Dec-17-1994
Vancouver Sun
The X-Files, Chris Carter
Hester Riches

Chris Carter, the executive producer and creator of The X-Files, has flown up from Los Angeles for a set visit, as he does every 10 days or so.

“I do some of my best writing up here,” Carter says of his Vancouver visits. “It takes me away from the post-production process, which takes most of my concentration away, and on the weekends the phone doesn’t ring here.”

Carter, 38, is at the stage in his career when many producers get lured away from such intense devotion to the show. Two years into a successful project such at The X-Files, producers are typically asked to start developing spinoffs, or possibly even feature films.

It’s also the point at which fans notice a distinct downward spiral in their favorite shows. It’s known as the second-season slump, a sagging of creative energy after the initial burst to get the show on the air.

Strangely, it hasn’t happened on The X-Files. And perhaps it won’t because Carter, despite other offers, intends to stick with his pet project.

“Even though I have big ideas for other shows, I think I better concentrate on something that is a big success. It’s something I give my full attention to now.”

For those out of the Friday night viewing loop, The X-Files is a one-hour drama starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI agents assigned to bizarre cases that may involve the paranormal. In the U.S., it is the top-watched show by adults 18-to-49. In Canada, it regularly makes the top 10. It won a nod of approval from Viewers of Quality Television. Of the many new sci-fi series this season, The X-Files is the only one set in present time.

Many episodes delve into popular North American folklore of the UFO experience. Other favorite plots dealt with DNA mutations, telekinesis, religious cults, spiritual healing, forest-devouring insects, killer worms and cattle injected with artificial growth hormones. The scariest segment was a two-parter starring a creature called Eugene Toombs, an apparently immortal, liver-eating mutant who proved capable of peculiar body transformations.

The highlights from last season read like headlines from The World Weekly News. But even some of the wildest stories are simply extrapolations of current scientific inquiry, or are based on research done at major universities into the paranormal .

X-events, says Carter, must take place within the realm of the possible. “It’s only as scary as it is real,” he adds.

Other elements add to the X-factor of credibility: muted performances by Duchovny and Anderson, even in the most hysterical circumstances; special effects that are effective but not over-ambitious; and open-ended stories that leave viewers to often make up their own minds.

Rarely is an X-File solved. How does one bust a UFO? Agents Mulder and Scully try to shine some light on the dark forces, yet they rarely end up standing in anything brighter than a grey Vancouver day. And they are subject to paranoid fears as they battle evil both outside and within their own government agency. On the season-ending cliffhanger last year, the show’s motto switched from “The truth is out there”, to “Trust no one”.

Carter, who grew up in Los Angeles watching The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, says his own sense of paranoia is heightened by nothing more eventful than a daily reading of the newspaper.

“There was something in the paper yesterday about drugs that were given to soldiers during the Gulf War, and they had no idea they had not been approved,” he recounts.

“And now those people are sick from the drugs the military was giving them to combat the effects of germ or biological warfare.”

From the Iran-Contra scandals to possible UFO cover-ups and unauthorized drug tests, Carter is shocked by what he reads in the news. And, in part because of the popularity of The X-Files, he knows he’s not alone.

” ‘Trust no one’ was one of my personal philosophies,” he says. “I believe that people as well as governments are self-motivated and self-interested and that things run that way. I’ve connected with an undercurrent of distrust and paranoia that seems to be pervasive right now with the public.”

Dec-05-1994
Newsweek
The Truth Is X-ed Out There
Barbara Kantrowitz and Adam Rogers

TV: Spooky, lovable ‘X-Files’ captures Friday night

She’s the skeptic, always looking for a scientific explanation for the seemingly irrational. He’s the believer, willing to accept the concept that some things defy conventional analysis. In their second season on Fox, FBI Special Agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) have turned their weekly investigations of the FBI’s creepiest unsolved cases “The X-Files” into the top show on Friday night for 18-to-49-year-olds, with a loyal base of fans around the world (broadcast rights have been sold in 56 countries). And after each episode, hordes of self-described X-philes log on to the Internet and online services to dissect the plot. “The fans are just about as obsessive as Mulder is in his quest to find the truth,” jokes Paula Vitaris, an Atlanta writer and a frequent contributor to online “X-Files” discussions.

Mulder is an Oxford-trained psychologist with a wry sense of humor and a fascination with the unknown. The key to his psyche is his childhood trauma: he watched as his sister was abducted by aliens. His creed: “The truth is out there.” Scully graduated from medical school and then joined the FBI. She was assigned to the X-Files, largely to monitor Mulder (colleagues call him “Spooky”).

So far, the team has battled a pyrokinetic assassin, an evil computer, human genetic experimentation gone awry and various mutants and alien life forms. As a general rule, things turn out to be even stranger than they seem. “It’s ‘Twilight Zone’ with a regular cast of characters,” says Pat Gonzales, a Minnesota fan who edits a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” about “X-files” for the Usenet newsgroup on the Internet.

Although the fans have all kinds of theories about why the show is popular, creator Chris Carter says he just wanted to scare people. Among his inspirations were Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” and the 1970s TV show “The Night Stalker,” about a reporter who tracked down vampires. Some of the most compelling episodes have been written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, who grew up together near San Diego, Calif. Before “X-Files,” they wrote for “The Commish”; now, they say they draw on such influences as “Rosemary’s Baby.” And the show’s feel, from camera work to lights to music, is at least as freaky as its plots.

“X-Files” attracts both male and female fans, largely because Mulder and Scully are appealing role models. They are intimate friends but never sexually intimate. “What’s more interesting is someone who can meet you in a conversation or a debate, that exchange of ideas,” says Carter. Both leads are serious people, and, as it happens, very good-looking people. In the online discussion groups, male contributors frequently refer to themselves as proud members of the GATB, the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade. Mulder has his admirers, too, the DDEB, David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade.

Like other shows that have attracted a cult following, the X-philes discussions especially the Usenet group, alt.tv.x-files are filled with a multitude of details. “Even the most esoteric question can usually be answered in the newsgroup,” says Cliff Chen, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who edits a weekly episode update on the Net. “For any huge X-phile, knowing things like David Duchovny’s birthdate and Fox Mulder’s astrological sign is a thrill unto itself.” Carter monitors reactions online and the writers have often included fan references. For example, an airplane-passenger manifest featured names of frequent discussion- group participants (and a crucial clue).

As “X-Files” becomes more widely known, some fans worry that it will turn too mainstream. Morgan and Wong are leaving to create their own show, which they describe as a World War II movie in space. Carter promises to keep it creepy. “The material,” he says, “is out there.” Sounds like a case for “The X-Files.”

Dec-05-1994
The Toronto Star
X-citement grows for hot TV show
Kinney Littlefield

Somewhere, out there in the spooky darkness, they’re cloning by the thousands.

For most of the week, these creatures, called “X”-Philes, look much like any other average humanoid, in California, Chicago or New York.

But that’s just a front. In secret these closet aliens feed their heads with UFO sightings, supernatural powers, psychic phenomena and the like. And every Friday at 9 p.m. ET (on Global in Toronto) they congregate behind closed doors in homes across the United States and Canada for ritual viewing of The X-Files, the sizzling hot, paranormal-skewed Fox TV show that holds more and more of us in thrall. Since its debut in September, The X-Files has grown steadily into a cult phenomenon, a Twilight Zone of the ’90s for thinking men and women who’d rather ponder invisible cosmic truths than go out and party down on a Friday night.

“My husband, Bob, and I look forward to curling up on Friday nights together and watching X- Files,” said “X”-Phile Suzi Cassidy, 26, a buyer for the University of California, Irvine’s, computer store, who grew up watching Twilight Zone reruns.

“I’ve been watching X-Files since its pilot,” Cassidy said. “It’s popular because it’s daring and intelligent. The stories seem plausible. Sure, this stuff can happen. Who’s to say there aren’t UFOs?”

When X first marked the spot with its tales of UFO sightings and genetic mutation at the beginning of the ’93-’94 TV season, its ratings were in the Nielsen basement, ranking No. 80 or below. But as the X-Files virus spread, ratings grew to recent respectable Nielsen numbers of 8.2 and 8.6. (One ratings point equals 942,000 households.)

While it’s still not within shouting distance of Roseanne, it’s moved ahead of such other Fox cellar-dwellers as The Adventures Of Brisco County and Front Page. The network has already signed X-Files for a full ’94-’95 season of 24 episodes.

So hot is the X-citement right now that even the hard-nosed, high-browed New Yorker magazine recently gave X-Files a lengthy, extravagantly positive review.

But the biggest X-Files buzz of all takes place on the computer Internet, where on an average day more than 800 messages are listed in a special newsgroup called alt.tv.x-files, posted from viewers as far away as Canberra, Australia, and Vancouver, (where X-Files is filmed).

“With X-Files we’re playing on universal fears of the unknown,” said Chris Carter, 37, creator/executive producer/writer of the series, who prefers to call his show “speculative science” instead of “science fiction”.

“I think we all live in fear, and a lot of the time we just deny that we do.”

As created by Carter, the appeal of X-Files is clever and clear.

Take some shivery, unresolved FBI cases involving aliens, reincarnation, or liver-eating cannibals, and call them the “X” files. Add a seductively mysterious and caustic leading man, FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). Toss in a sexy flame-haired female agent, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).

Mix together with an FBI plot to keep Scully and Mulder from learning about the U.S. government’s full involvement in these cases, just to keep the paranoia level high.

Dec-??-1994
SciFi Entertainment
A conversation with The X-Files’ creator Chris Carter
Lisa Maccarillo

“Now that Russia is no longer our very recognizable enemy, we suddenly need to find other enemies and other sources of discontent. That’s when we start looking to the skies….” — Chris Carter

What are the X-Files?

“Everything and anything from weird science to paranormal phenomena to genetic mutations to alien hybrids. Basically,” says Chris Carter, creator and executive producer of the Fox TV series, “we know an X-File when we see it.”

The X-Files chronicles the exploits of two federal agents, Dana Scully and Fox “Spooky” Mulder (intelligently played by Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, respectively), who inhabit a speculative branch of the FBI charged with investigating paranormal activity and unexplained phenomena, trawling the fringes of American culture for clues, only to butt up against walls built by the same government that issues their paychecks.

“I was inspired by the show Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” says Carter, his voice an aural blend of Rod Serling and Joe Frank. “It had really scared me as a kid and I wanted to do something as dark and mysterious as I remembered it to be. So, I was able to say to Fox when they hired me to an exclusive deal, “this is what I want to do.” I had the track record and the know-how to develop the show, cast it properly and produce it the way I wanted it to be produced. Although there’s no Kolchak character in The X-Files, the spirit of the show is in many ways the same.”

Having generated a buzz everywhere from computer bulletin boards to bohemian coffee shops to the mainstream press, The X-Files was renewed for a second season despite its slow start. Along with his creative team of co-executive producers and sometime writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, as well as supervising producers and occasional writers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, Chris Carter has created a virtual anomaly in network TV — a show which gives you questions where you expect answers, and which demands not only your attention, but your capacity to speculate, to wonder, and to think — all of this from the same network that brings you Melrose Place.

Rather than the usual practice of tying up all the loose ends at the close of a given episode, The X-Files series unravels like a narrative Gordian knot, with each episode revealing a small truth only to lay bare a deeper puzzle. Many conclusions are left ambiguous, a pill the network found hard to swallow. “Closure seems to be a word that everyone throws around in TV drama,” Carter says. “They want everything explained; they want the cuffs thrown on. They want somebody put in jail and they want the morality tale. You can’t do that with a show like this. It’s going to take different turns; you’re dealing with different kinds of villains. It took [Fox] a while to come around to our way of thinking. There have been many battles waged, and many of them won, and some are still going on, but we fight for what we believe in on this show and I’m not alone.

“I think that our most successful episode last year, on every level, was “Beyond The Sea”, in which Scully’s father dies,” Carter continues. “The look of the show was fantastic but believe it or not, the network didn’t want to do that episode. There were hesitations and reservations about some of the plotting — but we stood our ground.

In the case of “Deep Throat”, the first episode after the pilot, a compromise with the network grew into a motif which continued through the rest of the season. Carter explains, “The idea of closure was still being forced on us, and the scene in which Scully is sitting at her computer writing in her journal was not in the show until the last minute. It came down as an edict because they wanted a summing up of the episode, and in the end, I think it made the episode better. That motif of Scully doing a voice-over as she types became a running story crutch for us when we needed to reinstruct the audience about where we are going, or where we had been.”

Carter is quick to point out that not every idea incites a battle.

“A woman from the network called me up yesterday,” he says. “She said she felt silly telling me this but she had so loved the script I had written that she wanted to bow to “the X-Files god”. I obviously felt very satisfied by that. These things all work in strange ways.”

Another source of praise for the show has been the unique relationship shared by the two main characters. Though there is chemistry between Anderson and Duchovny, the writers and actors take pains to maintain a tender but nonsexual relationship. It’s their philosophical differences that form the heart of The X-Files. Agent Scully is a skeptic, Mulder, whose sister may have been abducted by a UFO, is a believer. By chipping away at her skepticism, he is also chipping away at ours. “I myself come to all this stuff about aliens and alien abductions as a skeptic,” Carter says. “One of the byproducts of doing this show is that I’ve met a lot of people who genuinely believe that they’ve been abducted.

But I have not seen a UFO. I wish one would reveal itself to me. But I’m one of those people that needs to see it in order to believe.”

Like The X-Files character Deep Throat (played by Jerry Hardin), Carter seems to know more than he’s willing to tell. “Some things I find intriguing,” he allows. “We read enough in the news to know the government keeps things from us every day, but I tend to think that the government runs out of chaos, and organization of thought or of systems inside the government is a joke. That’s why I find most conspiracy theories difficult too believe.”

On Area 51, the air base in Nevada many believe to be a test site for UFO technology: “I believe that people go out there and watch things happen. Do I think that Bob Lazar [a scientist who claims to have worked on alien technology in Area 51] is telling the truth? I have no reason to believe him; I have no reason to disbelieve him.”

Who is Chris Carter? Where did he come from? And how did he come to roll the stone of intelligence up the ever-steepening hill of TV’s lowest-common-denominator sensibilities?

“I have a strange and varied background,” he says with typical understatement. A California native, Carter has had the unlikely but enviable experience of thirteen years as writer and associate editor for Surfing Magazine. “I was hired because I was a journalism major in college and had been a surfer all my life. Travelling around the world and surfing, I had one of the best prolonged adolescences a young man could want. It allowed me a lot of freedom to write, develop a voice, read and see the world … and surf, of course.”

His interest in dramatic writing didn’t fully develop until he met his wife, Dori, who was herself a professional screenwriter. “I came from nowhere to somewhere in a real short time,” says Carter. “My hair was barely dry from the ocean when I was hired in 1985 by Disney studios with a feature writing deal, an office and a secretary.”

Nine years later, Carter seems to have perfected the style which has become analogous with The X-Files: intelligent writing, understated acting, and extraordinary situations taking place in a very mundane world. Carter and his creative team cull ideas from a variety of sources to keep their approach fresh. “A lot of the ideas come from the writers knowing what scares us and what scares others the most and building X-Files from those themes,” Carter says. “For example, ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask,’ which was the season finale last year, has a little element in it from the news. In the not-too-distant past, a woman was rushed to an emergency room with blood that had crystallized. After being exposed to it, doctors suffered from the fumes. I took that as a tiny element and incorporated it into a story I had been wanting to tell all year. It became, I felt, a perfect season finale, which revolved around the ideas that there is alien DNA that has been captured as a result of a Roswell-like incident, and this tissue is sitting in a lab in a government facility somewhere, and someone has been running tests with it. So, it’s a wedding of different ideas looking for good visuals, a good scare, and good tension, with the characters continually testing their own personal biases and beliefs about things.

“The Erlenmeyer Flash” brought an end to the X-Files project, and the new season has the team split up, with Mulder in the field, assigned to “conventional” cases (yet still managing to get into trouble with uncanny forces), while Scully is tied to a desk job (yet still the only agent who will tolerate Mulder’s bizarre theories). Carter has previously revealed that the separation will last for eight episodes, during which time more will be revealed about the X-File team’s foes and allies.

While the separation been necessitated by Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy, Carter sees this eight-week period as an opportunity to play with a more serialized, less episodic format, involving more of the personal lives of both protagonists. As far as the sexual tension between the two goes, everyone involved in the series seems to agree that a full-blown romance is out of the question.

Early episodes this season will feature the discovery of a genetic mutant, washed up on the shores of New Jersey; a “super-soldier” created as part of a government experiment; and, possibly, an episode about a “group mind” created over a computer network.

The last is a notion Carter has played with since his recent discovery of electronic mail and online computer services; this year, The X-Files’ producers, writers, and possibly cast members, will be making their appearance on the “information superhighway.” “Delphi is the official X-Files service,” says Carter. “The other writer-producers and I will be participating in online forum discussions in the not-too-distant future; but fans can also interact with other fans, and download different media from the system.”

How close will Scully and Mulder get to the final truth in the current season of X-Files? Carter’s answer is as nebulous as any of last season’s answers. ‘I don’t think there is a final truth,” he says with a laugh. “There are problem final truths. We’ll just keep pushing.

“Mulder still wants to find his sister, so there will be an ongoing source of his energy into his search into the paranormal. We always try not to go too far with the X-File stories because we want to keep them inside what we call the realm of extreme possibility. And besides, telling too much gives away part of the magic.”

This season, Carter will stretch his talents, making his directorial debut with an episode, and hopes to explore the possibilities of a spin-off series, in response to the Fox Network’s interest in “X-panding” the franchise. Carter promises that they’ll continue to push the envelope of extreme possibility.

Will we see Deep Throat again? “That’s a good question,” he says with a smile. “The X-Files begins with the idea that anything can happen, and so that’s how we proceed.”

Trust no one.

Dec-??-1994
Producer Magazine
Xploring the Paranormal
Debra Kaufman

Now in its second season, Chris Carter’s X-Files brings viewers into the realm of extreme possibilities – and tries its best to scare the pants off of them.

If you like your television programming on the scary side, chances are you’re already watching “X-Files.” Thousands of self-proclaimed “X-Philes” are already addicted to the Friday night episodic whose main goal is to produce a serious case of the willies.

Produced by Twentieth Television in association with Fox Broadcasting Company, X-Files, now in its second season, chronicles the adventures of two FBI agents – special agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) – who investigate unsolved cases (X-Files) which lead them into the unknown realms of the paranormal. In each episode, the deep recesses of the human mind and the mysterious worlds of the paranormal interconnect in thrilling and terrifying ways.

“We try to scare the pants off of people,” admits X-Files creator/executive producer Chris Carter. “And we try to do it intelligently, in the realm of extreme possibilities.”

The show’s fearless exploration of paranormal themes is echoed in its storytelling style, which ventures away from the Hollywood television formula. Many of its most memorable episodes explore the characters’ psychological lives and present realistically ambiguous endings.

That modus operandi is visible in “Beyond the Sea,” creator Carter’s favorite episode. In it, agent Scully, whose father has just died, begins to lose her skepticism about the paranormal when confronted with a condemned killer who claims to be able to channel spirits from the past. At the episode’s end, she “gets” a message from her dead father in a way that somehow relates to and transcends her paranormal experiences.

“The ambiguous end is part of the beauty and mystery of the show,” says Carter. “But there were big, big battles about this very issue in the beginning. In our very first episode, I had a rather heated argument about `wrapping the show up.’ The executives wanted complete closure and explanation about what had happened. I argued that we can put things up for speculation, but we cannot draw hard conclusions.”

Carter is happy to report that those very same executives who fought hard for a more traditional TV ending are now behind him “100 percent” when it comes to the show’s more tantalizing semi-closures. Though he stresses that the “give and take” between the creatives and the executives is of vital importance to the show, he’s had to strike a balance between sticking with his instincts and listening to the opposing point of view. In the beginning days of X-Files, Carter faced another incident that tested his mettle as creator/executive producer. Though he’s “often bowed to other people’s tastes” with casting, he knew he wanted the then untried Gillian Anderson for his agent Scully.

“I stood up in a room full of people and said that I wanted this person and nobody else,” remembers Carter. “I thought later that I’d laid my whole career on the line.”

The good news is that Carter’s choice vindicated him. Anderson, though reportedly “very green” during her first days on the pilot, was a quick study – and her chemistry with co-star Duchovny produced a kind of “magic” that’s made everybody on the show happy.

“You’re always developing your instincts in this business,” says Carter about the casting incident. “And this gave me more confidence.”

Carter’s start in Hollywood combined a good measure of instincts and confidence, with a generous dose of Hollywood fairy tale. As a freelance sports journalist and, later, editor of “Surfing” magazine (“I was trying to extend my adolescence,” he notes), he decided to try his hand at scriptwriting. His second script was read by Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg who signed him to a three-picture deal. Once there, the first seven projects he wrote for television got made.

“It was like fishing in a barrel,” he recalls. “But I was writing other people’s idea. And I decided to stake my own claim and not be a writer for hire.”

Carter first created a short-lived series, “Brand New Life,” for NBC Productions which ran on Disney. But when he got a call from someone he knew who had gone to Twentieth Television, Carter signed a deal and came up with the idea for X-Files. The idea for X-Files was chiefly inspired by “Night Stalker,” which mesmerized Carter in high school. Also a fan of “Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and “Night Gallery,” Carter wanted to spook audiences the way he’d been spooked as a teenager.

X-Files is shot in Vancouver, B.C., which Carter dubs “a Hollywood boomtown.” The show’s Canadian location is less the result of that country’s lower production costs than Vancouver’s fabled forests and a bit of serendipity. The X-Files pilot needed a forest location and, though the creative team made a mighty effort to produce it in the Los Angeles area, they couldn’t come up with a forest.

Vancouver proved to be the ticket for the pilot and, since then, tis wealth of locations has proven valuable, since the X-Files agents go someplace different each episode. Two location scouts work on alternate episodes scouting Vancouver, which, says Carter, can double for nearly anywhere in the U.S. Gastown Post & Transfer in Vancouver handles the film processing and telecine transfer. The show is offlined on an Avid Media Composer and onlined at Encore Video in Los Angeles.

With the exception of the writing and producing staff, the entire X-Files crew is Canadian. Over 300 Canadian actors were hired last year for roles on the show; and average of three American actors were used per episode. So far, all the directors have been American. Carter’s “secret weapons” on the show include cinematographer John S. Bartley CSC, whom Carter credits with making X-Files very visually interesting.

“He’s painterly in the way he gives us our mood, and our mood is what the show is about,” Carter asserts.

Co-executive producers/”secret weapons” Glen Morgan and James Wong write episodes as well as produce, as does Carter who, last season, wrote or co-wrote about one-third of the episodes. And this year, just before the show began airing again, Carter took the plunge and gave himself the job of directing and episode.

The episode, “Duane Barry” (which Carter also wrote), is about a man who believes he has been abducted by aliens. Institutionalized, the man is sedated until he escapes and takes a group of people hostage. Agent Mulder is called in and . . . that’s all Carter will say. If last season’s X-Files is any indication, the episode is bound to cause more than a few viewers a nervous night. For Carter, his first directing experience was an invaluable way “to become a better producer and a better editor.”

In addition to taking criticism from executives and learning on the job, Carter and the X-Files creative team also pay attention to what X-Files fans are saying – this season, on the Internet. [ 🙂 🙂 ]

“Every day working in this business, you get smarter,” Carter observes.

It’s a search for knowledge that’s echoed in the show’s mantra – “the truth is out there” – and its raison d’être of exploring the unknown.

END

Sidebar: “Capturing the X-Files”

Vancouver, B.C. – Cinematographer John S. Bartley CSC uses an Arriflex 35mm camera package to shoot The X-Files. According to Bartley, the show uses three camera bodies: the Arri 535 (“A” camera) with forward and reverse capabilities at constant and variable speed from 4 fps to 50 fps, speed ramping and color video assist. The “B” camera is an Arri BLIV with off-speed capability from 6 fps to 32 fps and B&W video assist. Similarly, the “C”/Steadicam camera is an Arri BLIII with off-speed capability from six fps to 32 fps and B&W video assist.

Bartley uses a range of lenses, including 18mm, 25mm, 28mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 65mm, 85mm, 100mm, 135mm, 200mm and 20mm-100mm (5-1) zoom lens. Heads include the Arrihead with built-in tilt plate, Steadicam, Clairemont Power Pod with Swiss Jib camera crane, O’Conner Fluid Head and Ronford 7 Underslung-type head. -D.K.