monkeys: don’t look it in the eye, monkeys ate keys off laptops, they were bored of mutiple takes very fast.
The X-Files’ 30th anniversary was already ten months ago! The PhileFest convention marked that event, and for those who didn’t attend (most of us!) the recordings of most of the panels are available online, courtesy of XFilesNews. In the coming days, I’ll be posting my long-delayed notes on watching these very entertaining panels.
We kick off with “The Wongs” family panal: James Wong (JW), Glen Morgan (GM), Kristen Cloke-Morgan (KCM), Darin Morgan (DM). Plenty of Millennium stuff too!
DM: In series now, every episode is the same episode; TXF had more variety, everybody has something different they like about the show.
GM: in the early days Dan Sackheim did a lot to guide CC; GM & JW were forced on CC by Peter Roth. CC wanted to, but the network said it can’t be UFO of the week. GM & JW liked Universal monsters, they did that. Alex Gansa didn’t get what the show was about, he needed something more grounded, he did weird science.
JW: there was no writers room per se, they had an idea, they pitched it to each other, then went off to write it. They had a Board with episode ideas, to make sure the episodes didn’t repeat.
GM: GA getting pregnant created the mythology, it was a mount of accidents that had consequences.
JW: is this a UFO show? CC: yes; then a few weeks later, no.
GM & KCM: MM: Lara Means going crazy: the whole sequence was improvised with director Tom Wright and the crew; Tom had storyboarded the whole act; camera operator Mike Wrench said the camera is an actor, he was crawling on the floor with “squishycam”, Mike laughing while KCM was crawling, crying, drowning.
GM: how I wrote TXF, with ‘Ice’: subscription to Science News, 6 pages long, record of deepest ice core in Greenland. JW would ask his eye doctor weird things with eyes. GM put in things he didn’t like (worms, snakes). Both fans of Hawkes & Carpenter, tried to isolate the characters, do a small show for the budget. Moved around the board cards, present progress to CC & Alex. Once a week go to UCLA Medical Library, look into journals. Howard & Alex had a National Geographic subscription. They had an idea of a snake that opens its mouth and eats a deer, they noted down ‘snake eats a guy, end of act 3’, then they had to figure out how.
DM: thought experiment: cutting episodes, DM eps were always 5 min too long, GM’s too (One Breath 16 min), CC’s were shorter, had to be exactly 43:12, big difference between network and cable shows, sometimes cable shows don’t need to be as long. When you watch your favourite ep, imagine you have to cut 2 min: which ones? A bad scene can be important for the plot. Start cutting lines, trimming shots here and there, you might realize you’re improving the episode’s flow! But then you start crying, cutting lines you love. ‘Coprophages’: had to cut out DD’s mother, in the crowd scene at the end, she had been on set the whole week, DD called him to ask why.
JW: counter-example, if in 21 Jump Street they cut out all the shit, they’d be 20 min short.
GM: ‘The Field Where I Died’: act 3 had to be 8-9 min, DD’s regression scene was 11 min, KCM’s was 8 min, magnificent performances but had to cut. Editor Heather MacDougall was tough on everyone. Editor Michael Stern had left SeaQuest, he was cutting ‘Home’, Standards & Practices came when they were cutting the sheriff’s death, later S&P had to defend it to the network because things were actually not shown, a lesson on how the audience fills in. In the revival, they had editor Eleanor Infante; a good editor will find things that even the director didn’t know were there.
DM: Stephen Mark cut ‘Clyde Bruckman’; most people didn’t know what autoerotic asphyxiation was and many think DM made it up; there was a reaction shot of Scully making her eyes big, he cut it because after ‘Humbug’ he didn’t want to push too much on comedy, now he thinks he should have kept it.
GM: JW directed ‘Musings’; in Memphis there was a magnificent B&W crane shot, he had to cut half of that shot.
KCM: we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Avi [Quijada], Julie [Ng], both are now friends, many fans now influence their own lives.
GM: in ‘This’, the handcuff line was totally pandering to you perverts [shippers].
GM: Doug Hutchinson’s audition was insane; JW’s ep ‘Musings’ was a favourite; when directing the action in ‘This’, the cinematographer saw chaos, GM thoguht sometimes being out of control is good; he found Eleanor’s cut of ‘This’ was great.
JW: remembers casting ‘Beyond the Sea’, Brad Dourif was great but didn’t audition well; ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ was one of his favourites; the dailies were amazing; sometimes you have to trust people. GM: Brad was an Oscar winner, was expensive, GM & JW offered their writers’ fee to hire him, CC called Peter Roth at Thanksgiving to push it.
DM: ‘Forehead Sweat’: loved the alien makeup & costume, saw the actor using his scooter and decided he had to use it going down the escalator, Craig & DM were laughing so hard. GM: that was Kurt Russell’s cape from ‘3000 Miles to Graceland’.
GM took props; he regrets not taking the Voyager record from ‘Forehead Sweat’; GM worked with s10/11 props master Tyler Smith in Twilight Zone and he had that record, Tyler gave it to GM and GM gave it to DM for Christmas; DM has the book with all the answers; CC gave DM the ‘Humbug’ monster twin, he still uses it for Halloween.
KCM: production designer Mark Freeborn made fun of the ‘Rm9’ teaser description at the script read-through; location scouting found an abandoned mini-mall, the set was beyond her imagination. ‘Field’: even when she was not on camera she was there for DD & GA’s close-up shots, just for the acting experience.
GM: ‘Musings’: Bills not winning Superbowl was a joke, then last year a sports writer from Buffalo asked why he did that. ‘Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense’ was about cults, and GM & JW had to go through in life what the ep was about; DM wrote that one for their friend Rich [Richard ‘Mr Smooth’ Steinmetz?].
GM: early on, the network was like “when do they help people?”, then they saw ‘Shadows’ with the ghost and the secretary, the network said “go back to what you whatever you were doing”
DM: ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’: during pre-prod many people like Bob Goodwin said they had no idea what it’s about, DM said I don’t understand it either, but Bob said he could tell it’s going to be great by how excited DM was. DM was lucky with exec producers’ trust, for that episode everything came together. He wanted Johnny Cash but he was unavailable; Jeff Vlaming & DM were throwing out names, landed on Alex Trebek; before he agreed for the commitment withh a day to travel back & forth, he wanted more than one line; the problem was his voice was so recognizable it would mess up the reveal it was him, so he said OK. That was when DM knew he was a producer.
KCM: ‘Rm9’: DD & GA were very happy they had no lines; DD’s line “why is your house better than mine” was DD’s improv, they kept it in.
JW: ‘Die Hand Die Verletzt’: the last shot makes him cry, saying goodbye to the crew.
The Millennium podcast revives an old interview with James Wong from circa 2010, that I don’t remember listening to back then. Jim discusses his time on Millennium (especially how they split tasks with Glen Morgan on season 2, and how everyone on staff was on board with their changes to the show in season 2, it’s only after the fact that he started having feedback that some didn’t like the transformation of the show) but also The X-Files (for example how he met a dentist who told him a story of a patient who couldn’t feel pain, which found its way in “Home”) and on Final Destination and Dragon Ball and how the film industry has changed substantially since the 90s with much more studio meddling (and that was 2010!…).
I’ll just leave this here. At The X-Files documentary screening at New York City yesterday, Chris Carter had the time of his life ending the panel with a bang! He sure likes controversy.
“She [Scully] admits or tells Mulder about her pregnancy in the final episode and that became very controversial. I mean a lot of people, I mean Avi Quijada, she closed her website down [XFilesNews], her blog, and Gillian got very angry at me and it’s like I wasn’t sure why that was but I actually sort of welcomed the controversy and I thought it was a good thing. But if you follow Scully’s maternity if you will, with Emily and with William, and — why does anyone think that this pregnancy is anything other than science fiction? This is a science fiction show, that pregnancy is… It’s spelled out actually at the beginning of the episode, where ‘The Truth Is Out There’ is something else [‘Salvator Mundi’, saviour of the world, for Jesus Christ] and it is what I had in mind. So I just want to go on record to say: it’s not necessarily Mulder and Scully’s child.”
So, the story is not over, the mystery continues, and the third child of Scully is still not quite her own. I understand his punk attitude with wanting controversy, after all here we are still raging about this, but don’t know why he persists so much with this long-dead horse. Good stories end, most would have been happy with M&S just continuing their lives, still investigating or not, with child or not.
Listen to Glen Morgan trying to hide his frustration with shippers in this interview with The X-Files Diaries! As always, my detailed notes below:
Morgan & Wong were about to sign for “Moon over Miami” run by Harley Peyton (of Twin Peaks; it lasted half a season), but then watched TXF pilot and wanted in. They were sort of pushed to work with Carter by Peter Roth. Marilyn Osborne also shifted to TXF over from the Steven J Cannell productions.
Carter would have been happy to have done UFO of the week, the network and Roth were pushing for more stuff. Gordon & Gansa were not sure what the show was about, they did weird science. Morgan & Wong did horror. [That’s really important, imagine if Carter had got his way!]
There was no writers room then, only for comedies. They only got together to talk about ideas.
He acknowledges the great directors Bowman, Nutter and Manners. M&W wanted Nutter and Manners over from Cannell, but Goodwin didn’t want them, they had done things that were out of style like The A-Team. But then some directors dropped out and they were brought in. Morgan worked with Kim’s brother Kelly in Space: Above and Beyond.
“Squeeze/Tooms“: M&W’s office was a small box, there were cockroaches. Wong thought what if a guy came out of the air vent. Morgan thought of how serial killer Richard Ramirez could break into people’s homes and thought what if a man could stretch. Carter had been to France recently and was spooked by foie gras, thought what if a man eats livers. Morgan visited an escalator that was being repaired, thought what if Tooms lived there. [No mention of the liver-eating mutant of The Night Strangler as an inspiration!]
“Beyond the Sea“: was about his mother reacting to her own father passing.
“Home“: they figured that Scully would start thinking of motherhood at her age, judging from personal friends and Gillian being a mother. “Wonderful, Wonderful” was one of his mom’s favourite songs.
“The Field Where I Died“: his father had a fascination with reincarnation. Ken Burns “The Civil War” documentary series was an inspiration, in that a man called Sullivan wrote a letter accompanied by violin music called “Ashokan Farewell“. The people Kristen portrayed were all people they knew. Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown were inspirations, there are misunderstood things about those tragedies. The regression scenes were both running 8-10 min long each, they had to cut severely like 8 min, he had to cut things that gave more legitimacy to Scully’s point of view. (Goodwin’s cut of “One Breath” ran 16 min long!) Wong likes crane shots. The point of the episode was that we do not have one but a bunch of soul mates.
“Musings of a CSM“: Bill Davis gave Wong grief while shooting, he thought the script was making fun of him (Lance Henriksen thought the same in Millennium). Based on comic The Autobiography of Lex Luthor. They were fascinated by the CSM in the pilot, who is he? In “Tooms” and “One Breath”, Bob Goodwin said don’t give him a line or scene, he can’t act! Morgan wrote “Musings” as if the CSM really did these things. Carter and executive Ken Horton thought they should change “Memoirs” to “Musings” to make it more ambiguous, and didn’t want Frohike to die. M&W tried to create a shot of Frohike getting shot with a sign and Hershey’s syrup, tried to put it in the cut that the network would see, but the shot disappeared! Over time, Morgan has to give credit to Carter, there’s another reading of the character if the CSM was a failed writer. There’s even a link with “Forehead Sweat”, maybe the CSM was reinforcing his own memory to convince himself he did these things. Says Darin is the better writer. [Even Glen says that!]
“Never Again“: “where’s Scully’s desk” was in response to online fan comments. Morgan and Gillian wanted Scully to have sex (Mulder had had flings so why not?), Carter didn’t think that was right for the character. He had a disagreement with Carter, but it’s his show, his decision (he doesn’t sound bitter). He didn’t edit the ep, he wrote it and was out. Frustrated that this episode didn’t air after the Superbowl.
Revival: He tried to watch almost all the episodes to catch up. [Wow!] The marketing people thought “Founder’s Mutation” would fit better as the 2nd ep and it was switched with “Home Again”. For “This”, he felt they were plodding so he wanted to kick off things with more action. The s11 cinematographer Craig Wrobleski was great, he wished they had him more. The handcuff line in “This” was pandering to shippers!
When they start discussing the Mulder-Scully ship: “You two need therapy!” [That’s my Morgan!]
In early discussions with Fox: if Scully sees an alien or if they kiss, the show’s over.
All couples on TV were fooling around, but they wanted to be different, two people can be very emotionally attached without sex, and you didn’t see that on TV.
But, every good show recalibrates itself over time, he sees why M&S ended up together in the long term.- He is proud of the Scully effect.
The genius of Carter is “I want to believe”, not “I believe”, not “I don’t believe”.
A rare interview by Sammensværgelsen – en dansk X-Files podcast with David Amann, one of the “next gen” writers that joined The X-Files in season 6 and stayed until season 9. What comes out of these interviews is what a tight ship Captain Carter ran, and how over time he built trust and delegated to his Commanders John Gillnitz, and how all the newcomers were like temporary Lieutenants who were struggling to keep the high quality standards. My notes on David Amann’s interview below.
A couple of years before coming in on TXF in s6, he was first offered a job on Millennium but he chose Chicago Hope. TXF was just his second job.
He and the new “low-level writers” who joined in s6 (Jeff Bell, Dan Arkin) were at a crappy trailer at the edge of the Fox lot, separate from where Spotnitz and Carter and co were. The young writers formed a mini-writers room to help each other out, but there was no real writers room.
They’d develop an idea, pitch it to Spotnitz/Gilligan/Shiban (sometimes Carter), break it, refine it, often started anew. Plenty, plenty of ideas were shut down. Trying very hard not to repeat themselves. Steep learning experience, on act breaks, on what makes an X-File, on the argument between Mulder & Scully evolves over an episode, what was the “beautiful idea”.
Intense use of index cards to break an episode — used 600 cards for his first episode!
Less rewrites by senior staff as time went on.
Chris was “running an empire”, he delegated a lot to Frank, and to Vince & John.
The young writers would often have to adapt to decisions that were made by the senior staff, like “by the way, Arthur Dales is going to be in Agua Mala”.
The scope was big for TV: shooting was 8 days (as with other shows) + 3 days second unit + 1 day inserts.
Over the seasons he did more and more work in post-prod, especially s8 editing room, it was a great education. There were a lot of cuts. John had been the main post guy, he sort of took over.
He worked a lot on editing Roadrunners, it initially ran 13 min long.
In editing: no score at all (no temp track), this gave an honest picture if it worked or not, then it was given to Mark Snow.
It was not written in the scripts, but they sort of referenced Terminator 2 in s8.
Sink or swim for new writers: he was not necessarily a good fit for TXF but he learned to work on it with a lot of effort.
Terms of Endearment: it went through a lot of iterations. Rosemary’s Baby with reversed expectations. The twist was Frank or Chris. Chris did a pass on the script. When filming, the mom of the baby in the demon scene freaked out and took her baby away.
Agua Mala: Chris or Vince’s idea to do a bottle episode (for budget reasons) with a sea creature. Chris did a pass on the script. There was a lot of water on the set, impressive.
Rush: first episode he really understood how to build a script for TXF, his favourite. Vince did a pass on the script. Fast kids a metaphor for youth/drugs. The Matrix style included in the way they prepared the episode, bullet time ended up being just slow motion. Fox Standards & Practices concerned with grisly deaths.
Chimera: Jeckyll & Hyde story. Not his favourite, slow, misses the M&S dynamic (GA was unavailable due to all things). Recurring theme of American suburbs in TXF: was not a conscious theme.
Invocation: inspired by Elian Gonzalez story. Frank’s idea that a kid disappears and comes back the same years later, Frank or Chris did a pass on the script. Took reference from creepy kids films like Village of the Damned or The Omen. Chris took a pass on that episode to add in Doggett’s voice. With the new characters, they wanted to build a personal mythology for them.
Hellbound: reincarnation, sins returning, to give Reyes character moments. For the slaughterhouse, it turned out it was cheaper to kill pigs than to do fake bodies, that was an unexpected consequence of him writing the script. Easter egg: Manari Meats is a reference to Kim Manners’ real name. Not inspired by Hellraiser. They kept an eye out to revisit Reyes’ spiritual side in scripts.
Release: he was working on a story about Doggett and his brother, John was working on a story about Doggett and his kid, they ended up combining them into one. He is fond of this one. He has a DVD of Mark Snow’s score. A supernatural resolution to Doggett’s son’s murder would have been too much, they wanted something that was emotionally satisfying. Unsure about the fan theory that Brad Follmer was involved in the murder.
It was very hard to find ideas, he understood why they were cancelled at s9.
Revival: it’s tough, you can tell they didn’t have the same schedule & budget as previously.
Jeff Bell, Greg Walker, Steven Maeda and him are a tight group, they get together often.
Favourites: Home, Bad Blood, Jose Chung, Tunguska/Terma.
Why TXF endured: DD & GA casting; Chris & Frank very disciplined, quality control, ambitious, committed people they hired to the vision, the feeling that everything mattered.
