CREEPY, SMART "X-FILES" INSPIRES A CULT FOLLOWING

By Steve Pond
Entertainment News Services

(Transcriber's Note: Source is the Sacramento Bee, from Northern
California, USA.)

This must be it. Monday morning. Los Angeles. The 20th Century Fox
lot. A little bungalow in the corner. Unmarked, hard to find. One
of the writers here is leaving for the day: A mysterious computer
virus has invaded his machine, nobody can track it down. A casting
director enters. Says one of his two dogs inexplicably disappeared
from his locked house over the week-end, then reappeared at the
back door 36 hours later.

Yeah, it makes sense that this is where they put together "The
X-Files". The Friday night show is Fox TV's underhyped successor
to "The Outer Limits," "Kolchak:The Night Stalker," "Twin Peaks."
Strange things happen in the Northwest woods, in the Nevada
desert, in government corridors. Two FBI agents poke around. One of
them, Fox "Spooky" Mulder, believes in the paranormal, expects to
find an alien in every clost; the other, Dana Scully, thinks
Mulder's nuts and looks for scientific explanation.

This is not normal TV: Most of its episodes end in uncertainty,
with Mulder and Scully-and us, for that matter- learning little but
falling far short of the big picture. Also, the show has broken
the primetime rule that says any two attractive but antagonistic
co-workers are thrown together, sexual tensions will rise, they'll
sleep together, and the show will go down the tubes.

As usual for Fox shows, the ratings haven't been great, but a
focal, demographically desirable group of mostly 18-to-49-year-old
males (Note: ???) helped the series overcome a slow start.

"I think we might have been overlooked at first," says Chris
Carter, the show's creator and co-executive producer. "People are
always looking for that big, explosive hit, but not a lot of
people watched us at the beginning. And people don't always take
Fox seriously. It's been the network of "Married...With Children,"
"Studs," and "90210," and people have had to change their mind-set
to accept something like "The X-Files"."

Among those who had to change were the actors. Anderson, 26, began
acting off-Broadway, then moved to Los Angeles- "swearing," she
says, "that I would never audition for a TV show." She laughs.
"But being out of work for a year changes your mind."

For his part, Duchovny, 34, whose resume include "Chaplin," "The
Rapture," "Twin Peaks" and Showtime's "Red Shoe Diaries" (not to
mention a stint as a Yale grad student), read "The X-Files" pilot,
liked its combination of humor and macabre drama and say it as "a
good one-hour movie and maybe a few episodes." Later, he realized
that it might have more staying power than that. "I thought it was
just a show about extraterrestrials," he admits. "But once it
opened up into the area of anything paranormal, I could see that
it need not ever die."

Indeed, the series has inspired a "Star Trek"-like cult. Devotees
of the show flock to computer bulletin boards on such services as
America Online and Prodigy, where these self-named "X-Philes"
create detailed character backgrounds, compile arcane,
astonishingly detailed fact sheets, speculate on a Mulder-Scully
romance (about which the consensus seems to be a resounding NO, as
long as neither of them gets involved with anyone else), and just
voice their opinions: "Mutants OK, but NO vampires on "X-Files",
please. Especially if they're played by Tom Cruise."

"The X-Files" folks are well aware of this: Carter used to read up
to 70 pages of downloaded fan comments each night, while in a
recent on-line forum co-executive producer Glen Morgan said certain
shows had been tailored to please the modem squad. 

And while the actors aren't quite so computer literate, they are
aware of the attention. "I've been told that on one of the
computer services there's something called the Gillian Anderson
Testosterone Brigade," says Anderson with a laugh. "That just
tickles me."

This season, Anderson would like the characters to become more
emotionally involved in their cases, though she knows that the
show needs to maintain a certain degree of detachment. (As does
she: "This is pretty gruesome stuff that we deal with, and I have
to underplay it so that I don't have nightmares.") Duchovny wants
to add more humor, and Carter just wants to deal gracefully with
Anderson's maternity leave (she's married to an art director). For
now, Mulder will have a new partner.

Carter is also trying to handle the demands of a show whose cult
seems to be expanding. "The tone of this show is subdued and
subtle," Carter says, "and I never expected fan clubs and T-shirts
and all of that. I think the show should remain dark and cultish."
He grins. "Everyone should *watch* it, of course, but it should be
still dark and cultish."

SOURCE: Sacramento Bee, Sunday, October 9, 1994 
--
Riza Aziz      ez002728@chip.ucdavis.edu
* X-Files      |"The truth is out there, but it's never been more
* Trek:TNG/DS9 | dangerous. The man we both knew paid for that 
* Windows      | information with his life." 

