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Posts Tagged ‘frankspotnitz’

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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Feb
07
2024

25 years of One Son + Frank Spotnitz interview

25 years ago today, The X-Files mythology essentially wrapped up with “Two Fathers” and “One Son”! A quarter of a century ago! What better way to celebrate than with a new interview with writer-producer and mythology second-in-command Frank Spotnitz, courtesy of The X-Files Diaries. “Incredibly ambitious episodes!” Here are the highlights [and my comments!]:

Why end the Syndicate storyline then? “When I look back on the evolution of TXF mythology and the storytelling, it was very elusive and teasing a lot, the first 4 seasons at least. Then the movie came along and we had to deliver more explicit pieces, that was sort of our mandate, the movie has to give to give you something you haven’t had in the TV show. So by the time we got to s6 we felt like we need to give more answers, we’ve teased people long enough.” We were “telling the audience it all does makes sense, this is what we’ve been hiding from you and here are the pieces all in one place, bringing that chapter to a close with the death of Jeffrey Spender and the Syndicate”. [The puzzle-like way the mythology of TXF was built and written is something that fascinates me endlessly.]

The flashbacks in the scripts: inspired by Godfather II. The scripts were late, not enough time for hair & makeup to do good work; all scenes were shot, the footage exists; but they were not happy with the wigs; but also the past/present narrative connections were not working. They were happier with the decision to substitute them with scenes where CSM is exposing everything to Fowley. [I agree, although I’d love to see those scenes!]

What was planned ahead? “I can’t entirely answer this question honesty because a lot of these things were in Chris’s head before I even came on the show” “when I came on, I don’t think anybody really understood the ‘mythology’, that we were actually building a coherent narrative” “the Black Oil, which was my thing, I didn’t understand how it connected, I didn’t even realize it was going to need to connect later on”. “Some of it was there from the very beginning, some of it had to be knit together, most of it we did understand going into the movie”. “Chris and I had talked in s4, maybe earlier, a lot of it didn’t make it into the show explicitly — it was sort of the petrochemical era of human civilization that brought the virus back”. [Amazing that Carter wasn’t sharing everything about the mythology not even with Spotnitz. The oil connection adds an ecological-historical reading to the mythology that I find very appealing, I wish they had developed that more.]

Diana Fowley: the writers wanted to play the ambiguity regarding Fowley’s allegiance, on who to trust, Mulder’s or Scully’s reading of Fowley? To the point where Mulder calls on Fowley’s bluff to see where her loyalties lie (end of One Son). But how the episode reads to the viewer is that she is an antagonist to M&S, not as ambiguous as intended. He would have liked to see more of Fowley. “That was explicitly one of the reasons why we wanted the Fowley character, it was a way to indirectly mine the sexual tension between M&S, by creating this new threat that you hadn’t really seen since s1, a rival for Scully”. [The inclusion of Fowley was very soap operatic from the beginning, but it worked rather well for what the show was doing by then.]

It was another time in terms of storytelling on TV: “We were so busy having to move the story and the plot along, you almost wish it had been 3 episodes and you had more time to slow down and look at the character dynamics and the emotional reality.” [3 episodes, I agree!]

On the MSR: “their work is what brought them together and is what kept them together, if they become lovers it threatens their ability to work together. This is one of those issues that I’m sure nobody anticipated at the beginning of the show, because you don’t know how long the show will go on you don’t realize it’s going to be 9 seasons+. By s6 and 7, you’ve got to go somewhere with this, you just cannot keep teasing the audience, you’ve got to honor the reality of these characters after all these years together.” [Similar thoughts to wrapping up the Syndicate plotline here, agreed. But extending the same thought further, it becomes less and less interesting the longer it goes on, like in s9 and beyond.]

On Mulder’s wedding ring (Unusual Suspects, Travelers): definitely not in the writers’ intention, was a DD thing: “we didn’t have the visual effects capability to erase the ring.” All the fan theories about Fowley being the ex-wife are good, but they were “not in the text”. [We’ll always have fan theories!]

On Krycek: “one of my regrets is we were going to do a Krycek episode, that would have been maybe a chance to explore the Marita-Krycek dynamic more fully”. Krycek as the ‘one son’? “Krycek not born to the throne, he’s working to earn his place”. [He doesn’t refer to a draft script for a Krycek episode, I wonder if he’s forgotten or if it really existed.]

On whether the CSM was Mulder’s father [at that point]: “that was an idea we had, an argument we had about whether he should be, we just agreed to not commit.” A revealing sentence about how Carter thinks: “Chris would often have ideas he wasn’t going to share until it was time, and we’d realize, oh you were thinking that?” Also, FS always assumed that Samantha is Bill Mulder’s.

On Jeffrey Spender: “Once he understood the moral dimension of what his father had done to his mother, it was a natural point for him to stand up to his father and redeem himself, and in redeeming himself he had doomed himself. There was no way he could stand up to the CSM and walk away. it felt like the inevitable Shakespearian conclusion.” [Again, great, but spread over more episodes would have been better.]

Cassandra’s “I’m going to pee the floor” was probably a Carter line; Mulder’s reply “don’t do that” was a Duchovny ad-lib.

M&S shower scene: stolen from James Bond “Dr No”. The partition between M&S was not scripted.

Ending: they were not allowed to shoot the Syndicate burning for fire safety issues, “it’s the largest wooden hangar in North America” [unfortunately just burned down in November 2023!]. When the show was ending in s9, if they had the money, he would have liked to redo some of the effects, like the morphing.

Next mythology was less about the grand conspiracy and was more focused on the characters, was that planned or not? “It just came about”. “We just trusted, as we often did, that we would find our way”. “We’ve never done the show with a map, with a plan, we always trust we’ll figure it out when we get there”. Fox was not happy to hear that from FS, when CC was absent, when they asked what s9 was going to be about. With all the changes, “it became very hard, even if we wanted to, to plan ahead the last 3 seasons”. [No change of method over the years, but it became more and more difficult to reconcile the cumulative storytelling of what was done already with what was going on behind the scenes.]

https://xfilesdiaries.libsyn.com/134-two-fathers-one-son-with-frank-spotnitz

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Jan
06
2024

Interview: Frank Spotnitz on “Detour”

Happy new year! Perhaps the last year without an X-Files reboot? We continue our catch-up of 30th anniversary interviews with an audio commentary of “5X04: Detour” with writer Frank Spotnitz thanks to The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast! Summary below:

  • With TXF, the writers-producers explicitly tried to make something that would last the pass of time [30 years later, congratulations!]; they had in mind Jaws (leave it to the imagination to fill the blanks); they were conscious to write strong women characters (like when Scully had to protect an impaired Mulder); the smart MSR was at the heart of the show
  • Shooting in the woods was a cost-saving measure, but weather made it costly (because of the rain, they had to build the camp fire scene in a set); How The Ghosts Stole Christmas was also a cost-saving ep but set building made it very expensive; Dod Kalm was successful in saving money
  • Behind the names: Marty and Michael were FS’s business partners; Louis was a cousin of FS; Michelle Fazekas was a 1013 assistant; West Virginia setting is where FS’s mother is from; Jeff Glaser was a Fox executive that gave them notes (“it’s only scary as it is believable”)
  • Leon County: a clue to Ponce de Leon
  • FS had done a lot of mytharc at that point, he wanted to do a stand-alone
  • Inspiration: things that scared FS when he was a kid, like a dog barking at something unknown at night; was fascinated with tree rings
  • Introductiory scenes: invest the viewer in secondary characters before something bad happens; also, FS had just become a parent a few years before
  • FBI team-building comedy scene was Carter’s idea
  • Brett Dowler had done a lot of 2nd unit directing, this was his first ep as director
  • Leonard Betts: Spotnitz-Gilligan-Shiban were in competitiong with Morgan-Wong on which ep would make it to Superbowl
  • FS was present in Vancouver for prepping and just the first day of shooting, then back to LA for scripts and post for other eps
  • 1930s The Invisible Man on the TV: it was all about whether they could afford licensing costs
  • Ground the episodes in reality: Scully is like the smartest member of the audience, if you can erode her skepticism then the script works
  • During s2 they had to go to the library for research, by s5 they had internet
  • Civilization is encroahing on nature, that’s why creatures react
  • Mark Snow wrote so much music, more than the average TV show; editing was done without music, then they’d go to Mark’s home in Santa Monica to hear it with music
  • Beyond s6 they were wondering what can they say that is new? s8-9 had a different storytelling format, leaning more into The Twilight Zone influences
  • Director of photography Joel Ransom used a lot of steadicam; even in interiors scenes the light is not flat, half their faces are in shadow
  • FS developed a show with Adam Rapp (brother of actor Anthony Rapp) but that didn’t get made
  • Creature stealing stones: inspired by Planet of the Apes (humans steal clothes), one of FS’s favourites
  • They typically had 8 days main unit, at least 2 days 2nd unit (which here did things like POV shots of the forest); the record was Jose Chung’s, 20 days (!)
  • Every 12 pages of script there had to be a cliffhanger for the act break, that forced good discipline for script writing; FS still does it even if there’s no need for commercials breaks
  • Mulder’s line “I don’t wanna restle” was improvised; there was very little ad-libbing, actors were used to follow the script closely, a lot of pressure to make the air date; today, there are daily phone calls, actors feel more empowered and change lines, the culture of movie-making has moved to TV, sometimes it is for the better
  • Running out of bullets: FS compares it to Hitchcock’s “Notorious”, where Cary Grant and Claude Rains run out of champagne
  • Mulder’s disappearance: they trimmed individual frames to make it seem sudden
  • The monster was a mix of practical and early CG effects
  • FS wanted M&S alone scene like in Quagmire; they rarely did character continuity, like Scully reflecting on her cancer
  • Originally Scully was to sing Hank Williams’ “I’m so lonesome I could cry” but GA said she can’t sing, the only thing she can sing was “Jeremiah…”
  • They were stuck during script writing on how to get them out of that hole; the solution was team building
  • The timing was down to the second for the ad breaks, they were shaving frames off shots (!); editing was done in a trailer at the end of the Fox lot
  • FS thought DD mispronounced “conquistadors” but he was right
  • They were careful with whose POV they were showing, that final shot with the monster was not Scully’s
  • Ending: there’s still something left, in typical TXF fashion

http://www.wemadethispodcasts.com/podcast/the-x-cast-an-x-files-podcast/episode/the-x-files-30-commentary-track-detour-ft-frank-spotnitz

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