Article: 928 of alt.tv.x-files
From: "The X-Files" News Wire <TheTruthIsNot@Here>
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files
Date: 26 Jan 1994 00:45:22 GMT
Organization: Stanford University

An introductory piece about "The X-Files," focusing on Chris Carter and
the principle actors.


                 Copyright 1993 The Chronicle Publishing Co.  
                          The San Francisco Chronicle

                   SEPTEMBER  5, 1993, SUNDAY, SUNDAY EDITION

SECTION: ;Pg. 5; TV COMMENTARY
LENGTH: 817 words
HEADLINE: Tracking the Paranormal
BYLINE: JOHN STANLEY
BODY:

Strange lights flashing in the night sky, mysterious, alien-like
shapes hulking in an eerie forest, an inexplicable force
disrupting mechanical devices, motorists disappearing for a few
hours and waking up to find their bodies covered with odd
puncturs . . . 

These recurring themes from reported UFO abduction cases have
become the stark, sometimes sinister images for the opening
two-hour episode of a new Fox series that dramatizes paranormal
phenomena, ''The X Files,'' premiering Friday at 9 p.m. on
Channel 2. 

If there is any one word that Chris Carter, the show's producer
and creator, wants to emphasize it's ''scary.'' However, ''I
don't mean scary in the horror-genre sense, but scary in the way
that speculation pushes beyond scientific credibility to enter a
realm of 'extreme possibility.' Films like 'Coma' and 'The
Andromeda Strain' have that quality. It's the idea that shakes up
you and your beliefs, not some hideous Frankenstein monster or a
hand clasping the heroine's shoulder.'' 

Even so, it was the hideous vampire monster in ''The Night
Stalker,'' a highly rated TV-movie of 1973 produced by Dan
Curtis, that gave Carter his inspiration to create a show like
''The X Files.'' ''When I saw 'Stalker,' with Darren McGavin
playing that obsessed newspaperman Carl Kolchak, it really shook
me up to think there might be a twilight world of bloodsucking
creatures. Of course, that's the spectrum of the supernatural.
Today we're all more interested in modern phenomena, which has a
way of really shaking up that segment of our society that's come
to believe in aliens and UFOs.'' 

Carter was having dinner one night with a Yale psychology
professor and researcher. ''When I found out he had been a
consultant on Dan Curtis' 'Intruders,' a 1992 drama about UFO
abductions, he told me that 3 per cent of the public believed in
this syndrome. I ws astounded. I realized there was a topicality
to this theme of the unknown, and 'X Files' grew out of that
fascination.'' 

The series depicts two FBI agents -- poles apart in their
thinking -- on the trail of various unsolved mysteries. In
upcoming episodes, says Carter, they will track ''biological
anomalies, chemical anomalies, twists on genetic engineering and
other fanciful spin-offs from modern technological advances.'' 

Maverick agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a firm believer in
the paranormal, often paranoid in his obsessive search to find
the answers to baffling phenomena. His partner Dana Scully (
Gillian Anderson) , with a degee in medicine and a bent for
seeking answers through scientific logic, is a total skeptic.
Each week they are incompatibly thrown together on a new
assignment, unaware that their chiefs are part of a top-secret
government project using them to further its own clandestine
causes. 

In real life, the actors are just the opposite in their attitudes
about the paranormal. Duchovny, who portrayed the transvestite
detective on ''Twin Peaks'' and whose ''Kalifornia'' is now
playing in movie theaters, has serious doubts about all those UFO
reports.  ''I accept the possibility of life forms in this vast
universe of ours,'' he says, ''but I don't understand why, if
there are aliens, they don't land in Manhattan instead of always
choosing unpopulated areas where maybe three people see them.'' 

Duchovny doesn't believe much in conspiracies, either. ''It's
unlikely any high-level conspiracy could last for long. The sheer
amounts of people keeping the secret would eventually crack open;
somebody's death-bed confession would expose the whole thing.'' 

Anderson, an award-winning off Broadway actress whose film/TV
caeer is just starting, admits that ''I have this tendency to
believe the most outrageous things. After all, this is a large
universe we live in, and UFO stories tend to follow a pattern
that, in my eyes, gives them validity.'' 

She finds the role of Scully a challenge to play. ''She does
everything she can to find a scientific answer to the mysteries,
which becomes difficult after a while, because her constant
exposure to the weirdest things imaginable eventually have an
accumulative effect. Even so, that's when she turns to her
science and physics the most. In a way, she's shielding herself
from the unacceptable.'' 

Carter, whose screen writing career since 1985 has included
several TV movies for Disney, tries to see both sides of each ''X
Files'' enigma. ''One half of me wants to have something set
before me so I can see it with my own eyes. But another side, and
we all have it, wants to take a leap of faith, wants to believe
in wild things. I'd like to be driving one night through the
desert or a lonely forest and suddenly see something that
couldn't possible be happening, but is. Then I would know these
strange things are going on, and I'd finally be a part of it.''
