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DuchovnyNet is a fan run website and is not affiliated with Mr. Duchovny in any way. "The X-Files" TM and © (or copyright) Fox and its related entities. STALKERATZZI
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David Duchovny's Grace Notes
By Paula Vitaris, Cinefantastique Magazine
April 2002
With the broadcast of The Unnatural and Hollywood A.D. The X-Files's DD
revealed himself to be a writer and director of great promise. The
Unnatural, a warm, gently humorous, and ultimately moving story about
baseball and aliens, clearly was the outstanding episode of the sixth
season. In Hollywood AD, Duchovny turned a Hollywood producer loose on
a tantalizing mystery investigated by Mulder and Scully, the the
resulting "movie" is one of the funniest spoofs yet of the show. In the
second season, DD shared story credit with the show's creator and
executive producer CC on two episodes, Colony and Anaszazi (on the
latter he also participated in the plot break-down)Other episodes for
which he received story credit include third season's Avatar and fourth
season's Talitha Cumi.
Several seasons went by before he began thinking about actually
writing a script of his own. "I didn't have the surety, the confidence
in my mind that I could write a teleplay," Duchovny said. "I was 35/35
and I thought I'm never going to get it. I have decent ideas and I'll
just pitch them to the writers. It took me to the sixth year of the
show to actually sit down and write one of my ideas."
Duchovny's first written by credit was shared with CC for the seventh
season ep Amor Fati. By the sixth season DD was ready to write his first
solo script and decided he should direct it too. His episode, The
Unnatural, is about an alien who falls in love with baseball so much
that he will do anything to play the game. Said DD, "The satisfying
thing about it is that I had no help at all. The mentoring was done
through having five years of well structured teleplays to guide me
through. I wouldn't have known the teaser, four act structure- That's
not an intuitive thing to figure out. Above anything else The X-Files is
a really well structured, story telling mechanism. So I had that as my
mentor. It's the most satisfying thing I've ever done.
Duchovny and X-Files executive producer CC both devoted baseball fans,
had wanted to write an episode about baseball for several years, but had
never been able to find the right story. One morning DD was reading the
newspaper- much like Mulder at the beginning of the episode and spotted
an article about a minor-league player named Joe Bauman. In l954
Bauman, a gas station owner who had played for the now defunct Roswell
Rockets in the long forgotten Longhorn League, hit seventy two home runs
and drove in 224 runs for an overall slugging average of 916. He played
in Roswell, New Mexico which I found hysterically funny" the actor said.
So I thought , What if this guy's an alien? He's hitting seventy home
runs and he's an alien. There's my story we've got an alien baseball
player. I told my wife,
Téa Leoni, the idea and the next day I woke up and said to her, "What if
the guy's black and he's an alien and the reason he's black is because
he doesn't want to go to the pros because he doesn't want to be
discovered? After that, it just all fell into place." The alien's race
also dictated the flashback structure of the episode. "Once (alien ball
player Josh Exley) Jesse Martin became black, the story wouldn't make
any sense if it took place after the integration of baseball, because
after integration he would be discovered, whether he wanted to or not,"
Duchovny said. "I liked the sense of loss that is part of the legacy of
black ball players in this country. There were players whose names we
don't know who were every bit as good as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and
all the names we do know." A flashback story also lessened Mulder's
presence in the episode, giving Duchovny time for pre-production and
directing.
The nighttime scene where Mulder instructs Scully on the finer points
of batting is one of the most charming finales in an X-File episode. On
one level, watching Mulder teasing Scully and Scully laughing at their
fun together, is utterly endearing. But there is another level to the
scene, and unspoken subtext: Mulder's desire to communicate to Scully
what he learned from his investigation. The scene also complements
beautifully their scene together at the beginning of the episode's first
act, when Mulder is spending his Saturday researching in the office and
an unhappy Scully brandishing a fat free tofutti cone, longs for weekend
freedom.
Duchovny saw these Mulder and Scully scenes as his opportunity to
write something warm and funny for the two characters. "I was tired of
hearing the conversation between Mulder and Scully where Scully would
say, "Well I'm a scientist. I believe in science and science tells me
this, and then Mulder would say, "Well, I go with my gut. My gut tells
me this." I wanted them to have a conversation in which they are
actually 'in' their dialogue rather than saying who they are, to let
the way they speak say who they are, and to let them inhabit themselves
rather than perching outside themselves.
As a director DD had first cut of the episode, so for the first time
he found himself working in the editing room. His editor for The
Unnatural was Lynne Willingham. "We often start to shoot scripts that
are still in progress, that's just the nature of the schedule," said
Duchovny, "but I had my script far in advance because I was only doing
one, so I was prepared months before and I knew what I needed. Lynn(who began editing while shooting was still in progress) would call
me if I missed anything, so I had the chance to go back and get
something. When you're out there shooting, you really do have an
infinite amount of possibility for where you're going to put the
camera. The great thing about the editing room is that for better or
for worse, once you're in it, you only have the shots you took, and you
have to make it work from that.....It's kind of like growing up. You're
like, Okay, well, fuck, I'm not going to be an astronaut, let's just
learn how to fly a plane.
Duchovny's decision to direct "The Unnatural"
grew out of his occasional frustration with the show's storyline and his
lack of control over his character, something he acknowledged an actor
"has to give up" in a television series. He saw directing as a way of
protecting his script. "Directing is a part of the writing process.
It's the completion of the writing and making sure that your vision gets
carried through all the way. I guess I've been disappointed in the
show's execution. It's a little like music. You can tell somebody this
is how this should be and this is how it goes, and they nod, and you
figure, We're on the same page we're, we're speaking the same language, but
it never works out that way. It doesn't. So you just go, For better or
for worse, I'm going to be the guy that executes it all the way. I'm
not going to leave it up to somebody else. Duchovny admitted that, as a
director, he has his weaknesses, especially in his ability to conceive a
shot visually. "I'm spacially backwards. I have no competence at
all. I can't draw. I can't even conceive on a flat piece of paper in
three dimensions. I wish I could. So I was really nervous going in in
thinking how am I going to move these people through three dimensional
space. I also always feel nervous that I'm not always getting enough
pieces to cut it together. What I do have is a kind of non-linear sense
of how images reveal a story. I guess in The Unnatural it would be the
moment when Exley bleeds red blood and in Hollywood AD it's the final
moment when a piece of plastic makes zombies dance on a sound stage.
When someone would say, This doesn't make any sense. Why is this here?
I would say, "Because." It makes poetic sense, and I think that when you
tell a story visually you're telling it poetically. You're not telling
it like a literal narrative.
Although The Unnatural was his first directing assignment, Duchovny felt
he did not receive any help beyond what is usually given any new
director on the series. "Traditionally, as a sop, TV producers will let
a long time actor on a series direct, but it's letting a monkey paint,
Duchovny laughed. "The idea is, Oh, we've got this mechanism of The
X-Files in place and we won't let you fail, which is encouraging, if
also condescending. When you actually go through it, you realize both
that you can do it, and secondly, that you do need a lot of help. "
Everybody who comes in to direct gets a lot of help, not just dumb
actors who think they can direct".
The Unnatural was an instant hit with X-File fans, some of whom
compared the episode's visual puns and occasionally mocking tone with
episodes by former X-Files writer Darin Morgan. Duchovny claimed that
Morgan, whose work includes Humbug, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose and
War of the Coprophages, wasn't as big an influence as one might think,
although he greatly admires Morgan's work for the show. "Darin comes
much more out of the history of film", said Duchovny. He's seen
everything. I come more out of literature. In that way we're very
different, but I do think we are both kind of hell-bent on subverting he
seriousness of the show."
The tone in Duchovny's second episode as a writer and director,
Hollywood AD, moved away from the pathos and low-key humor of The
Unnatural towards something more outrageous and satirical, creating a
story with a dual focus: a super serious case investigated by Mulder and
Scully; and a satiric look at Hollywood.
Duchovny's original idea for his second directorial turn was to write
a story centering around Assistant Director Skinner. "I'm always
wanting to write Mitch stuff, because I think Mitch is totally under
used," Duchovny said. Initially, the actor considered writing a Midnight
Run type episode for Mulder, Skinner, and two retired FBI agents.
That's where I was heading, and then it turned into Hollywood AD."
Skinner still has several standout moments in Hollywood AD, particularly
when he, Mulder and Scully all end up in a bubble baths in their
respective Hollywood hotel rooms and engage in a three way split screen
phone conversation a la Pillow Talk.
Hollywood AD's fictional producer, Wayne Federman (played by real life
comedian Wayne Federman) appears at first blush to be the stereotypical
film-biz player, slick, fast talking, unable to view the world as
anything but one big movie. Naturally, the super serious Mulder and
Scully wish Federman would go back to where he came from (Mulder asks
Skinner if he's pissed him off "in a way that's more than normal" to
merit Federman's presence), but they eventually realize that words of
wisdom may emerge even from the mouths of Hollywood habitués, especially
when Federman paradoxically states that Mulder is crazy for believing
what he believes and Scully is crazy for not believing what Mulder
believes. "The idea was Hollywood satire, but that's too easy,"
Duchovny said. "There are a lot of philistines out here, but there are
a lot of smart philistines here...That's what makes Hollywood a crazy
town."
Duchovny added that he took pride in "throwing the case away, because I knew people would want to see the whole story. I like it that it’s so good I'm going to throw it away."
Like "The Unnatural," "Hollywood A.D." ends with Mulder and Scully together, sharing information about what they've witnessed and what it means. Duchovny felt that despite similar structures, each episode's conclusion showed Mulder and Scully in a different light: "They're slightly different in that 'Hollywood A.D.' ends on its own [with the zombie dance] and 'The Unnatural' ends with Mulder and Scully. 'The Unnatural' is more integrated into the frame of the characters in the show. 'Hollywood A.D.' is more of a release and happens behind their backs; they sum up the story in the way they think it was, and then the story sums up itself with the way 'it' is. Mulder and Scully get what they need to get, but they still underestimate the power of Hollywood."
Duchovny had no further plans to write or direct for THE X-FILES. "The great thing about THE X-FILES is that I could cut my teeth on what's about as close to moviemaking as you can get on television.... I don't see myself going into television to try to create characters that could sustain seven years' worth of shows. I'd love to write and direct two hours at a time. I feel that's what I should do with my life."
Article courtesy of Cinefantastique Magazine, transcribed by Marlene.
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