#dean haglund

While the "interactive" is clearly an overused catchphrase in the modern media age, few shows have prompted the sort of emphatic viewer response as The X-Files has in such a relatively short time period. Indeed, as with any cultural phenomenon, fan reaction to the series has become as much a part of The X-Files story as the show itself, from the conventions that have sprung up around the country to the hours of chat about the series whipping around each week on the Internet.

The X-Files launched its own World Wide Web site on June 12, 1995, but fans were becoming involved in the series well before that. Delphi, the on-line service, estimates that 25,000 people go in and out of sessions pertaining to the show on a monthly basis, more than all other Fox series available via the service combined.

At least four regular on-line sessions are scheduled, with a Sunday night David Duchovny Fan Club (one group of female fans held a "virtual birthday party" for the actor on his birthday, including gifts; another group call themselves the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade), a Tuesday discussion of paranormal phenomena, a post-show party each Friday, and another hour discussing the series on Saturday. There's also a less formal but not-to-be-outdone Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade, who by all accounts tend to be a bit more restrained than their feminine counterparts.

The Internet has even prompted fans to forge in-person relationships, with some groups who've met over the 'net actually hanging out together - one of the largest being in the Houston area and calling themselves, naturally, "Tex-Philes."

On top of that, The X-Files conventions have proliferated since the first San Diego gathering was attended by roughly 2,500 people in June 1995. A total of 20 conventions have been scheduled through the end of calendar-year '95, with conservative estimates that 35,000 to 40,000 people will ultimately participate by the time the year's over....

Virtually anything associated with the series has become a collectible, with even the issue of TV Guide that featured the show on the cover commanding a premium on the resale market. Fans can buy T-shirts, caps, still photos, posters, and comic books, all topped off by a snazzy and not-for-the-faint-of-heart (or faint-of-walled) The X-Files jacket. Any way you slice it, the series has become big business.

There's also an official X-Files Fan Club offering wide variety of memorabilia.

EARLY ENGAGEMENT WITH FANS

September 1994: On the set of The X-Files in North Vancouver, Gillian Anderson tilts back in her reclining make-up chair and does what she has perhaps never done before a television camera: laugh. It's a vibrant, burbling giggle that fans of Dana Scully, her sensible-yet-appealing character from the show, may well never hear. I'm hearing it on this July afternoon because I have suggested to her that she is, among fans of her show, a sex symbol. "I'm not a sex symbol," the 26-year-old says, patting her seven-month-pregnant belly. "I'm a reproduction symbol! This is the least sexiest character I've ever played."

How then to explain the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade? The fan club meets on the Internet after every Friday night episode (Fox, 9 p.m.) to share gossip and fantasies about their favourite FBI special agent. With her partner Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), Scully has close encounters with deep-frozen aliens, blood-drained corpses, liver-eating mutants and all the other creepies lurking in the paranoid Zeitgeist of post-Cold War America. Do not, however, expect her to have a close encounter with Mulder. [T]his is one sharp, confident, professional, logical, sensible character who can and does squish her partner's ego with an effortless eyebrow-up zinger. In other words, she's dead sexy.

October 9, 1994: 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.”

January 21, 1995: TS: David Duchovny stars in one of the most talked about TV programs, The X-Files, Friday night on Fox. It was called a cult hit, but when it won a Golden Globe Award for best drama, the cult favorite became a mainstream hit. Before you [referring to Duchovny] came on here, we got nine pages from people who follow The X-Files on the internet. We have the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade, reports on David Duchovny's pets, restaurant habits, personal life, clothes, everything. Do you follow what goes on on the internet?

DD: I'm the main supplier of information for those people, obviously. I follow some of it. They send me flowers, if they know where I am going, and things like that. I'm just flattered by the whole thing. I don't know the intricacies of the information and things like that.

TS: But have you gone on-line with these people?

DD: I did it once, very quickly, but it was kind of like going into a room and everyone saying hello at once, and that was the depth of the conversation. It was just "Hi David," "Hi David," Hi David," and then I had to go and and it was like, "Bye David," "Bye David," "Bye David." So that it ended up in the fact sheet, of course, that David like[s] to say "Hi" and "Bye."

May 1997: There is a joke on the X-Files set that crew members don't have lives, they have The X-Files. Dark humor abounds when you work 16-hour days, 10 months a year in Vancouver, British Columbia. It's tough to tell, however, whether Duchovny and co-star Gillian Anderson find such things funny. Life is different when you're the poster children for the most scrutinized television series in recent memory. "The fans read into the show a whole lot more than we ever intend," says X-Files director and producer Kim Manners. "They take it apart like a coronet."

May 1997: Q: "Have you ever gone on the Internet to see what they're writing about you? Because there are all these David Duchovny chat rooms ..."

DD: "Oh, I know. Recently I was idle in my manager's office, and her assistant took me into one of my chat rooms. Listen to me, 'my chat room.' Anyway, I type in, 'Hi, it's David Duchovny. Does anybody want to talk?' And they just went on with their conversation. So I typed it again: 'Hi, it's David Duchovny.' And they all start typing back: 'Yeah, I'm David Duchovny, too.' 'So am I!'"

Q: "So what is it with all these chat rooms?"

DD: "They bring people together. It's like church. You know, we all go there saying that we're gonna pray to God, but we're actually there to meet people, right? And have a community. I mean, that's why church is great. It's not just faith, it's about community. Like God, I'm unnecessary at this point. They'd hate me if I showed up."

June 11, 1998: MSN START/MSNBC <Elkhorn, Nebraska> What do you think is the most important aspect of the X-Files, what do you want fans of the show to walk away with? and Q: What do you think of all the fan sites on the Internet? Do you ever visit them?

Chris Carter: I want people to be entertained and scared I want it to make it a great intense, hour of television. If they get anything beyond that – if it’s not that we set out to educate people even though the science is very accurate to the point where it’s almost speculative. What we all try to do is to make it a very entertaining show.

David Duchovny: I think our shows been popular on the Internet from the beginning because the cult fan base being science fiction and that somehow entails owning a computer and being on the Internet is something that – makes sense. I don’t personally visit the sites…except for one time but it makes sense.

Gillian Anderson: It seems to fit very well with the nature of the series. A lot of the episodes hint at the broadening of technology and technology taking over in some way or another and the involvement of extra terrestrials and their heightened technology. It seems logical…and I’m not answering your question at all…I think it’s great! ...

MSN START/MSNBC <Seal from Denmark>: To DD and GA: Do you get sick of the fans. Is it a drag sometimes?

David Duchovny: You don’t get sick of the fans. You get sick of talking about yourself. You get sick of yourself and the fans can bring that out in you!

Gillian Anderson: It’s true, after doing the junket…

David Duchovny: The fans bring the worst out of yourself…

Gillian Anderson: That’s a very good point! It entails talking for 9 hours a day about yourself and your participation in the movie ad nauseum. You go home and you just want to beat yourself up a little. It’s horrible makes you just feel sick to your stomach! It’s weird, it’s not healthy it’s not natural <laughs>

David Duchovny: She loves the fans… Gillian Anderson:(laughs).

July 31, 1998: He is equally unmoved by his own popularity. The Internet is regularly clogged with drooling consideration of ‘Spooky’ Mulder’s motivations as protector of difficult truths, while Duchovny’s previous life as butt-exposing bit-parter in a selection of dubiously titled B-movies, including The Copulating Mermaid, has caused much tabloid titillation.

“I’m flattered by the attention, if it means they appreciate what I do, but I think that it would be wrong to really believe that they are as obsessed as they seem,” he says, downplaying insistently. “People like to play at being obsessed with certain things. It’s like kids screaming at the Beatles. After a certain point the kids are screaming because that’s what they want to do.... It really has nothing to do with me or the show.”

FAN LETTERS

January 21, 1994: Not surprisingly, the show receives hundreds of letters from viewers who have an unnatural affinity for it, including many who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

“I got a letter addressed to Fox Mulder from a man who said he had met an alien,” Duchovny said, shaking his head. “It was kind of sad in a way.”

March 19, 1994: Ironically, when it comes to who's actually a believer in the weirdness that Scully and Mulder investigate, Anderson counts herself as more open than her co-star -- the exact opposite of the roles they play on screen.

"I'm much less skeptical in real life than Scully is," said Anderson, busy last week filming a sequel to the episode about the liver-eating (and that's human livers) serial killer. "David's more skeptical. His answer to the letters he gets from believers is usually something about believing in the possibility more than the actual events."

October 28, 1994: “I forget about the importance of our relationship in the show, because the story lines are what drive each episode,” said Anderson, who gave birth to a baby girl, Piper, last month. “But, from what I can tell, from the feedback in the fan mail, there’s a particular dedication that audience members have to this relationship.”

October 1994: EXTRA: Now how do you reconcile being a new mom and a full time actress?

GILLIAN: I don't know, I don't think I have. I think it's just hitting me. I don't know. I'm just doing it and hoping I don't fall flat on my face.

EXTRA: Now have you gotten a lot of gifts or a lot of out-pour of response?

GILLIAN: Oh yeah it's been amazing. It's been amazing. Cards. When people started to find out that I was pregnant I started getting cards wishing me well and wishing me good luck and there was this one card I got from a twelve year old girl who said what... are you having a baby? It was very funny but 99.9% of the cards I got were in support of it and gifts came from everywhere. I got little koala bears and kangaroos from Australia and hand made gifts that people had made across the States it was just fabulous and she has this shelf in her room that's just full of stuff that came from people without faces, just people in support. It was just wonderful.

EXTRA: A lot of gifts with that X-File theme?

GILLIAN: No, not really. Baby theme mostly.

January 1997: FHM: What about fan mail - have you noticed that you've been getting much more stuff through the post?

GILLIAN: Oh... yeah! There used to be a manageable amount and now it's not manageable at all, and we haven't quite figured out how to remedy that. I can't see myself hiring somebody to fake signatures. I'd rather grab at a few when I get the chance and write a note myself.

(Bonus Pileggi-- January 2000: Q: Do you get a lot of fan mail from Australia?

Mitch Pileggi: (laughs) You know, actually I do. I've had some pretty interesting letters from people here- there was this one cheerleader from a soccer team who sent a pretty interesting fan picture. Well, my wife got a hold of it and she said that was the last time that I was going to read any of my fan mail.)

BONUS: TLG AND ALT.TV.XFILES

November 24, 2012: Q: The Lone Gunmen were introduced how early in the first season? DH: We were just supposed to be day players back in an episode called “E.B.E.” which stood for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. And I think it was a way to get Mulder inside a top-secret facility. They needed some guise. And at the time [episode writers] James Wong and Glenn Morgan said they saw these three guys in an airport handing out UFO pamphlets, and they were all very diverse, and they thought that was hilarious. So they created these characters, and it was just going to be a one-off thing. But I think because suddenly realized that the Lone Gunmen were the representation of the online, the early, early online fan gatherings that were happening back then. And they were happening in newsgroups. There was a newsgroup called alt.tv.xfiles.

Q: Aha! DH: Do you remember that?

Q: I not only remember it, that’s where I wrote my reviews back in the day. DH: That was the thing; everybody assumed that [creators] Chris Carter and Frank [Spotnitz] and [writer] Vince [Gilligan] were all lurking on the site. And in fact, they were, because they were so excited that this was the first time writers got a chance to get direct feedback anonymously. Like, you could see the feedback honestly. Because if you go, “I’m Frank, I write the show.”  Then everybody goes, “oh, I love the show,” and it’s hard to get honest feedback of what they [really] think of the show. But if you’re just lurking in the newsgroup, you can see how everybody is complaining about this, or you know, some of the ideas that the fans had back then were very, very passionate and very cogent. So Chris Carter really appreciated that, and [after] putting in the Lone Gunmen, the newsgroup went wild, going, oh, well, this proves it. And for seasons two and three, we would say lines that actually appeared on the newsgroup. So we would take an actual sentence from the newsgroup and give it to the Lone Gunmen to say.

Q: Oh, that’s wild. DH: So we had this great symbiotic relationship with the fans early on, and I don’t think the Lone Gunmen would have been as popular were it not for the Internet and the newsgroups at the time.

CONCLUSION

And there you go.

Thanks for reading~