#fox studios

Theda Bara starred in more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926. In 1937, a fire at Fox Studios destroyed most all of her films (only six survive, as well as a handful of fragments, as of 2020). Her film loss is perhaps the highest percentage of lost work of anybody with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

April 14, 2000: Nevertheless, at press time, Twentieth Century Fox and the actor’s lawyers were still negotiating, and getting a straight answer regarding the particulars - well, even Cancer Man couldn’t crack this. “There is a scenario which would bring me back and it’s up to Fox whether they want to meet it,” says Duchovny. That scenario, he adds, has less to do with money than other issues, but he’d happily “bleed the studio for as much as I could get.”

Duchovny, who currently takes home a relatively low $200,000 per episode (ER’s Noah Wyle gets twice that) as well as a cut of the profits is hardly crying poverty. “I’ve been compensated more than an actor should,” he says. “But in the grand scheme of things, if you look at what the show’s made for Fox [which Duchovny’s lawyer estimates at more than $1 billion in profits so far], and you look at people like myself, Gillian, [directors] Rob Bowman and Kim Manners, and [former producers] Glen Morgan and James Wong - people who were instrumental in the success of the show have not been compensated sufficiently.” Duchovny laughs. “It brings up all those 6-year-old issues - you know, It’s not fair! Like I’m yelling at my mom, ‘It’s just not fair!” [...]

“There will have to be some arrangements made to make the show survivable,” says Anderson, referring to the 70-hour weeks demanded of her and her costar. Duchovny suggests that had X-Files creator Chris Carter developed other regulars into main characters, the pressure on them would be less. “It would have been great if Mitch Pileggi [Assistant Director Skinner] had been made into a third lead.” It might have given the series more longevity, he adds, “but no one’s used well on the show, aside form Gillian and I, and sometimes I don’t think *I’m* used well.” [...]

Carter and his executive producer, Frank Spotnitz, are currently in the impossible position of writing the last episode of the season without knowing if it’s also the final chapter of the series. “It’s very frustrating working this way,” says Carter, who adds that although he’s always known how the series will end, he’s unclear as to how he would handle the show if it continued without Duchovny, especially since he and his lead actor are still eager to do a second movie: “I’ve never imagined The X-Files without him.”

Ditto Anderson, who can’t conceive of the “scenario Carter would have to come up with to make it okay and watchable” without Duchovny. “It’s insane the position we’re in right now,” she says. “We’re about to shoot episode 20 out of 22, which means if this is the last season, we have one or two episodes to wrap up *everything*, which is absurd.” Equally absurd, she says, is the notion that Fox would let the last season of their top drama pass without promoting it: “Which leads me to think they have no intention of ending it.” More personally, she’d miss what she calls healthy closure. “I don’t want to let go of seven years and have one episode to mourn it or be mourning in retrospect.”

Did you know? If you visit the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles, the exterior of Stage 21 features a mural of a very iconic scene…

October 11.