TIME TUNNEL
Celebrating Yesterday's Fantastic Entertainment
The X-Files

DAVID DUCHOVNY is inextricably bound up with the success of 1990s
television hit THE X-FILES, but when it started the show's
longevity was far from guaranteed . . .

Words: Ian Spelling

Dramatic X-cellence

You may think that THE X-FILES was a big-hitting genre series, but
it was no LOST. Back when it started, no one really cared all that
much about THE X-FILES. The ratings were OK at best, the buzz was
minimal and if the show were to debut today under those same
circumstances it'd be cancelled in a matter of weeks. However, Fox
held steady with its new supernatural series, let it breathe, and
allowed creator/executive producer Chris Carter to work out the
kinks
in his undeniably engrossing premise.

Meanwhile, David Duchovny -- who played FBI Special Agent Fox
"Spooky" Mulder to Gillian Anderson's FBI Special Agent Dana
Scully -- did his thing under the radar, all the while cranking
out such classic first year episodes as THE X-FILES' pilot, "Ice",
"Beyond the Sea" and  "The Erlenmeyer Flask", the last of which
most people regard as  the first bona fide conspiracy hour.

"Back then I was just trying to survive, just trying to educate
myself as an actor, as a working actor, and just trying to get
through that first year, which was a marathon," recalls Duchovny
today, several years after the end of the show. "It was something
I'd never experienced before. I was still trying to figure out
what kind of a performer I could be and trying to get better as an
actor. I didn't really think about the show outside of what my
role within the show was. I kind of left it to Chris and the
writers to figure out what THE X-FILES
was at first, and I just did my job. I really had the blinders on
for the first 25 episodes because we were working 14-, 15-, 16-
hour days and I was just trying to get confident as an actor and
get into the role."

Conspiracy Goes Mainstream

Not too much later, lots of eyes were on THE X-FILES. The ratings
rose -- though the show never actually attained Nielsen
blockbuster status -- and, perhaps more importantly, the
mainstream embraced its cultiness.  All that coincided with
Duchovny, Anderson and Carter finding their  respective strides
and the show itself gaining traction with such
memorable second-season episodes as "The Host", "Duane Barry",
"Humbug" and "Anasazi".

"I think we all got better," Duchovny asserts. "I think the
stories got better, the acting got better and the directing got
better . . . At some point we just reached this critical mass
where it was just a great show and this unstoppable force, where
you put a great show on TV and people will find it. Luckily, we
had that little while to get great. We didn't get cancelled before
we figured out what we were and what
we were doing. Once we did that, there was nothing like it."

Over the years on most long-running television shows, the actors
eventually assume guardianship of their characters. Whereas a
writer and/or writer-producer invents a character, sometimes in
his or her own image, the actor then fills in the fine details.
And several seasons in, they tend to dictate -- sometimes
directly, sometimes indirectly -- the ongoing character
development. "I was always interesting [interested?]
in writing, but early on I didn't so much take guardianship of the
character," says Duchovny, who first received "story by" credits
on the second season episodes "Colony" and "Anasazi".

"Although on a day-to-day basis there were discussions of what to
do, of what was correct for the character, it was never really
contentious. We were all pretty much on the same page that way.
But when I started to write for the show, then I really became
interested in trying to take Mulder into areas that might be
interesting for me as an actor to play and for me as a storyteller
to tell."

Deepening the Mythology

"By the time I was really writing for the show, it was the sixth
and seventh season," he adds, referring to "The Unnatural",
"Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati" and "Hollywood A.D.", all of
which he scripted. "In the early ones my interest was in the
mythology and kind of deepening the context in which the show was
finding itself, so it became like this prism through which you saw
all of American  history or whatever. It was really too ambitious.
I liked opening it up, but when it came time to actually write an
individual episode I felt that by then, by the sixth and seventh
years, what we'd lost  was the idea that the essential character
of Mulder was that he was
a loser . . . He was never publicly right, even though the
audience knew he was right. He never solved a case. He was never
promoted.  He was a laughingstock. I think the difficulty with the
show becoming what it did was I became a star, the show became a
star, and it was  hard to see the guy as a loser anymore. He was
dressing better.  He had a better haircut and all that stuff that
comes with money
and notoriety. The fact was I felt his loser aspect had been lost.
So the couple of times I really tried to make a show I wanted to
getback to the fact that he's a loser, and what comes out of that
is his pathos, humanity and humor. To me that was always the best
part of  the character. I'd rather listen to a loser than a winner
any day tell a story . . . That's what I wanted to get back to."

As season seven played out, Duchovny made it clear he wanted to
move on. He still loved THE X-FILES and was appreciative of all it
had done for him and his career, but he was exhausted -- remember,
they'd also squeezed
in an X-FILES movie. He was also engaged in a lawsuit against Fox
in which he sought a larger share of the show's profits, and he
was eager to ride his success in THE X-FILES to other
opportunities in Hollywood. And so, with the seventh-season
finale, "Requiem", he bowed out.  Sort of. Mulder wasn't killed
off. Instead, he disappeared, setting the stage for season eight -
- with Robert Patrick of T2 fame coming on board as FBI Special
Agent John Doggett -- to focus on the search for Mulder, with
Duchovny popping up for half the season's episodes.
In some shows, he made little more than a cameo, but he factored
mightily in the terrific Mulder-Doggett hour "Vienen", for
example.

"I felt like we'd done everything we said we were going to do when
we started," Duchovny recalls. "Chris and I had always said we
were going to do five years of great television, and we did more
than that. I felt like we were starting to repeat ourselves a
little bit and using certain kinds of gimmicks and conventions to
keep the characters apart or get them together. It was impossible
for that kind of thing not to
happen on a show like THE X-FILES. The fact that the writing was
able to sustain itself for as long as it did is the most
remarkable thing  about the show to me. I'm not insulting the
writers in any way.  They had years and years of great ideas,
ideas that were movie ideas. But for me, as a performer, as a
creative artist or whatever, I was  itching to write and direct
and I was itching to play other roles. Unfortunately the demands
of the show were so all-consuming that
there was no other way."

Closing THE X-FILES

Season nine rolled around and no X-tention was on the cards.
THE X-FILES was pretty much the Scully-Doggett show at that point,
with Annabeth Gish on hand as Doggett's new partner, FBI Special
Agent  Monica Reyes. When it became clear, however, that season
nine would  bring THE X-FILES to a close, Duchovny agreed to
return to the fold.
Almost as a warm-up he wrote [no, he did *not*] and directed
episode 16, "William", and then he stepped in front of the camera
for the Mulder-on-trial finale, "The Truth".

"I hadn't really watched that much of the show," Duchovny says of
the time after he left. "I was never a a fan of the show to watch
it.I loved it, of course. But we made it; we didn't consume it. I
don'tknow what I made of the finale. I can't honestly remember it
as well as I remember other things. It's hard to wrap up a show
that doesn't want to wrap up. There were certain things that had
to be serviced.  I hoped that the finale would help us transition
into a movie franchise
and hopefully we'll do that this year."

Now all those nine seasons of THE X-FILES are out on DVD. Duchovny
pauses for a moment when asked what it's like to see nine years of
his life, nine years of effort, compressed down into nine little
boxes.  "It looks like some kind of alchemy," he replies. "At
least it's something that you can hold and that has a certain
amount of heft. I know the blood, sweat and tears that went into
what you've got in those nine little boxes. It's nice that they're
out, that everybody can see them whenever they want . . . I know
that the whole experience
was bigger than just those nine little boxes."

Back to the Big Screen

Once the show ended, Duchovny moved on, but didn't abandon his
past. He appeared in the Steven Soderbergh film FULL FRONTAL,
shared the screen with Nia Vardalos and Toni Collette in the
comedy CONNIE ANDCARLA, and wrote, directed and stars in the
upcoming coming-of-age drama, HOUSE OF D. Amidst all that he
occasionally gets together with Carter, who lives not far away
from him, exchanges emails with the now London-based Anderson, and
pals around every so often with
old friend Nick Lea, who played Krycek on THE X-FILES. Next on
Duchovny's agenda are a film, TRUST THE MAN, a comedy co-starring
Julianne Moore and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and AREA 51, a video game,
with Marilyn Manson, Powers Booth[e] and Duchovny among the voice
talent. On the personal front, Duchovny and wife Tea Leoni are
still happily married and raising their young daughter, Madelaine.
The long-anticipated second X-FILES movie should finally become a
reality in the very near future. "As far as I know, we're trying
to shoot it next winter," he says. "From what I understand it's
going
to try to hearken back to the earlier episodes, which were more
monster-of-the-week and less concentrated on what came to be known
as the 'mythology' that, for better or for worse, made the people
who loved the show proprietary of that knowledge, but also
alienated certain people who didn't know the show as well and felt
like there was no way they could understand it unless they did
their research. So I think
this will be more of a standalone movie that people will be able
to enjoy without knowing anything about the show. I think that's
the smartway to go with trying to launch this part of THE X-FILES
franchise."