Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (30 page)

I often regretted that I didn’t negotiate the directing of an episode into my contract. I was about ready to ask for it, feeling ready to do that work, when they killed me off for the second time. Well, maybe I could write an episode. Writing for the show turned out to be almost as weird as the show itself. It started off simply enough: “Hey Frank, what would you think of my writing an episode?” Frank Spotnitz was Chris Carter’s right hand and chief story editor and an all round nice person. He seemed open to the possibility, so over a lunch we kicked around a few ideas. I wanted to focus on CSM and Scully as in seven seasons I still had not done so much as one scene with Gillian. Our looks together in the pilot had been referred to in a few episodes, but the potential had never been exploited. Frank seemed interested in this, so I thought, ‘Oh great,’ and went off and wrote an episode and sent it to Frank. No, no, no, that’s not the way we do it. We have to “board” the episode before you write it. Sorry you went to so much trouble. Oh, by the way, it was fun reading it.

Some elements of that script did make it to the final version of “En Ami” — the road trip with Scully and the fancy office for me that turns out to be a mirage. But others, alas, did not. I guess CSM teaching Scully to water ski was pushing my luck. Or finding we had to stay in a hotel with only one bed. Or having a bed scene with Mimi Rogers as Fowley. What can I say? Still, it was a start on the episode.

My next surprise was when I flew to L.A. to have a meeting with Frank and phoned from the airport to say I had arrived. Oh great, his assistant said, we’ll send a car for you. Turns out she spoke too soon; they don’t send cars for writers, only actors. So now as a lowly writer, I hailed a cab and headed off to my meeting with Frank. It turns out writers don’t write scripts either. Each episode is charted on a large white board by a team of writers and only when everyone is satisfied with the plan is the writer then authorized to write a script. And once that’s done, and the writer has written the script and hands it in, Chris Carter writes a new script loosely based on the one submitted. Well, the good news is the writer still gets credit and the money.

Well, maybe even that’s not true. Chris Carter writes the script when he gets around to it. Meantime, we go ahead and shoot without one, or at least not a complete one. Still, with Rob Bowman agreeing to direct, I was confident the episode was in good hands. I grant that, however convoluted the language, and it usually was, Chris had a better handle on CSM’s voice than I did.

It’s hard to say what is left in the episode of my original idea or even the ideas we developed as a group when we “boarded” the episode. A road trip with CSM and Scully certainly remained. The story as it was finally shot involved CSM luring Scully into taking a trip with him to obtain the secret science that would cure cancer. CSM needed Scully for this, as the scientist would not release the information to anyone else; CSM had arranged for a fake email relationship to develop between Scully and the scientist. As it turns out, the science will not only cure cancer, but will give the possessor power over life and death itself. No wonder it’s a prize CSM would seek. CSM begins by charming Scully — well, as best as CSM can — and winning her conditional trust. But in the course of the trip he genuinely softens towards her; he has, it turns out, lusted after her for years. But then who hasn’t? By the time the science is to be picked up, on a CD, CSM is a changed man, and while he allows the scientist to be killed at the time of the transfer, he kills the assassin who was to have shot Scully. Two odd things happen after that: he gives her the CD with the science on it and throws another CD in the water. It turns out that he has switched Scully’s CD for a blank one. It is the real one that he has thrown in the water.

The director Rob Bowman and I were worried the viewers would not understand why CSM destroyed the CD and Rob had considerable discussion with Chris about this, but Chris insisted the evidence was in the script; CSM had made a conversion and didn’t want anyone to have this power that could, and almost certainly would, be used for evil. Well, I lost count of how many times fans asked me, “Why did you throw the CD in the water?” But Chris, according to Rob, was adamant; no changes in the script were needed.

It’s hard enough to be credited with a script one didn’t really write, but making matters worse, was that Chris was so slow to write it himself. The key scene in the episode is a dinner scene between CSM and Scully. We had arrived at the location and we still did not have a script for the scene. I don’t recall when the pages were finally thrust into our hands, but I think it was after wardrobe and makeup. And then — then — we ran out of time at the location after we shot Gillian’s side of the scene. We had to shoot my coverage days later in a clever set built in the studio to reflect my corner of the restaurant. And then — then — Gillian wasn’t available when we shot the scene. Her stand-in played the scene with me. Although not an actress, the stand-in brought a warmth to the off camera lines that helped me, this being one of the only scenes in the series where CSM shows some humanity.

The final episode of season 7, “Requiem,” well named for a number of reasons, marked the end of CSM on the show — apparently. Aging, sick, wheelchair-bound, CSM mounts a pathetic attempt to restart The Project, only to end up hurled down a flight of stairs, wheelchair and all, by Krycek. Wink, wink, no one really dies on
The X-Files
. Or so they say. Whatever, I was gone until the last episode of the series two years later.

But really the requiem was for David. How does an actor get out of a long running hit series? It’s true, despite the fact that almost every actor in the country wants to be a lead in a long running series, many lead actors want out of their series long before the producers want them to leave. Years ago when I was just starting back into acting I had a small role on the series
Wiseguy
. We had a large group scene to do after lunch, with many actors and extras painstakingly placed by the director and his first assistant. Once in position we waited for nearly two hours before anything happened. Why? One of the lead actors had gone home for lunch and had not yet returned. Why? He wanted out of the show, at least so the rumour went. But getting David out of
The X-Files
was far more spectacular. He willingly — well, he did want out of the show, after all — joins a group of abductees and allows himself to be flown into space in an alien spaceship.

For me, this was death number two on the show. Imagine being in a wheelchair at the top of a set of stairs and knowing that at the end of the scene you will be lying in a heap at the bottom. Fortunately, in the film business, we have these crazy people called stunt performers. I only had to be pushed off two stairs and to fall on to a mattress, worrying enough, I can tell you. The stunt performer, Tom Morga, had to somersault down the whole flight of stairs with a wheelchair crashing on top of him. And perfectionist that he is, director Kim Manners had him do it twice. But he did offer the encouraging words, “Have a good ride.”

My suffering for this episode, and for the finale of the series, would be of a more quiet nature. You might recall I returned to acting when it seemed that not only would there be no curtain call in a film, there would be little or no makeup. How wrong can you be? For this episode and the finale it took roughly three hours to put the makeup on and another hour to get it off. What took the time was the prosthetic on my neck, created so that I would be able to smoke. As a result of a tracheotomy CSM could no longer draw the smoke in through his mouth. Of course, that would also mean that he couldn’t speak, but that would have seriously slowed down the pace of his scenes. So instead he spoke with a funny voice, not an entirely satisfactory solution. But Chris was determined to show the desperation to smoke.

Whether because I was aging or because I was getting a rep as a bad guy, I was to become increasingly familiar with the inside of a makeup trailer despite my earlier aversion to makeup. A prosthetic on my neck was necessary again for my brief role in
Caprica
. My neck had to be sliced open by a sabre, blood spurting in all directions. To do this a tube had to be inserted between my real neck and an artificial neck so that blood could be pumped through as my neck was being cut. Even more debilitating was the makeup for my role as a Prior in
Stargate.
Not only was my face distorted with the use of prosthetics again, but I had to wear contact lenses that in their first iteration almost totally obscured my vision. I had to be led to my mark on the set; I could hardly see at all. Finally, they allowed a slightly larger pinhole in the lens so that I could navigate the furniture at least. In both cases the time in the makeup trailer far exceeded the time spent on set.

Two years later I would return to die for the third time in the two-hour finale of
The
X-Files
series. There would be no mistake about my death this time; rockets were fired from helicopters and I was fried to a crisp. But not before another scene with all the makeup, where I declare that my purpose in life was to see my son — Mulder — broken and destroyed. Well, that wasn’t my backstory before, but as I have said, I learned to be flexible while on this show.

This episode was intended to reveal all the machinations and complications of the underlying story. I’m not sure it didn’t raise more questions than it answered, but the story itself, cobbled together as the series progressed, has as much junk DNA as the human genome, a product of evolution more than intelligent design. Chris Carter was reported to have said once that he was afraid that some day he would get Mulder and Scully into a dangerous situation that he could not get them out of. The genius of the series may have been that free-flowing imaginative thrust, that willingness to stretch beyond a prescribed structure. So maybe they shouldn’t have tried to explain it. Maybe it just seems overly complicated and even pedestrian when it is laid out before us. And maybe that’s why some fans refused to believe the truth even when it was spelled out for them.

But what did Mulder want to believe? He tells Scully in the final scene that he wants to believe that the dead are still with us, that they speak to us, that we are part of something larger. An underlying premise of the series is the exceptionalism of humans. How did we get here, how did life begin? By aliens, it would seem in the fiction of the story, but the assumption behind the fiction, that we as humans are special, that we need a special explanation, is both the spine of the story and the premise that Dawkins might have attacked. To a skeptic like me, it is a false and potentially dangerous assumption.

Did the series give in to pressures from the fans and the actors? I know I wanted to show the human side of CSM, to make him less of a villain. But was that good for the story? Probably not, and certainly Chris Carter fully restored my villainhood by the end. Should Mulder and Scully really have become lovers — of course I’m still not sure if her baby was theirs or an alien — or should the tension have remained unresolved? Should L’il Abner have married Daisy Mae? It was front page news when I was a child, but then who read the comic strip after that? Should Archie marry Veronica?

Looking back at the final episode one is astonished at how the production values had increased from the first season. But why did David seem to be just walking through it, while all the other actors, the ones who had been in the show for the last two seasons, were acting their socks off? And why did Kim Manners, the director, let him do it? Well, no one could say much to David. He does wonderful work in so much of the series, but in this episode he seems to be regretting he agreed to come back.

Gillian clearly grew tremendously as an actor in the nine years she was on the show. Her people skills may never have improved, but her acting surely did. She is quite magical in the later years. And I shouldn’t say that about her people skills. She was quite friendly on the set for the last episode, joking and taking pictures. She demanded of Kim Manners, bless him, that he bend over so that she could get a butt-cleavage shot. It is hard to imagine how they must all have felt to have come to the end of the road.

For me, it was a privilege to have been part of both the show and the experience that went with it. And by the last episode I even managed to make the funny, tracheotomy-shaped voice sound believable. The show did change my life. It improved my acting no doubt, it opened new opportunities, and it was good for my bank balance, though not nearly so much as most people seem to believe.