Adventures With The X-Files
My secret origin story as a screenwriter: The Truth is Right Here
Thank you!
First off… thanks for the lovely response to my first non-Skaana Substack. I was delighted by how many people signed up and kind of shocked and thrilled that several of you signed on to encourage me to keep doing this! Because this is The X-Files 30th anniversary I thought I’d share some of my adventures with The X-Files.
In the media
A few weeks ago I was invited to give a talk at my local synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El I billed as Moses from Krypton: The Not-So Secret Jewish Origins of Superheroes. Sam Margolis wrote a super piece about it for The Jewish Independent: https://www.jewishindependent.ca/jews-and-superheroes/ Yeah, I should probably at least turn this into an article since it turned into a 75 minute lecture…
And my plat Bar Mitzvah Boy received a lovely mention in America’s Jewish Exponent by David Winitsky. In Theater, There’s More to the Jewish Story Than Antisemitism and the Holocaust
And I discovered that when you write a book about sharks the media calls you for Shark Week. I’ll share more about this over at Skaana, but this is really a terrific story about my book, Sharks Forever and how I started sharing shark stories. Saanich author dispels myths about sharks in new book: Bite-sized facts help Mark Leiren-Young share knowledge from countless researchers
And a great review of both of my new shark books from The Hakai - Twelve New Kids’ Beach Reads to Inspire Action and Adventure
I also did shark interviews with CBC Radio and CHEK TV - and I’ll share those next week if they’re posted.
The MLY Files
Thirty years ago The X-Files started filming in Vancouver and changed my life… The show launched my TV writing career, landed me an ongoing gig writing for The Hollywood Reporter and derailed my first feature film. So this seemed like a fun way to kick off my personal Substack. If you’re looking for the latest on orcas, sharks, octopus and why Deep Sea Mining is a very bad idea and sending Lolita/Tokitae home is a very good one… please visit the Substack for Skaana. And now let’s visit Mainframe - the Vancouver-based company that was creating the first CGI animated series at the same time Pixar was launching Toy Story on the big-screen.
When I received the tour of the Mainframe office back in 1995, it seemed like everyone already knew me. Strangers kept greeting me with: “You’re The X-Files writer!”
I wasn’t an X-Files writer or a TV writer and certainly not an animation writer. I was a playwright, journalist and comedian.
I was almost a screenwriter too - but The X-Files had kiboshed that particular ambition. I’d just written and sold my first screenplay and the producer was set to make it as soon as he finished what he knew would be a brief gig. He’d been hired to work on a new FOX series that was being shot in Vancouver - in part because it was the show they expected was going to fail, so they weren’t putting much money into it.
My producer told me that FOX was betting big on another show and it wasn’t his. High concept. Fantasy. And a big star with a bigger chin. You all remember Bruce Campbell’s Brisco County Junior right? Anyone? Bueller?
Yep, my poor would-be movie producer was working on a show that he figured was too smart to catch on and was unlikely to last the season… The X-Files.
Spoiler alert. It did. And that script of mine he’d optioned… he never did find the time to make it.
So let’s cut back to my entrance to the Mainframe offices in downtown Vancouver.
A few nights earlier I’d been on-stage doing my comedy act in a Vancouver theatre and one of the audience members, Helen DuToit, thought I was funny. Helen worked for Mainframe and told our mutual friend, Joan Watterson, ReBoot could use a funny writer and asked if I’d ever written for kids.
Here’s the Spotify link for some of the tunes from my comedy duo, Local Anxiety, that landed me the job interview to write for ReBoot. I think the image on the album cover was our poster art for the show that landed me the job interview…
Fortunately for me, Joan was the only person in the packed theatre who knew the answer was yes. I’d written plays for kids.
Helen asked if Joan to ask me if I had any writing samples.
Fortunately, I had an agent who’d urged me to try my hand at writing TV so I could afford a car one day. So I wrote a “spec script.”
A spec script is a fake episode of a real show that writers do to prove they have what it takes to write television. These episodes are never shared with anyone working on the show being specced because lawyers ruin everything.
I thought this was a waste of my time, but I was friends with a lot of people working on The X-Files and asked if they could send me scripts so I could see what a TV script looked like. Remember, this is pre-internet so getting ahold of a TV script - any TV script - wasn’t easy.
I studied the scripts (especially Chris Carter’s Duane Barry) wrote my own episode of The X-Files and I don’t think anyone other than my agent had seen it when Helen asked for a “TV sample.”
The next thing I knew I was being asked if I could write an X-Files parody episode of ReBoot because…
X-Files star, Gillian Anderson, was married to someone who worked for Mainframe, so they knew she’d at least read a script.
She not only read it, but agreed to voice her ReBoot avatar Data Nully.
When David Duchovny declined to play, I suggested Mainframe audition one of my oldest friends from high school — an actor I used to write everything for — Scott McNeil.
I’d written a few plays for Scott. I wrote a book about one of the plays I wrote for Scott —Free Magic Secrets Revealed.
Scott scored the gig and not only played Fax Modem in my episode, he also appeared as a roller-skating binome working at Al’s Diner and became a fixture at Mainframe.
My first outline for my episode was absurdly ambitious and didn’t just include CGI special agents, Data Nully and Fax Modem, but Special Agent Spinner and the mysterious Smoking Can.
The Smoking Can had to go because not only would the dreaded censors at ABCKids balk at the idea but, at that time, smoke was impossible in CGI. I assume Spinner was cut for time and cost because it took time and money to build new characters.
The gig was a blast and my main contact and story editor was Susan Turner, the unsung hero of Team ReBoot.
I was allowed to watch the local actors record their roles — which was, well, alphanumeric — but didn’t get to attend Anderson’s recording session because everyone wanted to go and freelancers don’t get dibs on such things.
Years later, I interviewed Anderson on-set for The Hollywood Reporter - a gig I landed because I was set to do a story on the series for Vancouver’s TV Week Magazine. She was shooting The X-Files season three episode, DPO, just outside an arcade in North Vancouver. Jack Black was guest-starring before he was THE Jack Black. So was Giovanni Ribisi.
I got to sing her Happy Birthday on set (it was her 27th) and told her I thought Mulder’s relationship with aliens reminded me of Big Bird’s with the Snuffleupagus and Scully always went AWOL just before Snuffy appeared.
Anderson laughed, and I didn’t push my luck by telling her I’d written her cameo on ReBoot.
I did finally get to write for The Smoking Can, or at least William B. Davis (aka Cancer Man). He was a guest host for the CBC TV variety series, Terminal City and I wrote a monologue where he took credit for every Canadian conspiracy including the FLQ crisis and several key Stanley Cup losses.
I was ordered to change the monologue because the show’s producers didn’t think anyone would get the jokes, because Canadian audiences wouldn’t know who this X-Files character was. I suspect I came close to being fired when I argued that he was by far the most famous guest the show had ever had and audiences were likely far more familiar with his character than pretty much any character on any show that was currently airing on CBC.
Instead, I came up with a list of Canada’s unsolved cases like… “If a tree falls in a forest will Greenpeace hold a press conference? If you play a Tragically Hip CD backwards will you be able to understand the lyrics?” And, my fave, “If Bruce Cockburn had a rocket launcher — which son of a bitch would die?” That joke didn’t make it on the air either.
Everyone knew my ReBoot/X-Files episode was going to be fun, but no one expected my TV debut would score a story in Entertainment Weekly and a rave review in the New York Daily News that actually mentioned I wrote it.
Who knew TV was so glam?
As I was working on my ReBoot parody episode I was asked to turn it into a two-parter and script the season finale.
And that led to writing about 100 animated scripts and a career in TV - though that original screenplay… an adaptation of my first “hit” stage play, Blueprints from Space… still unproduced.
