THE X-FILES: IN THE BEGINNING

With the current release of The X-Files: The Complete Collectors Edition on DVD and the announcement of production on the feature film X-Files 2 for later this year, it seems an appropriate time to look back at the show’s genesis.
   Back at the beginning of the 1990s, Chris Carter was best known for writing comedies for the Walt Disney Company. “If you look at my resume,” says Carter, “you won’t find any clear connection between my previous work and The X-Files.”
   Carter had what he terms a “fairly normal” childhood made up of Little League baseball and surfing. After graduating from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in journalism, he weighed the pros and cons of his two greatest ambitions – being a beach bum and being a writer – and decided to split the difference.
“I went to work for Surfing magazine, which is a big deal – an international magazine,” Carter says. “it was really to postpone my growing up, and those were the best years of my life. I ended up working for them for thirteen years and was listed as senior editor when I was twenty-eight. So I went around the world, surfing, and I got to write. I wrote constantly. I learned how to run a business. It was a wonderful, adventurous time. I did many other things, too, including being a potter.”
   At the suggestion of his wife, Carter “settled down” and began pursuing screenwriting as a vocation. His first efforts were strong enough to attract the attention of then-Disney execute   Jeffrey Katzenberg, who signed him to a multipicture deal. As a result, he wrote the TV movies B.R.A.T. Patrol and Meet the Munceys.
   “When I went to Disney,” Carter explains, “I actually became known as a comedy writer. So that was what people thought of me as: a person who had a certain handle on the voice of contemporary youth and the comedic voice. That’s what people kept wanting me to write. I like that type of writing very much, and I think I can do it. But The X-Files really is more where my heart is: in scary, dramatic, thriller writing.”
   In 1993 Carter was hired by Fox to develop programming. At that point, Carter began to nurture his idea for a series that would tap in to his childhood memories of The Night Stalker and The Twilight Zone.
   “Sometimes the Night Stalker influence is overstated,” Carter explains. “Somebody asked me in  what way it inspired me and I said, ‘I think I remember two scenes from the old show. One where Darren McGavin is confronted by a vampire and is able to drive a stake into his heart, and the other is in an alleyway.’ I just remember being scared out of my wits by that show as a kid, and I realized that there just wasn’t anything scary nowon television. The inspiration is general rather than specific.”
   He also points out a distinction between The X-Files and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone that he feels is too often overlooked. “Rod Serling was telling fables, almost allegorically. You see a lot of that in The X-Files, too, but each of the episodes of The Twilight Zone had a bigger message, a bigger purpose, and that was to illuminate something about the human comedy. We don’t set out to do that; we don’t set out to be instructive – there’s no message behind each X-Files episode. Although there is something you can take from it, we’re not teaching.”

Beyond the influence of The Night Stalker and The Twilight Zone, The X-Files began to take solid form in Carter’s mind thanks to an old friend who was familiar with the work of Dr. John Mack of Harvard. “Mack , who has become famous in UFO circles, surveyed a big cross-section of American citizens and found that three percent of Americans believe they’ve actually been abducted by UFOs,” Carter says. “That means if there are one hundred people in a room, three of them have actually been abducted, or believe they have. And this psychologist friend of mind, whose specialization is schizophrenia, told me – and this is a sane, credible, believable person – he’s looked into people’s eyes and he’s seen, whether it be multiple personalities or the schizophrenic himself, what he feels is not human. So he believes in the alien abduction syndrome, or in alien abduction. I thought that was a great leaping-off point for the series.”
   But this was going to be somewhat different from the typical alien premise. Carter decided to ground the show in reality by offering a counterpoint to the mysterious paranormal happenings: that is, Scully’s scientific skepticism. Mulder, who believes his sister was abducted by extraterrestrials, is obsessed with proving the existence of ET’s. But Scully [played by Gillian Anderson], originally assigned to partner with Mulder [David Duchovny] to debunk his theories, finds more prosaic explanations for the cases they encounter.
   As originally conceived, the show wasn’t so much The Night Stalker as it was The Avengers. “I loved that show,” Carter says of the ‘60s series starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg (among other female partners to Macnee’s Steed). “I loved that relationship between Steed and Emma Peel, the intensity of the stories. It’s the way I sort of instinctively write, so that has also fed in to my ultimate concept of the show. The character of Mulder came first, because he was the key to the series in that he was the person who wanted to believe. You need that before you can move ahead.  Then Scully as his opposite. It’s the nature of any interesting relationship. When someone forces you to justify what you believe in, you take that person more seriously and, in turn, that person really turns you into a better, clearer thinker, which is what Scully does for Mulder. I always felt that the show was from Scully’s point of view. We would cut to her reaction to what Mulder was saying. She was the one who would pull Mulder back and say, ‘Look what you’re doing ; look what you’re saying.’”
Creating credibility was the chief mandate from the start. “To make the show convincing, you do have to make it believable,” he muses, “so I set out to do just that. Credible, believable characters and credible, believable situations dealing with incredible and unexplainable phenomena. I did as much research as I could through the FBI, and they were rather reluctant then. It was a limited resource. But I did research on all the things that I was writing about – aliens, UFOs and the FBI – just by reading about them.”
   Carter believes that the show’s early phenomenal  success had as much to do with viewers’ fascination with UFOs as it did with the creativity of the show itself.
   “The idea that there are visitors to the planet, that they are not only visiting now but have been visiting since prehistory, and how it affects us is a very interesting idea,” he suggests. “I suppose just looking up into the night sky at all those millions of stars up there, you wonder if it’s possible. I have a pet theory that everyone wants to have that experience where they’re driving through the desert at night and they see something and can’t explain what it is. I think it’s all about religion, but it’s about beliefs – and meaning and truth and why are we here and who’s lying to us. It’s religion with a lowercase ‘r.’ Encountering a UFO would be like witnessing a miracle.”
   The true miracle was that the show got on the air at all, given the skepticism that the Fox network had for the concept. But it did and it quickly began to soar, the credit for which Carter has always shared with the show’s cast and crew.
   “My feeling is that most things fail in this business, and the powers that be always proceed as if what you’re going to do is going to fail; they’re always hedging,” closes Carter. “So we went boldly forward and showed them we knew what we were doing, what kind of stories we were telling, that we could tell them well. I think that boldness translated into a winning team. I’m sounding like a coach now, but in many ways it is like putting together a good team of people. And this is the best team you could hope for.”
   And the truth is out there – on DVD, in the form of The X-Files: The Complete Collectors Edition.

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[hollister uk]

I went to work for Surfing magazine, which is a big deal – an international magazine,” Carter says. “it was really to postpone my growing up, and those were the best years of my life.