Jan-17-2001
Long Island Newsday
Glued to the tube
‘X-Files’: It’s Still Out There But its creator eyes Fox’s backing of ‘Lone Gunmen’
Diane Werts

HOLLYWOOD – IT WAS 1930s Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn who said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” Today, the showbiz heavy hitters just call the TV critics.

Actually, they don’t have to call. We’re already here, twice a year, at the two-week press tours in which the country’s tube writers meet with network executives, producers and stars to preview their fall or midseason offerings.

Mostly they come to our convention hotel in a parade of ballroom news conferences. But sometimes we head to their home studios to chat on-set, where they feel more comfortable.

And so they get personal. “The X- Files” creator Chris Carter did his press duty on a 20th Century Fox soundstage below a hanging alien ship contraption that looked like some “Star Trek” Borg assimilation of an arena scoreboard.

Carter clarified that David Duchovny’s MIA Mulder character “will come back into play in Episode 14 this year [the Feb. 25 cliffhanger before a five-week hiatus] and be very important to the rest of the season.” Simultaneously, the show will explore Robert Patrick’s new Doggett character. “We’ll realize why he is the way he is and how he may have changed, in Episode 14.” Annabeth Gish is joining the cast to avoid a Mulder-Scully-Doggett triangle, and Scully’s pregnancy will be “played out by the end of the season,” Carter says, choosing his words carefully.

He gets less circumspect regarding negotiations for another season of his eighth-year show, revealing much in one-on-one conversation about his relationship with the Fox network, which debuts his spinoff series, “The Lone Gunmen,” March 4 to keep the “X-Files” Sunday slot hot.

“I’m open to it,” he says of more “Files,” but “I really am interested in seeing their promotion and support for ‘Lone Gunmen.’ I want to make sure that they are supporting us completely and not just partially, that it’s not just for the perpetuation of ‘X-Files,’ that they’re going to support it as the good show it is.” His recent series “Harsh Realm” got “no promotion,” he states, and “it was a shock to me.” Got the message, Fox? “I hope that the talks can be done a lot sooner than they were last year, which was like right down to the wire,” Carter says, “and that we would know [early] so I could have more time to spend with the [season’s] final episode.” Carter partner Frank Spotnitz says May’s last outing, in any event, “will be the finale for eight seasons of “The X-Files,” as Duchovny’s part-time contract runs out. Nevertheless, the show’s fate remains uncertain.

Jan-15-2001
Virginian-Pilot
It’s torture being Mulder this season
Larry Bonko

LOS ANGELES — What do you see when you peek inside cavernous soundstage No. 6 at 20th Century Fox Studios here? You see the laboratory/operating room where poor Agent Mulder of “The X-Files” has been poked, probed and tortured by the aliens who abducted him.

They put hooks in his face and stretched his skin out to h-e-r-e. Yipes!

As filming took place, David Duchovny lay there “buck naked,” said “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter.

There’s bad news for Duchovny. Carter’s scripts call for Duchovny as Mulder to undergo more “horrible torture” on that set before we learn during the May sweeps exactly why the aliens snatched him in a blaze of blue light last May.

The operating room set which awaits another visit from Duchovny is painted silver and hangs above the floor of the soundstage like a flying saucer. It appears to have been made of odds and ends from a handyman’s shed including garden hoses.

Yeah, the set looks cheesy when you’re visiting. But when you see it on TV, it’s as spooky as Frankenstein’s castle.

Hollywood magic.

While showing TV writers where he films “The X-Files” on a studio lot not far from Beverly Hills — the show was originally shot in Vancouver — Carter talks about what could the series’ last season.

I said could be.

First off, “X-Filers” will be pleased to learn that Duchovny returns for episode No. 14 on Feb. 25. He’ll be back again on April 8 and be seen in every episode on Fox until the two-hour season finale.

“We’re looking forward to his return,” said Carter.

It’s not likely you’ll see Duchovny in season No. 9 if there is a season No. 9. “He’s got no contract,” said Carter.

As for the future of “The X-Files,” “If we can find a reason, creatively speaking, to keep doing the show, we’ll keep doing the show. Can we continue to tell interesting stories? That’s the question. The show has gone well since we added Robert Patrick,” said Carter. Next month, he adds another agent to the cast — Agent Reyes played by Annabeth Gish. “The X-Files” airs Sundays at 9 p.m.

Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully) is under contract for a ninth season. She’s on the verge of becoming a movie star after her performance in “The House of Mirth.”

Sony Pictures is pushing her for an Oscar nomination. A Rolling Stone critic said she was “delicate dynamite” in the film, and that not since Bette Davis “has an actress used a cigarette as erotic punctuation.”

Being compared to Bette Davis? Practice your Oscar speech, Gillian.

Spend a few moments with this actress with a face nearly as radiant as Garbo’s and you get the impression that she wouldn’t mind if it’s sayonara for “The X-Files” after this season.

“The schedule is so grueling,” she said.

Patrick came aboard in September to play Agent Doggett who joins Scully in the search for Mulder, last seen in a desert setting in the September 2000 season premiere. Patrick said he’d be happy to continue in “The X-Files” even with its long hours.

Last week, the “The X-Files” cast began filming a script on Monday that had been written over the weekend. Weekly TV is produced on an assembly line.

“It’s a little upsetting not to be able to rehearse. I love to rehearse. I love knowing my lines backwards, sideways and forwards,” said Patrick. “At first, it’s unsettling to work in a weekly series.” (He was last seen in three episodes of “The Sopranos.”)

On Patrick’s first day at work, Anderson as Scully tossed a glass of water in his face. Welcome to “The X-Files,” Robert.

Carter promised to sort out Scully’s pregnancy thing as this season concludes. The world is dying to know who impregnated her. Carter has yet to tell Anderson who’s the father.

Anderson said in filming “The House of Mirth” she tried “to do a character that wasn’t even remotely like Scully.”

It’s time to begin drifting away from the character that made her rich and famous, she said. “It’s time to do some different stuff.”

Anderson also said she knows less about “The X-Files” than its devotees who devour sci-fi magazines, browse the Internet and attend conventions.

“I’m the wrong person to ask about what happened on the show, three, four or five years ago. Once I shoot an episode, it’s gone from my brain.”

Anderson, who has a degree from DePaul University in Chicago, was hired by Carter early in 1993 almost the minute she walked into his office. “With Gillian’s looks, carriage and bearing, we instantly knew we had Scully,” said Carter.

And Duchovny?

Lightning did not strike as quickly. He scarcely spoke during the audition. Carter, waiting for the perfect Mulder to walk through the door, wondered … does this man have the smarts to play an FBI agent saving the world from aliens invading our body’s gene pool or wherever?

Then he glanced at Duchovny’s resume. Duchovny earned an undergraduate degree at Princeton, a master’s at Yale. He was plenty smart enough to play Mulder.

In going over the next few months of “The X-Files,” Carter also announced that a spinoff from the series, “The Lone Gunmen,” is in production. It will run on Fox for three episodes starting March 4 in “The X-Files” time slot.

Said Carter, “When we needed to give David and Gillian some time off, we gave much of an episode of “The X-Files’ to “The Lone Gunmen.’ It worked so well, and was so much fun to do, that we decided to spin the characters off into another series.” “The Lone Gunmen” in a nutshell: Conspiracy geeks, computer hackers and underground newspaper publishers (played by Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood and Dean Haglund) take on terrorists and other shadowy figures.

Fox adds sex appeal to “The Lone Gunmen” in Zuleikha Robinson and hunk appeal in Stephen Snedden. Robinson is part Emma Peel, part Lara Croft, say the show’s producers.

Only sleeker.

While it’s unlikely you’ll see Duchovny again playing Mulder on TV after 2001, he will be in the next movie based on the series. If there is a season No. 9 for “The X-Files,” the motion picture will be delayed at least 18 months, said Carter.

Learn to take your Duchovny in little doses.

Jan-06-2001
Fandom.com
X-Files Music: Composer Mark Snow
The Ambience Is Out There
Randall D. Larson

For the last eight years, The X-Files has been mesmerizing its television audiences with its mysterious entities, government conspiracies, alien abductions, malevolent mutants, and whimsical creatures, all wrapped up in a detective-show type format. Among the various elements that bred its dark, pensive ambience has been the musical contributions of Mark Snow, the only composer the series has utilized thus far. Snow’s ominous musical atmospheres have intensified the show’s sense of apprehension and otherworldliness, while also supporting its eclectic storylines and rampant creativity.

Although X-Files, has given Snow his greatest claim to fame, the composer actually has been scoring television since 1976. He studied oboe at New York’s Julliard Academy of Music, where he became friends with Michael Kamen, another music student who would end up working in film. The two of them formed a band they called The New York Rock and Roll Ensemble in the late 1960s. It was an encounter with “Planet Of The Apes”, including Jerry Goldsmith’s modernistic 12-tone music, that caught Snow’s attention and directed his path towards a career in movies.

Aided by his wife (sister of actors Tyne Daly and Tim Daly; daughter of James Daly), Snow gained introductions in Hollywood and started working as a composer for Aaron Spelling on the TV series, “The Rookies”. Other assignments followed, including “Starsky & Hutch”, and before long Snow found a comfortable niche scoring for television. He got involved with The X-Files at its inception, and his music has gone on to become another character in the series, as prevalent and as important as Skinner, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, or the Lone Gunmen.

Snow’s main theme is a rhythmic amalgamation of synclavier and an electronically reprocessed melody whistled by his wife, which was sampled and doubled with a music software program called Proteus2. That simple 5-note motif musically symbolizes all that the X-Files is about, with its furtive, spooky ambience and a rhythmic cadence of adventure and investigation.

During the show’s first season, Snow emphasized a brooding, ambient soundscape, but as the series progressed, he found more opportunities for musical development. “From day one, with the pilot, everyone involved from Chris Carter on down wanted a lot of music,” says Snow. “At first he was talking about ambient, atmospheric, basic synth-pad material, and that’s what I did at the beginning. It got boring and too ordinary, so I opened it up. Chris didn’t mind, and after the first year he just let me go off on my own. As the years went on, it became more musical and less sound design-oriented. Now it’s a pretty good mix of the two.”

Snow likes to maintain an open palette of sounds for his X-Files scores and relishes the freedom he’s given to compose a variety of musical styles while maintaining an overall atmosphere of ominous danger. “It seems that people respond to my suspenseful music as if it’s this really new approach, but it’s really just the style of music I’ve come to love over the years, since I was a student,” says Snow. “Music by Varese, John Cage, all the real atonal material that perhaps I like more than some other composers. I think some of those sounds and techniques work great in suspense. On The X-Files, I mix that with a more traditional scoring approach.”

“Musically, the show has evolved from being more ambient, sound-design kind of material into some melodic music, in a dark, Mahleresque style,” said Snow, who has received several Emmy nominations for his X-Files music. “What is great about it is that I can go back and forth. There’s always a combination of the two styles. I’ve done flashbacks and dream sequences that are all very aleatoric and tonal, avant-garde sound design, with wonderfully weird combinations of sound and music, and then it goes back into the style of Mahler or Bruckner or late Beethoven!”

The variety of the series, which contrasts the ongoing mythology stories with a number of stand-alone, monster-of-the-week episodes, gives Snow plenty of opportunities for musical diversity. “When we have these stand-alone-or what I call ’boutique’-episodes, some of which verge on black comedy, there’s a lot of cute things I can do,” says Snow. “The big mythological/conspiracy/cover-up shows are fairly drab, and there’s not much room for anything but the real dark approach.”

In Season 4’s tongue-in-cheek episode “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,'” Snow arranged a cheesy muzak-version of the show’s main theme, which plays during the alien autopsy sequence-the only time he’s used the show’s title theme in the body of an episode score. His music for “The Post-Modern Prometheus” in Season 5 paid homage to John Morris’s score for “The Elephant Man”, a film whose storyline and visual style shared a lot with this episode. The 6th Season episode, “Triangle,” gave Snow the opportunity to compose Swing music for sequences occurring on a 1940s cruise ship. More recently, in Season 8’s “Via Negativa,” Snow crafted a powerful and frightening amalgamation of electronic and acoustic patterns and sounds that leant a potent, nightmarish mood of apprehension in the dream sequences. In an earlier 8th season episode, “Invocation,” Snow adapted the children’s folk song, “All the Little Horses,” into a variety of arrangements for piccolos and voices that become a haunting musical description of the kidnapped boy whose sudden reappearance, 10-years later, opens up a ghostly tale that could have come out of “The Others”.

Snow has anywhere from three to five days to write up to half an hour of music for each weekly episode. “The hardest part is the beginning,” he says. “Figuring out the palette of sounds and instruments, and doing that first cue. After that’s done, it starts falling into place.”

When X-Files creator Chris Carter created Millennium, about a former FBI agent with a psychic affinity for profiling the murderously depraved, Mark Snow came along to supply the music. While both shows dwell on dark subjects, Snow provided a somewhat lighter tone by contrasting the darker music with an element of quasi-Celtic folk material. “When they first came to me, they said they wanted the music to depict good and bad, heaven and hell, hope and horror,” says Snow. “I asked them, ‘Which is it more? Is it more dark or more light? Is it more horror than hope, or what?’ And they said ‘Yeah.’ So I came up with this single voice, which turned out to be a solo violin, with this dark percussion accompaniment. I had these folky, Celtic violin solos with the sleek, dark synthesizer rumbling. I’d gotten into more specific dark music with this Celtic contrast, whether it’s solo violin or solo harp or solo woodwind. That seems to have worked well.” The expressive violin tends to speak for the heart of Frank Blake, the show’s reluctant hero, while the synthesizer patterns represent the darker world in which he works, confronting the various faces of evil.

Snow got his biggest feature assignment to date from The X-Files movie in 1998. With the canvas of a widescreen theatrical feature, Snow had the opportunity to expand the scope of his television music and orchestrate it much more broadly. Most pleasing was the chance to redevelop themes, motifs, and stylisms he’d composed for the show’s 30-odd musicians into a full orchestra of 85 players. “Ninety percent of the score is big orchestra combined with electronics,” Snow said at the time of the film’s release. “I think the best thing, thematically, that’s come out of the feature is the X-Files Theme itself, which was harmonized and orchestrated in different settings that have never appeared on the TV show. The TV version is sort of a one-note pad with simple accompaniment. With the feature, I’ve put different kinds of harmonization to it. It doesn’t happen every place, but it happens enough that anyone who knows the theme would recognize it.” The orchestration was fairly standard but the inclusion of extra basses and five percussionists gave the music a deep dynamic and a wider scope.

Snow created a few new themes for the movie. “There is a veiled theme for the Cigarette-Smoking Man,” said Snow. “It’s not as much melodic as it is harmonic. It’s a bunch of minor chords going from one to another. There’s a theme for the Elders, the Well-Manicured Man, and the older conspiracy figures.” Some of these themes were carried into the 1998 TV season finale, which acted as a sort of prelude to the movie, which was released later that summer.

Far from the TV series’ five days, Snow had a lavish five months to compose 75 minutes of music for the X-Files feature. Snow said that a major concern on the feature was to carry through the honesty of the music from the series into the size and scope of widescreen cinema. “My biggest challenge was in understanding how to make that jump without it seeming like a score by Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner or another big name movie composer.”

Snow went from the X-Files feature into another feature film thriller called “Disturbing Behavior” before returning to Ten Thirteen productions for the new season of The X-Files. Snow still finds time to score about five or six feature or TV films a year, including such TV thrillers as Dean Koontz’s “Sole Survivor,” “Stranger In My House”, and Dean Koontz’s “Mr. Murder”. Quite unlike his X-Files music, his scores for made-for-TV movies-dramas, murder mysteries, Westerns-have been quite romantic and melodic. He provided a lavish and harmonious score for ABC’s Jules Verne fantasy, “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. He also composed the theme for the TV incarnation of “Le Femme Nikita”, and provided music for some manic episodes of “Pee Wee’s Playhouse”. In 2000, he wrote a score for an action video game called “Giants”.

But The X-Files remains inescapable for the composer, whose career continues to be defined, if not restricted by, his musical efforts for Mulder and Scully and company. “If there’s any sense of style that I have now, it was really The X-Files that put me over the hump and got me up into another level,” Snow said. “It made me experiment with a lot of different approaches, and it made me comfortable with that.” In fact, with the 2001 debut of a spin-off series, “The Lone Gunmen”, Snow will continue to lay down the fundamental ambient atmosphere that intensifies the X-Files world. The series, set to debut in March, should give Snow some new opportunities as he musically characterizes the personalities of the conspiracy-busting trio. “The main theme starts out with the Star Spangled Banner, ala Jimi Hendrix guitar solo,” said Snow. “Then it goes into a rhythm pattern, and then into the main tune from guitar. It sounds a little like a hipper version of “Mission: Impossible”. It has that spy vibe to it.”

Snow also scored Chris Carter’s short-lived 1999 series, Harsh Realm, laying down an X-Files-ian atmosphere but deriving his approach more from the duality of the series’ setting, half in the real world and half in the virtual reality of Harsh Realm. “In the most simplistic way, I’ve used conventional, traditional instruments like pianos and strings for the real world, and more of the sound design in the Harsh Realm world,” said Snow. There was a blurring of the edges on occasion; for example, when Snow needed to accentuate an emotional moment in the virtual world, he’d bring in the strings, creating an emotional crosslink with the real world that also enhanced the symbiotic relationship between the two as emphasized within the series.

With The X-Files entering its eighth season this year, Snow introduced a new tonality in the form of a lilting melody for solo female voice associated with Scully, which will be heard throughout the season. “Since this whole season is going to be so Scully-intensive, Chris Carter thought there should be a theme for her during the contemplative moments of the mythology episodes-something that spoke for her emotions.” The vocalist for the theme is Nicci Sill, who previously sang Snow’s theme for “Le Femme Nikita”. The vocal was initially intended to be wordless, but as she vocalized the part Sill began repeating in barely discernable voice the phrase “We are near,” which Snow felt was more than appropriate considering the fact that the aliens have kidnapped Mulder and are closer to the cast than ever before. “With the first episode of the season, the aliens have Mulder, and Scully is close but never quite there. But when she was singing it, it sounded like some ethnic incantation of some sort.”

The lack of a real soundtrack CD from The X-Files has been a source of frustration for many. A CD that came out in 1976, called “Music in the Key of X”, was nothing more than a collection of rock tunes inspired by the show, plus a version of Snow’s theme music. A very odd creation was also released that same year, “The Truth and the Light: Music of the X-Files”, merging seemingly random bits and pieces of music from the show with random bits of dialog and sound effects, creating a bizarre sound collage that pleased few people. “That mistake will never be made again!” grins Snow. “Somewhere, Chris Carter heard this voice-over thing and thought ‘That was great, we gotta do it!’ Actually, I thought it was pretty cool up to a point, but it got a little out of hand. And it was incredibly problematic-all the actors wanted a royalties, and so forth.”

To date the best representation of the show’s music appeared on a compilation CD entitled “The Snow Files”, released by Silva Screen in 1999. In addition to an impressive variety of excellent music for films and television, a very faithful arrangement of Snow’s X-Files music was performed by composer and synthesist John Beal, under Snow’s direction. (The actual music tracks were not available for licensing on the disc; but Beal’s arrangements are very fine and true.) Still, there is ongoing talk in the hallways of 20th Century Fox about the possibility of an actual soundtrack release, and hopefully one will be forthcoming in the future.

While more opportunities to score feature films would please Snow, he is finding plenty of satisfaction scoring quality television such as The X-Files. “I’ve been very lucky, because the quality of X-Files and Millennium is so good, in general, that it is like doing a mini-feature every week,” says Snow. “I’d like to graduate some day to where I’m not doing episodic TV, and I’m doing three, four, or five movies a year, where I really could expand my career from film to film. But the graph of my career is still amazing to me. I haven’t gotten into the negative yet. There’s so many guys who have come and gone, who have been so blisteringly hot and then fell off, so I really can’t complain when I look at it from the perspective of the business.”

Jan-03-2001
Conan O’Brien Show
Interview with Chris Carter

(Prior to Chris’ appearance Heidi Klum had done a re-comb on Conan — using about a half a can of hairspray — which looked something like a Lyle Lovett…)

Conan: Nice to have you with us.

Chris: Thank you for having me.

Conan: Yeah, no problem. It’s a nice night to be here. Lovely ladies. My hair is looking crazy. It’s my tribute to Eraserhead tonight. I hope you enjoy it.

Chris: I appreciate that.

Conan: Let’s start off by saying — let’s talk about “X-Files” for just a second, because it’s such a landmark show, such a different show than, I think, any other show that had come before it and I would imagine that whenever you bring something new to a network they try and — well, especially Standards, they get scared. They’re afraid.

Chris: Right.

Conan: They have probably tried to stop you at certain times from putting certain things on the air. Do you have problems like that because you’re Chris Carter now? Can you win those battles?

Chris: There’s lots of nervousness about blood and gore and stuff, but Stephen King wrote an episode called Ching* and the Standards people were really upset about the title. They said, “That’s a bad word in Spanish, a bad slang word.” We argued and we argued and finally they wouldn’t let us use the word Ching*, they wouldn’t let us use the name Ching*, so, uh —

Conan: Stop saying that word. Our Standards lawyer is Spanish right now.

Chris: So we called the episode Bunghoney instead. [That’s how he pronounced it, folks!]

Conan: Seriously?

Chris: That means nothing in Spanish.

Conan: And that got through?!

Chris: That’s what the episode is called now.

Conan: That’s great, ’cause that’s very true. I don’t know if people know that, but the Standards lawyers often will object to one thing, you’ll put in something much worse and they’ll go, “Well, that’s better.” I don’t know why. You have a new show now, “The Lone Gunmen.” It’s a comedy. Tell us about it.

Chris: It’s a spinoff of “The X-Files.” It stars the three computer geeks that you may all know if you’re “X-Files” fans. It’s on Sundays at 9:00. It’s going to take “The X-Files’ ” timeslot for three weeks and then it’s going to go to Fridays at 9, which is the old “X-Files” timeslot. Anyway, it’s kind of “The X-Files” turned on its head. It’s a comedy with some drama in it. So don’t be afraid to laugh.

Conan: (gesturing to audience) Please, I’m telling them that all the time. “Please don’t be afraid to laugh” is how I start my monologue, often. Who do you identify with comedically or who influenced you comedically? Was there a TV show, a comedy, that spoke to you as a kid?

Chris: So many things as a kid. “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” I have to say “Gilligan’s Island” was my big–my big influence.

Conan: Seriously? I think you should leave now. No, it’s funny, because “Gilligan’s Island” was hated at the time by TV critics but it’s the show that everyone in my generation grew up with. We all thought it was great.

Chris: I loved the show.

Conan: Who did you like the most on “Gilligan’s Island”? Who did you think was the coolest guy?

Chris: Well, not the Skipper, he wrecked the boat. And not Gilligan ’cause he was the Skipper’s “Little Buddy.”

Conan: Right. Which had creepy overtones.

Chris: Exactly.

Conan: Which Standards just let right through.

Chris: Homoerotica. Bunghoney.

Conan: (embarrassed) Yeah, okay. Why, Chris, why?

Chris: I’d have to say the Professor.

Conan: You liked the Professor? Why?

Chris: Because–

(A few whoops from the audience)

Conan: Well, two people just agreed with you out of a random 210 sampling. Why the Professor?

Chris: Smart is sexy and I think the Professor was actually getting it much more than anybody else on the island.

Conan: Well let me — I would agree with you except he shares that island with a multimillionaire. I think he would probably do a little better than anybody else on the island. That’s just sad but true. What about — you said that this show that you’re doing now combines drama and comedy, you have another show that’s a very successful drama. Have you ever thought — There’s this reality craze now. Everyone’s saying what’s the new reality show? Have you ever thought, “I’m gonna invent a reality show. I’m gonna do one of those and try and ride this wave”?

Chris: Yeah, I actually came up with one where — a family would go to the producers and ask that someone in the family be kidnapped and then you get a million dollars and you can decide whether or not you actually want that person back.

Conan: No one would ever ask for that person back. They would just keep the million dollars.

Chris: Exactly.

Conan: That’s the meanest show I’ve ever heard of. I’ll do it with you if I can share in the profits. And keep this hair. There’s a paranoia that emanates from “The X-Files” and it has made me think that maybe you are a paranoid person yourself. Do you think you are?

Chris: Basically.

Conan: Really. You tend to believe that there are forces out there trying to destroy you.

Chris: I know that there are forces out there–

Conan: It’s called the network. Yeah, yeah. They don’t really count. They’re not as bright as the aliens. The aliens can actually travel through time and space. These people can’t put their suits on. (Audience laughs) None of this will air. I’ll be replaced by a robot tomorrow. “Buy NBC goods! General Electric good!” Do you have any idea where that sense of paranoia would come from? Was there anything in your childhood? Do you think you had any experiences as a kid that would make you be paranoid?

Chris: I’ve told this story before and no one really believes it. When I was growing up I came home to dinner late one night and my dad actually made me sit in the street and eat my dinner on a manhole cover.

Conan: [forces a laugh] That’s a hard thing to laugh at! First of all, was this a pretty quiet street or were you on a highway? It’s pretty hard to eat your pudding when Mack trucks are passing you on either side.

Chris: You develop certain senses or sensibilities when you —

Conan: You really ate your dinner off a manhole cover?

Chris: It was in a cul-de-sac, so it wasn’t so dangerous.

Conan: Right.

Chris: But going for seconds was always a little risky.

Conan: Dodging traffic the whole way.

Chris: I was scrawny.

Conan: Well, then, you’re excused for creating “The X-Files” and having that paranoid vision, I would think. “The Lone Gunmen,” this new show, premieres this Sunday night at 9:00 on Fox, and it was really great having you on the show.

Chris: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Conan: Yeah, thanks for making time for us.

Jan-03-2001
Hollywood Reporter
The truth is out: Gish taking on role in ‘X-Files’
Nellie Andreeva

LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Reporter) — A new FBI agent is joining the alien hunt in Fox’s “The X-Files.” Annabeth Gish will join the drama produced by creator/executive producer Chris Carter’s Ten Thirteen Prods. in association with 20th Century Fox Television in a three-episode arc this season with an option to return in the fall as a regular on the show.

Gish’s yet-to-be-named character will be brought to the team by agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick) from the New Orleans office, where she has been working a ritualistic crime detail dealing with reports of satanic cults.

“She is quite unlike any of the other agents,” Carter said. “She has been neither a firm believer nor a major skeptic, either.”

To spice things up, Gish’s character has a personal history with Doggett, who brings her in to help on a case involving agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). Gish’s first episode, which will air Feb. 25, also will mark Duchovny’s return to the series this season.

Carter got the idea about the new character from an FBI agent investigating satanic ritual abuse whom he saw on “Larry King Live” years ago, before he started working on “X-Files.” In fact, that interview was one of things that inspired Carter to create the series, he said.

If the show returns for a ninth season, Gish will become a regular, but she will not replace anybody, Carter emphasized. “It seems to me that we have benefited from the addition of Robert Patrick to the cast, and we’re hoping that we can expand the cast even further and as successfully with Annabeth,” he said.

Patrick and co-star Gillian Anderson are contracted for the ninth season of the show (HR 7/27). Carter is in preliminary talks about coming back next season, while Duchovny’s “X-Files” future is not clear.

Prospects for the series’ coming back for a ninth season look good as the introduction of Patrick has delivered an average of 13.9 million viewers for the season to date, up 7% from last year, and a 7.6 rating/16 share among adults 18-49, up 9%.

Gish, who came into the spotlight with the features “Desert Bloom” and “Mystic Pizza,” followed up with roles in “The Last Supper,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Nixon” and “Double Jeopardy.”

On the TV side, Gish starred in the short-lived CBS drama series “Courthouse” and in a slew of TV movies, most recently “Sealed With a Kiss” opposite John Stamos. Last year, she starred in “L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide,” a drama pilot for NBC.

She is repped by ICM and manager Joan Hyler.

Jan-??-2001
Written By
A Viral Inspector: The science advisor to Chris Carter’s The X-Files takes no credit
Richard Stayton

By Anne Simon, Ph.D. (as told to Richard Stayton)

This is Chris’ show. He writes it. He’s the creative force behind it. All I do is help with the science. I’ve occasionally gotten some of my original ideas on the show, but the most is a line, and it’s up to him to use it or not. He’ll call me and say, “How can I tag someone with their small pox vaccine?” I didn’t come up with tagging someone with small pox vaccine. He did. I just gave him some science.

I always say, “Oh, just e-mail it to me. Let me look at it first, and I’ll make sure that the science is correct.” But it’s his storyline. His story. His idea. He writes the scripts. All I do is help a friend.

It’s because of my dad [writer Mayo Simon]. I’m very sensitive to how little control that you have in Hollywood and how upset my dad got when people were taking credit for things that he had written. And in science we really don’t like it when people take credit for our ideas, and we’re very careful to attribute things in science. We’re careful about what we’ve done and what we have not done. I understand the pain that writers go through.

When people take credit for your writing, it’s terrible. You’ll have this wonderful movie, and who gets the credit? It’s the director who did it, and it’s the actors who did it, and who mentions the writers? And it’s ridiculous. It’s the writer who did it. The director is just going from the script, and the actors are just doing what the director says that’s in the script. I grew up with that.

During my book tour, I’d make reporters swear that they would not say that I wrote for the show. “I’m a science advisor,” I’d tell them, “I help with the science.” They end up writing, “She writes for The X-Files.” And I think, My God! I know what my dad would think. So I began the interviews by saying, “You’re a writer. You know what it would be like if somebody took credit for your writing. Well, think about how I feel when people write that I am doing the writing and providing the creative ideas behind what somebody else is doing.”

Contacts and Connections

When I was much younger and living with my parents in Pacific Palisades, Chris’ wife was a friend of my dad’s. So Chris was over at Thanksgiving, Passover, the usual affairs. I got to know him as a really cute surfer, which was what I thought of him. He was gorgeous: blond and always tan. I didn’t think about him as a writer at all. His wife was the writer.

Then when I got my assistant professorship at the University of Massachusetts, I didn’t really think about Chris until five years later. I was going through the TV Guide, seeing if there was anything on, and I read this description for this show on Fox: two FBI agents investigating cases of the paranormal. I like science fiction, and I thought this could be a really interesting show, especially because it describes the woman as a medical doctor and scientist. I was watching the show every week, and about halfway through the first season I get this call from my mother and she says, “Do you know that Chris has a new show called The X-Files?”

Chris is a real fan of science. In another life he would be a scientist.

Once I had corrected a script. But I said, “Do you realize this term is incorrect? Do you want to have it wrong in the script?” He said, “Yeah, it’s more conversational.”

Chris and I discussed whether or not you could have virus in pollen. I said, “Sure, I could do it. It would have been tricky. But you can do pretty much anything.” So he sends me this film script. And I’m number 10 to see it because the scripts were all numbered. Our names stamped on every page. Mine was spelled incorrectly. I got to look at my incorrect name on every single page.

I’m reading the script, and Chris starts talking about how the virus gets into a person and turns into this horrible alien organism. Chris’ idea was that the virus was the original inhabitant of the planet. But when I’m reading it, it’s like the virus turns into this horrible creature. And he’s describing the big black eyes of the virus. And I’m going, “Oh my god!” I work on viruses. Viruses can’t turn into anything. If a virus turns into something, it’s not a virus. I was really horrified. So I read the rest of the script, and I came up with a different science that would only change a few conversations, but it would change the idea of what the virus was. And I had my fingers crossed that he’d go for it. If Chris wanted that virus to turn into something, he would’ve done it whether I wanted it to or not. But he loved the new idea: The virus integrates itself into the DNA of the person. That’s what a lot of viruses do, activate a resonant program in the cell. There’s a program in all our cells, in our DNA that starts with that single egg and turns us into a person. And that’s encoded in our genes, in our genetic makeup.

The problem is that there’s a huge amount of DNA we don’t have a clue about. There’s a whole lot of DNA that we call junk DNA. We don’t have a clue what this junk DNA is doing. My idea was the virus activates a resonant program in the junk DNA, and that the junk DNA is actually there to turn a cell into the horrible creature, which means that we are the aliens.

Once Scully was so upset when she had this horribly deformed baby that she accidentally misspoke and called the illness an autozomal dominant disease when it’s really an autozomal recessive disease. There’s a huge difference because if it’s dominant, the parent had to be dead at birth. And that can’t happen if you’re talking about the baby, so obviously you can’t get around that. But there are some people who nitpick and say, “The writer obviously made this bad mistake here.” But I say, “So what? Writers aren’t scientists. I see plenty of mistakes in grant proposals from professional scientists.” It’s not my job to sit here and go through the problems. These are not scientists. They do a terrific job of making the science look real, and occasionally there’s a little problem. So what.

Anne Simon, Ph.D., is Professor and Associate Head of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department at the University of Massachusetts and author of The Real Science Behind The X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites, and Mutants.