X-Files mythology, TenThirteen Interviews Database, and more

Archive for July, 2025

Jul
09
2025

Mark Snow in memoriam + THE X-FILES: THE UNRELEASED RECORDINGS

Martin “Mark Snow” Fulterman died on July 4 at 78 years old in his home in Connecticut. May he rest in peace and may we remember his work for a long time.

This is one of the big ones. I consider him one of the most important people involved in Ten Thirteen Productions, perhaps the most important after just a small handful of people — Carter, Goodwin — this is the biggest loss for the Ten Thirteen family since Kim Manners in 2009. If there was any remaining doubt, you can be certain that whatever happens to the X-Files brand in the future, it will feel very different from what came before.

Although he was very prolific with plenty of TV shows and TV movies and movie scores, Mark will certainly be remembered for his main themes and scores for The X-Files and Millennium.

Mark Snow’s music gave Carter’s shows a unique identity, instantly recognizable, often copied but unmatched. The music, like the shows’ scripts, balanced the routinely procedural with the philosophical, the horror and unsettling with the ethereal and hopeful. Beautiful piano solos over ever-present synth moods progressively shifted to a dark ambience and harsh percussion. And the music was everywhere — some 20 to 35 minutes of original music for every 43-minute episode, well above all television shows, and with nearly no repetition across almost 300 episodes and two movies. Certainly some specific compositions stand out as notable works, but it was the overall feel that was important, a feel that could transport you in other worlds and lose you there. Snow’s 100% synthesizer music didn’t sound like 1990s synthesizer music, a tribute to his skills as a musician and as a master of his tools.

But this is also a particularly shocking news to me. I listen to him almost every day for the past 30 years. Mostly atonal ambient electronic television soundtracks…there are literally dozens of us, dozens, that listen, no, live with it. It was so much a fixture of daily life that it never occurred to me that Mark would leave us. Apart from submitting a couple of questions to interviews to him I never got to interact with him, I never felt in a hurry. I will continue having Mark part of my daily life.

Some more homages for Mark Snow:

To celebrate Mark’s career, what best than to listen to his compositions? After 1996’s foundational “The Truth and the Light” album, from 2008 to 2020 La-La Land Records released a total of 16 CDs for TXF (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3), 4 for MM, 1 for Fight the Future, 1 for Harsh Realm/The Lone Gunmen, plus 4 for TXF’s revival seasons. Diminishing returns on additional issues and a shrinking market for physical releases meant that La-La Land decided not to release even more music. What we got was amazing. But they were not everything! What we need is…:

THE X-FILES: THE UNRELEASED RECORDINGS

Despite fan requests, a lot of Mark Snow’s music remains unavailable commercially, and unavailable in any other form than from directly recording the sound from the DVDs or BluRays. The best we can do is extract that audio and clean it up with more or less complex tools. Courtesy of Benjamin Cochia, a friend of the website and the man behind TXF Unreleased Score, we are happy to bring you the complete unreleased recordings of Mark Snow’s music for The X-Files.

The tracks that are available in LLL’s records are removed, leaving only the parts that are otherwise unavailable. No copyright infringement is intended whatsoever, this is purely for the enjoyment of fans, and is made available here without profit. If you are a representative of Mark Snow or a copyright holder of The X-Files and wish me to remove any of this music, please contact me by e-mail. Even better, if LLL releases more of this with a clean sound, I’d be more than happy to take this offline!

The unreleased tracks here are just called “unreleased” given that we don’t have access to the full official music sheets that include specific cue names and lengths. I hope that someday we can fill the gaps.

We start with season 1.

  • Total tracks length: 11:06:32
  • Total released tracks length: 2:33:00
  • Total unreleased tracks length: 8:33:32

By episode / total / unreleased:

  • 1X79: Pilot / 27:07 / 18:15
  • 1X01: Deep Throat / 32:21 / 14:10
  • 1X02: Squeeze / 29:55 / 25:22
  • 1X03: Conduit / 26:37 / 16:12
  • 1X04: The Jersey Devil / 29:45 / 23:07
  • 1X05: Shadows / 32:58 / 26:04
  • 1X06: Ghost in the Machine / 33:07 / entirely new
  • 1X07: Ice / 27:47 / 22:00
  • 1X08: Space / 31:18 / 21:21
  • 1X09: Fallen Angel / 28:20 / 22:10
  • 1X10: Eve / 26:45 / 23:00
  • 1X11: Fire / 26:34 / entirely new
  • 1X12: Beyond the Sea / 20:38 / entirely new
  • 1X13: Genderbender / 30:45 / 16:39
  • 1X14: Lazarus / 30:22 / entirely new
  • 1X15: Young at Heart / 26:30 / 16:14
  • 1X16: E.B.E. / 26:11 / 18:10
  • 1X17: Miracle Man / 22:14 / entirely new
  • 1X18: Shapes / 22:09 / entirely new
  • 1X19: Darkness Falls / 23:21 / 15:14
  • 1X20: Tooms / 25:15 / 15:03
  • 1X21: Born Again / 28:50 / 22:20
  • 1X22: Roland / 24:28 / 19:08
  • 1X23: The Erlenmeyer Flask / 31:27 / 23:59

> Mark Snow – The X-Files Complete Recordings (unreleased) season 1 (703 Mb)

Season 2 and beyond to follow soon…

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Jul
04
2025

Vince Gilligan on his X-Files episodes

Here are the highlights from some recent interviews with Vince Gilligan, who really started his career with The X-Files in season 2.

Starting on TXF:

His agent Rhonda Gomez: “she said, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it [TXF] yet. But, actually, I’m related to the fellow who created [the show], related by marriage to his wife. Would you like to meet him the next time you’re out to California on movie business?” ” [Dori Pierson really, really helped Carter’s career!]

“They had a 26 [episode] order for the second season of X-Files, and they didn’t have enough episodes. They were taking any warm body who walked through the door.”

On Soft Light, his first episode:

Inspiration: “The night before [meeting Carter], I was sitting on the sofa in my hotel on Beverly [Boulevard]. I was watching TV, and the lights were off. I was looking at my shadow on the wall, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be creepy if it started moving independently of me?” […] in the original version, this [shadow] was alive and it moved separately.”

Rewrites of the initial script: “If it had been produced as it was written, it would have cost somewhere — just for that one hour of TV — between $40 and $50 million.” “It was so big and over the top and insane and unproducible. And [the producers] took it — they said, “Thank you very much” — and then they rewrote, probably, 70%, 80% of it. They were very nice about sending me the script back after it had gone through the rewrite process.”

On Small Potatoes:

“I got to be on the set the whole time up in Vancouver, and I had the best time.”

“he [DD] really liked Darin, and he got to play Darin, essentially.”

On Bad Blood:

“I got to be on the set the whole time and I enjoyed it thoroughly.”

“Some of my favorite dialogue in “Bad Blood” is stuff I didn’t write. My favorite scene in “Bad Blood” is when David Duchovny and Luke Wilson were sitting in the cop car out by the cemetery and they just start riffing. Luke Wilson’s character is saying, “So the guy you’re looking for is kind of like Rain Man?” And David says, “No, not really.” And Luke goes, “Well that ol’ boy could count all those toothpicks.” All that dialogue in that sequence there, it was just David and Luke who came up with that. It makes me laugh so hard. I didn’t write a word of that.”

On X-Cops:

“I think it was one of their [DD/GA] favorites because that was the shortest shooting time of any episode of The X-Files. The X-Files typically took between 13 and 21 days to shoot an episode. But “X-Cops” was shot on video, and it was done in these long oners. That episode was shot in five or six days.”

“It was a big deal, for instance, as I recall, to shoot it on video, instead of shooting it on the normal 35mm Kodak stock that we shot the show on.”

“we shot with Bertram van Munster, who was a producer on Cops at the time […] He was one of their lead camera operators; he’d be the guy riding around with this big camcorder on his shoulder, riding around the back of these squad cars on Cops. He photographed a fair bit of the episode himself”

On writing and the humor in TXF:

“Darin Morgan showed everybody that The X-Files could, indeed, be funny, but I tend to think that Glen Morgan and Jim Wong don’t get enough credit. Really, the first little whiffs of humor, as I recall, were in episodes written by them. They had some killer lines between Mulder and Scully in certain early episodes.”

“I never really got to know either David or Gillian as well as I perhaps might’ve hoped to because they were busy on the set 14, 15 hours a day, and I was busy in my little cubbyhole, writing and rewriting episodes.”

“There was a lot of midnight oil being burned, trying to figure out how to get exposition across [in these episodes] in a way that didn’t seem expositional. One of the many things I learned working on The X-Files for seven years was, how little the audience needs explained to them. It took me years to learn that as a writer, but it was an invaluable lesson. And you don’t learn it just from writing many episodes of TV, you learn it from spending hours and hours in the editing room. You come to realize that there are whole reams of dialogue that you can cut out in an editing room — because the actors are so good.”

Links to the articles:
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-soft-light-interview
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-x-cops-episode
https://www.cracked.com/article_46032_vince-gilligan-on-finding-the-funny-in-the-x-files.html

In his speech accepting a top award at the Writers Guild, Vince Gilligan — creator of iconic shows with anti-heroes like “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” — argued that the ‘bad guys as protagonists’ trend had gone too far, and he urged writers to come up with more shows where the leads are actually good guys. (Hear, hear!) Looking forward to his next show, then.

Introducing that award was Gillian Anderson, with a hilarious intervention (“we did some 7065 episodes in the 9000 years that we were shooting”)!…

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