Amazon.com is hosting an online auction of props from The X-Files to benefit the Variety Club of British Columbia, a children's charity. The props--including Fox Mulder's desk nameplate, a package of the Cigarette Smoking Man's Morleys and costumes worn by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson--is being conducted by Legends in Time, an online dealer.

The auction ends April 6. Other items include Mulder's tie, Scully's blouse, a copy of The Lone Gunman newspaper, the license plate from JFK's assassination car and several "X-Files."


03/29/00

Artists working for several SF&F projects were honored at the First Annual Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards, presented in Hollywood earlier this week. The awards, recognizing outstanding achievement in makeup and hair in 1999 movies and TV, were sponsored by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 706. A partial list of winners follows.

Best Period Makeup, Television (For a Single Episode of a Regular Series)

�Cheri Montesanto-Medcalf, Kevin Westmore and LaVerne Basham, "Triangle," The X-Files


03/29/00

David Duchovny's lawyer is denying news reports that the actor has been offered as much as $1 million per episode to reprise his role as FBI Agent Fox Mulder in the hit Fox show The X-Files. "The information contained in a story in [the March 16] Daily Mail of London concerning an offer purportedly made by Fox to David Duchovny for the eighth season of The X-Files is inaccurate and has no basis in fact," said Peter Nelson of Nelson, Guggenheim, Felker & Levine in a statement.

Nelson added, "The source with whom they spoke clearly has no idea what he or she is talking about." Duchovny's contract to play Mulder runs out at the end of the current season.

Meanwhile, Gillian Anderson (FBI Agent Dana Scully) told the New York Times syndicate last week that she is not interested in doing an eighth season of the paranormal show, particularly if Duchovny doesn't return. She added that she doesn't want to appear on Fox's proposed spinoff based on the Lone Gunmen characters. Anderson is contractually bound to play Scully for one more season. The Times syndicate reported that the Lone Gunmen pilot wrapped production last week.


03/29/00

The X-Files star David Duchovny said he probably won't be returning for the show's eighth season, and he's not even sure the series should have had a seventh year, according to EW Online. Duchovny called recent episodes of The X-Files "a little thin" and asked: "Have you seen the show the last two weeks? Man, we should stop."

However, those comments don't include the upcoming episode "Hollywood A.D.," which Duchovny wrote and directed and which features his wife Tea Leoni and his friend Garry Shandling. "Mine happens to be really good," he said jokingly.

But don't look for Duchovny to be back next year. "I honestly can't tell you whether there will be an eighth year, or whether I'll be in it," he said. "There's a very good chance there will be an eighth year and I won't be in it.

Duchovny's lawyer recently denied reports that the actor was offered $1 million per episode to return for an eighth season of The X-Files.


03/29/00
This is a letter to the editor

I disagree with M.C. Abel's Issue No. 151 letter "The Others Characters Are Clich�s," which claimed that Glen Morgan and James Wong managed to become severe handicaps to The X-Files and neatly ran Millennium into cancellation within a year and half. First off, he doesn't mention how they became handicaps to The X-Files (I personally thought they did a great job and wrote some of the best episodes). As for Millennium, that show had low ratings before they even worked on the show. If anything, they enabled the show to stay on another season (and it probably would still be on if they didn't leave).

Ryan Smith [email protected]


03/28/00 This is from George magazine.
Gillian Anderson
Feminist Majority Foundation

Photographed by
Anthony Mandler in Los Angeles
on February 6, 2000.

Gillian Anderson doesn't pretend that she got into the show business to make a difference in anyone's life but her own. "For many years I was so self-focused," she says. But soon after she landed her first job, portraying Dana Scully on The X-Files, "it became clear to me that people can come from nothing and make something of themselves. That was my experience; it was important for me to share that."

She - or, at least, the character she portays - was already inspiring viewers, particularly young girls. Watching Anderson triumph week after week as a hyperconfident FBI woman inspired them to put up Web sites with names like Order of the Blessed St. Scully the Enigmatic (personal note: I've been there. Its good). And they wrote letters of thanks filled with statements such as "You saved my life." The implied responsibility at first overwhelmed her. "Then I realized I have an opportunity." Her fan base, and her own passions, made her a natural match for the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that advocates political, economic, and social equality for women.

Anderson became a spokesperson for FMF in 1996, during its fight against Proposition 209, an anti-affirmative action initiative in California. At rallies she warned of the detrimental effects on women's advancement. Ultimately, 209 passed by a slim margin and is in effect even though it is being challenged in the courts. "It was key to have people like Gillian involved," says FMF national coordinator Katherine Spillar, "because the proponents of 209 didn't want to talk about its impact on women."

Anderson, says Spillar, doesn't say from "tough issues like violence against women's health clinics and gender apartheid in Afghanistan." At 31, she is part of a new generation of young, feminist performers - Sarah Jessica Parker, Tori Amos, and Laura Dern among them - who have taken the reins from '70s icons such as Jane Fonda and Marlo Thomas. Besides her work for feminism, Anderson also raises money to fund research into neurofibromatosis, a disease that grows tumors on nerve tissue. Her younger brother Aaron is battling the disease.

"I'm not much of a public person, and I have mixed feelings about the celebrity aspect of the business I'm in," Anderson says. "The only true benefit is when one can be of service." - A.A.


03/22/00
Go here. No introduction. Just some DD Stuff.


The news dated 03/22/00 is from Scifi Weekly.com
03/22/00

The network with the biggest needs is Fox, where execs are still ducking calls torturing them about Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and staking out space on the highest ledge at the thought of a schedule without The X-Files. Losing Mulder and Scully from Sunday night not only hurts Sunday night, it hurts all those other Fox shows you promo on Sunday night. It's not just a hole in the schedule, but a black hole, sucking other programs down with it.

Which is why Fox is fielding a whole brace of candidates to backstop (and ultimately replace) The X-Files, notably James Cameron's Dark Angel, filming a two-hour pilot with a guaranteed 12 episodes to follow. Now, Cameron certainly knows how to produce a quality SF project on a low budget (Terminator), but I wonder if he can deal with the rigid demands of a television schedule. Is a new episode of Dark Angel going to be rolling off the assembly line every eight working days?

Cameron's television team--director David Nutter and co-writer Chick Eglee--certainly know the drill. Nutter, with his years of experience on The X-Files, is quite familiar with the trick of adding three or more days of second unit production to each episode, essentially cramming 11 days of filming into that "eight-day" schedule. It showed; The X-Files was one of the best-looking and -sounding series on television. Eglee is a talented guy who learned sound habits under Steven Bochco. (We won't talk about the bad habits he might have picked up from Glenn Caron.)

The drawback is that a team like this operating on an X-Files schedule costs a lot of money, far more than any freshman drama is likely to justify. But it's James Cameron. Let's assume that the Fox network and 20th TV will give him at least as much leeway as other outlets gave Steven Spielberg for Amazing Stories and seaQuest.

And, hopefully, with better results.

This is all entirely aside from the concept of Dark Angel. Will 10 million people spark to the adventures of a beautiful young woman who happens to be more than human? Well, I've read the script, which is terrific, and I've seen Jessica Alba, so I'll be watching. At first.

Everything works if it's tried often enough

Fox is also doing Lone Gunmen with the X-Files cadre of Chris Carter, Frank Spotniz, Vince Gilligan and John Sheridan. I personally love the Gunmen and would pay money to see a prime-time series built around three geeks rather than some typical WB hunk or hottie, but I will be very surprised if this works.

Two other X-Files/Millennium alumni, Howard Gordon and Chip Johannsen, are doing Ultraviolet, a soap about vampires, which is a good idea that has been tried in the past without success. (Remember Kindred? No, I didn't think so.) Of course, there is a rule in television development that everything works if it's tried often enough.

Then there's Fearsum, scripted by Gregg Hale and David Goyer, which deals with--well, imagine The X-Files if Mulder were a twentysomething Florida dude investigating a slightly different mix of strange stuff. This music-driven, self-conscious slacker fantasy seems more geared to UPN, especially given Fox's recent re-direction toward broader, family programming, and doesn't seem very fresh. See my comment on Ultraviolet.

Over at the WB, Michael Piller, formerly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is developing (with his son, Shawn) and producing The Last Train, an adaptation of some British concept called Day One. It deals with a group of ordinary (well, maybe not so ordinary) Americans tossed into a bizarre future. What bodes well for this show is Piller's presence, since ST:TNG seemed to come together under his helm, and we all know the WB will promote the heck out of it.

Still, the core idea seems a tad familiar to someone (like me) who remembers Logan's Run and Fantastic Journey (they're in your TV encyclopedia under "obscure failures").

Finally, we have Gorilla World from Todd McFarlane and UPN. Well, we had that. It was supposed to be a twisted version of Planet of the Apes; alas, Todd McFarlane actually said so publicly, which got some lawyers busy strangling the project in its crib.

I don't hate this business. But there are days when I love it more than others.


03/22/00
The X-Files has been nominated for best tv show by the International Horror Guild and it was nominated for both best tv show and best actress by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Awards).


03/19/00
Here is a short interview with James Wong and Glen Morgan who used to work on X-Files and Millennium. They worked together on the new movie Final Destination


03/13/00
STARS COME OUT FOR PUBLICISTS: Publicists do so much for celebrities, it should come as no surprise that a long list of "A-list" people have committed to appear at the 37th Annual Publicists Guild of America Awards in Beverly Hills later this month. Oscar nominees Denzel Washington


The rest of the news from this month has been lost. I'm truly sorry.

to this months news