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Posts Tagged ‘darin morgan’

Jul
28
2024

PhileFest: Creatives panel

I wrap up my notes on last year’s The X-Files PhileFest events with the Creators panel. This one is so long and full of cool info that I’ll split it in two. Featuring: R.W. (Bob) Goodwin (BG), Frank Spotnitz (FS), Chris Carter (CC), James Wong (JW), Glen Morgan (GM), Kristen Cloke (KC), Darin Morgan (DM). [+ my comments in brackets]

  • CC on Scully’s 2nd pregnancy being mysterious and science-fictional as well [eh, rinse and repeat… that My Struggle IV finale will haunt CC’s public appearances to the end of his days!]
  • GM cheers on CC repeating GA’s comment about firing all the writers! [I love how they are all comfortable enough to troll each other!] BG praises the writers [in response to GA’s comment] and that he and Sheila had their last child at age 71 [what does this refer to? a grandchild? a film/series he did? BG’s last film credit is “Alien Trespass” from 2009, when he was 66]
  • GM on the unwritten “Lincoln’s Ghost” episode
  • JW and GM on “Home”, trying to have a sequel in “Millennium”; they get no residuals
  • JW: “Home” was the reason for a “violence” check from FOX; BG: Deep Throat’s death in “The Erlenmeyer Flask” had been used to illustrate violence on TV [how times change!]
  • GM on doing sequels/prequels (DM: Flukeman as a tadpole! Small Potatoes: The Series!)
  • BG on meeting DM in the Flukeman costume
  • FS tried to include Charles Scully in “Christmas Carol/Emily” but Pat Skipper was very good, no place for Charlie
  • GM on inspirations for “Home” (“Brother’s Keeper”, Charlie Chaplin autobiography, “Dark Nature”), JW on reception of the script by FOX executive Charlie Goldstein (“you’re sick!”), GM on Karin Konoval
  • BG on having a nervous breakdown upon reading the “End Game” script with the submarine conning tower (CC had said “Bob will figure it out”), FS pitched that idea based on a New York Times article CC had on his bulletin board with such a photo
  • CC on directing Steve Railsback in “Duane Barry”, BG on casting director Rick Millikan, CC on Vancouver extras appearing over and over, BG on using girls after facing difficulties with boys as aliens in “Duane Barry”
  • JW on directing “Musings” (GM: “you also had an amazing script!”)
  • GM on their 3 main directors, Rob Bowman, David Nutter (“treat yourself”, he got that from his college film professor, that’s where DM got it for “Small Potatoes”), Kim Manners; shooting “The Field Where I Died”, DD’s hypnosis scene originally lasted 12 minutes! Someone fell out for directing “Die Hand die Verletzt” and GM & JW brought over Kim Manners.
  • DM on getting help from Rob Bowman on directing; wrote last act of “Jose Chung” in one go during the night before it was due; filming “Forehead Sweat” UFO scene at 3 am
  • KC thanks CC for being open to possibilities, that’s what made the show (unlike modern TV); talking with Bowman when shooting “The Field Where I Died” about music and the feel of a scene
  • CC thanks BG for producing, pushing for increasing the budget; BG negotiated one extra day of shooting for “The Erlenmeyer Flask”, the studio didn’t think TXF had a chance, proved its worth on its own and so there was no studio interference, studio said “spend what you have to spend, just don’t miss an air date”; budget went from 1.1 M$ in the “Pilot” to 2.8 M$ in “The End” [all hail Bob Goodwin!]
  • Did Scully sleep with Ed Jerse in “Never Again”? BG: there was a time he thought everybody slept with DD!
  • “Humbug” was a writing assignment from GM to DM, do something with circus freaks and Jim Rose; BG: was supposed to be Florida but it was Vancouver in winter, the crew had to melt the snow
  • “Rm9…” was a writing assignment from GM to KC, do something with drones with no dialogue; JW: GM broke up with me because of KC; before that, there was a “Space: Above and Beyond” episode with no dialogue; KC: there’s a real vibrator that tracks your “activity”; CC: the gifts M&S exchange in “The Ghosts Stole Christmas” were vibrators [crowd goes wild! CC is such an enigma, both enraging and enchanting fans and especially shippers!]
  • JW: “Beyond the Sea” was written as a reaction to online comments that “Scully’s a bitch”; FS read online comments a lot; CC: we heard fans, we didn’t necessarily incorporate feedback; CC: after “The Erlenmeyer Flask” there was an uproar, that was a great thing [CC likes controversy!]
  • BG showed director of photography John Bartley a Caravaggio painting, “The Calling of St Matthew”, as inspiration for the look of the show, to get darker and darker
  • GM & JW shot the footage of Frohike being killed at the end of “Musings”, they wanted to put it in the edit, but the footage had “mysteriously” disappeared [CC was against it]; FS lobbied CC not to kill Frohike

Second and last part of the Creatives panel from last year’s #TheXFilesPhileFest. There were more panels, especially one focused on #Millennium, but no recordings have surfaced, unfortunately. Below, more trivia and stories from the past, and some more Carter controversy [+ my comments in brackets]. Here’s to TXF’s longevity!

  • DM: “Forehead Sweat”: the only note from the studio was not to mention Trump by name (although they quote him directly); he would change “War of the Coprophages” so that cockroaches kill Frohike! He apologises for killing Queequeg; he remembers struggling with writing “Quagmire”, the writers had floated the idea of giant clams eating Scully’s car (Mandela effect: FS doesn’t remember that story)
  • BG on directing 15000 people in “The End”
  • CC: the reboot [he still calls it that…he means the revival] aired around Trump’s inauguration, and it predicted everything that came to be in the next 4 years; TXF is not science fiction, it’s a documentary [he really dislikes the term science fiction]; he mentions alien artifacts in TXF and David Grusch [UFO/UAP whistleblower that testified in a congressional hearing in 2023] and the episode “Eve” that dealt with cloning before it was a thing [interestingly, he mentions that episode was “largely” JW & GM, although different writers were credited]
  • CC: if he had wanted to end TXF after 5 seasons, FOX would have fired him and taken somebody else to continue [as much as we can fantasize about TXF ending at its peak before declining, that’s the sad truth…]
  • FS remembers that the original plan was that Mulder would find Samantha alive at the end of the show [CC doesn’t react to that, it would be nice to have a first-hand confirmation]; but by season 7 they made a “brave and controversial” decision to end differently [and by that time that was a good choice, but we are still left to wonder about that Redux II Samantha]
  • When did they know that there was something romantic between Mulder & Scully? CC: in the “Pilot”, in the mosquito bites scene, [FOX executive] Peter Roth asked “where’s the sexual tension?” CC said there is sexual tension, it’s just not of the same kind; FS: he knew from season 1 “Tooms” “if there’s iced tea in that bag, could be love” [ironically, a compliment from the most shipper-friendly writer to the least ones!]
  • GM on how a mysterious quarter in his mom’s belongings when she died found its way to “Home Again” (mentions his daughter Chelsea, DM’s wife Caroline)
  • GM & JW: quote George Roy Hill, 80% of anything is directing and casting; describe how casting director Rick Millikan was bringing them typical network TV people but they wanted freaks; after the casting of Doug Hutchinson as Tooms, he knew (describes Hutchinson’s casting session; mentions he didn’t hit it off with the episode’s director [Harry Longstreet, indeed he only directed that episode]); “Pilot” casting director Randy Stone saw DD as Mulder directly after reading the script.
  • Was the CSM William’s father? CC mentions mitochondrial replacement/removal, thanks to which a child can have two fathers and one mother, and “that’s the answer”; DM and the audience boos him! [a way to have your cake and eat it too – both Mulder AND the CSM are biological parents, according to CC, and that’s final; so much for the CSM just enabling the pregnancy; not to mention that biologically this is wrong, mitochondrial DNA is passed on from mother to offspring only and does not consist in the main cell’s DNA, so at best William is biologically Mulder and Scully’s and has CSM’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, plus some alien DNA here and there; the more you think about it the less it makes sense]
  • How about a season 12? CC doesn’t want to answer [fine by me!] BG gives an impression of how CC works: when shooting the ending of “Anasazi” with Mulder inside a burning box car, CC had said “I wonder how he’s going to get out of there”!
  • What was so important about TXF 30 years later? CC: Mulder and Scully! The best advice he got was when he showed the “Pilot” script to a production designer for Spielberg and Cameron who won two Academy awards [that would be Rick Carter, no family relation], that with no money and no time the best thing to do is to keep the scary stuff hidden. BG: there are three elements that define a success, the casting, the writing and the execution (it could have been cheesy) [I especially agree about that underappreciated third item] and “we got it”! BG got a call from Spielberg at some point, he told him that TXF was the greatest TV series ever made! GM: DD & GA! GM credits CC’s thing of “I want to believe”.

Top photo from XFilesNews

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Jul
05
2024

PhileFest: The Wongs

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.

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Jan
31
2024

Interview: Darin Morgan

Darin Morgan appearances are rare and should be cherished! His X-Files and Millennium episodes are nearly universally adored. Here is a long interview with him from a couple of months ago by The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast. It’s hard to summarize what is an excellent interview, but I’ll try! [+ my own comments]

– “Blood“: brother Glen (GM) offered Darin (DM) a story idea. Somebody turned in a script that didn’t work, and DM had to produce a script quickly, he worked on it closely with GM.

– On working with Chris Carter: CC (and Howard Gordon) hadn’t read anything DM had written apart from Blood when they decided to hire him as a writer. DM was reluctant to join the show because it wasn’t comedy but he had no job. CC thought that GM supervised DM more than he actually did. CC liked DM’s scripts, they didn’t need rewriting, and that’s all he wanted from DM. DM has worked on shows where he suggested story ideas that were different from the show’s format and showrunners were not receptive; CC was not like that. [More good words about Carter, he’s hands off but that is also a good thing.]

– On the original run: “Humbug“: GM told DM to write a show about sideshow freaks and Jim Rose. When DM pitched it to CC, it was just the story with no humour, CC told DM to make the creature more mythic or something. When DM turned in the script, CC, to his credit, didn’t say no to it because it wasn’t the format of the show. After he won the Emmy for “Clyde Bruckman“, still nobody recognized him in the street, the only people he knew that were watching the show were his own parents, so success didn’t go to his head. He liked his idea for “War of the Coprophages” but the script didn’t come together like he wanted. He usually likes his stories to be about new characters, not Mulder & Scully; in “War”, the new characters are cartoonish and one-note and it has more M&S. When DM wrote it, he thought he had failed, in comparison to “Clyde Bruckman”, then he had to prove himself with “Jose Chung“, he put a lot of pressure on himself. [“War” a failure?! I wish the show had done more episodes of the same quality as that!] He only has watched one or two “Twin Peaks” episodes, doesn’t get why people say he took inspiration from it [re: “Jose Chung” potato pie scene].

– On S4: Frank Spotnitz’s story that DM didn’t turn in his script then they had to do “Memento Mori” is not true [beef!]. CC had left DM with an open invitation for doing an episode, but DM wouldn’t commit. Having a deadline is one of the reasons why he left the show, he just can’t deal with them.

– On writing for TXF: The story was structured around the scenes at the end of each act (commercials breaks). DM tried to avoid fade-out / fade-in happening in the same scene; but at times there was no other place to go to (like 3rd act of “Clyde Bruckman”). For the revival there was an additional act, more commercials: this reduced the number of scenes, made acts shorter, made it difficult to develop a rhythm. [I think that’s a very important point and a reason why many felt the revival was rushed and a lot of noise for nothing.] Showing “Forehead Sweat” to his father, he realized that he tends to come back from acts in a different setting or with an unrelated character, confusing the viewer.

– On directing: “I’m not a barker”! He cares about actor performance, guide them through what the show is like, pull them towards more comedy instead of drama. Directing is getting the performance, not just technical stuff.

– On editing in TXF: “Imagine you have to cut two minutes from your favourite episode.” They had to follow time strictly, exactly 44 min 12 secs (revival: 2 min less). “Jose Chung” was his only episode that had the right length, all his others were over by like 6 min. CC’s scripts are short, GM and DM’s are not. Scripts are written in such a way you can’t remove an entire scene, even if that scene is not great, so you have to cut lines or jokes here and there. He has dailies from his MM episodes, but not cut scenes.

– On his “Millennium” episodes: it was painful. He disagreed that the show was too bleak: the subject matter was dark, but in his episodes he had a record number of suicides and they were considered “comedic”. MM viewers were much less open to change than TXF viewers: the people least likely to like DM’s MM episodes were the people who watched MM. In S2 Fox wanted change to increase viewers; but the captive audience from S1 liked what they saw, the lost viewers won’t return, it was a no-win situation.

– On preparing the revival: CC took GM & DM to dinner, they were hoping to do 10-12 episodes, he wanted to bring as many of the old crew back. DM “was like yeah that could be fun let’s do some more”, he never thought that TXF’s time is past. [Funny, that feels completely different to how his last episode ends!] He liked to have the freedom to do whatever he wanted. Fox marketed the revival as a limited series and the audience was expecting a continuing story, he thinks the reaction would have been different if it had been marketed as new episodes in the same format as in the past. [Maybe?]

– On his revival episodes: Back in the 90s, he had a story idea: a ghost story, but you find out it was a ghost only at the end. He thought of writing a feature about that, time passed, then “The Sixth Sense” came out and he knew the twist while watching! In Frank Spotnitz’s “The Night Stalker” revival, he wrote the “Were-Monster” script, and the day he finished it the show was cancelled. For years he lived in fear somebody would do that “man biting monster” story. With the revival he thought here’s my chance to put the story out there. The first 2 days of shooting “Were-Monster” were the graveyard scene. Writing “Forehead Sweat” was difficult as ever, but shooting it was the most fun he has ever had in his career. Recurring actors: DM likes to have a stock company of actors, like the movies in the 1930s.

– On the audience reception of the revival: when they set out to do the revival, DM was glad he wouldn’t have to deal with viewer comments about TXF not being comedy, but it happened again! With “Humbug”, people liked that they did something different, but with “Were-Monster” people freaked out, weird. Is the audience really more sophisticated? In today’s shows, every episode follows the same format, tone, style, a single continuing story, no new character or location. TXF didn’t do that. [Not sure things are so monolithic.]

– A thought experiment: if your favourite episode had aired in the revival, would you like it as much? DM thinks not; and conversely, people would have hated “War” if it had aired in the revival. In the revival there was no worry to tarnish the reputation of the show, it had already been tarnished by the last seasons and the second movie. [I love this!] But he was wrong! By the time the revival aired, people saw the original run as perfect, even the movie was reevaluated upwards. The revival was the same as ever, with ups and downs. “DPO” he thought was not a good ep, now people love it. He’s worried that people will never be watching the revival in the future. “Forehead Sweat” is more relevant now than back when it aired, and unfortunately more so next year [2024 – ouch!]. [I understand his point, but I don’t entirely agree here. On the one hand he seems to agree there was a drop of quality towards the later seasons, on the other hand he thinks there were always ups and downs and the revival was no different. There’s a lot of nostalgia in fandom, but it’s not only that.]

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