Bruce Bryant and Carol Johnsen were two of the three designers of the opening credits sequence of The X-Files. They were married since 1985 and both died within a few months of each other, in December and April.
Together with Jim Castle, they formed the company Castle/Bryant/Johnsen in 1987, which designed, produced and directed opening titles for hundreds of shows, such as Cheers, Frasier or The X-Files. In 1997 the trio continued as a duo, as Bryant/Johnsen Media Design. (Dates from Fandom.com)
They had little online presence. The photos of them I could gather are from their obituaries, obviously from very different time periods. There’s nothing I can find about Jim Castle, either. Their professional website is accessible via archive.org.
In 2013 they did an interview for Empire, where they shed light on a lot of the details behind the opening credits of our favourite series — for which they received an Emmy Award. They appear several times in the credits! That’s Carol in that photo pointing to a UFO, and also as the figure falling into the hand, and that’s her eye at the end. Carol signed Scully’s badge and Jim Mulder’s. That’s Bruce as a ghost behind “Government denies knowledge”.
“We had a deadline of maybe a couple of months until the airdate.” “Chris Carter had already designed the logo itself. So he gave us “The X-Files” in that typeface. Midway into the project, we were given Mark Snow’s theme tune. When we’re working on a project, we do like to have the music.” “It helps us to create the cuts, the mood, the timing. Everything.” “We’re enormously proud of our work on The X-Files. It won the show its very first Emmy.”
These opening credits are instantly recognizable and were definitely part of the show’s success in the 90s. As time passes, we continue to acknowledge, remember and cherish the people behind the scenes that contributed in making this show, especially those that are not as well-known at large.
Another loss in the Ten Thirteen family — editor Chris Willingham passed away aged 74. He had worked on all four of Ten Thirteen’s shows, most importantly in all thee of Millennium‘s seasons (16 episodes, among them Lamentation). He also worked on The X-Files (7 episodes during season 8, including This Is Not Happening), Harsh Realm (2 episodes) and The Lone Gunmen (pilot).
He also worked on productions led by Ten Thirteen alumni (Morgan & Wong’s Space: Above and Beyond, Howard Gordon’s 24, for which he won several Emmy awards).
He is survived by his wife Lynne, also an editor, also worked on The X-Files (36 episodes over seasons 5 to 9, nominated for an Emmy for The Post-Modern Prometheus). They are pictured above with their Emmys, from an interview with them at the TCA website!
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.
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.
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.”
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”)!…
It’s The X-Files: “Fight The Future” Day! The movie premiered…27 years ago already. On that topic, here is an excellent and comprehensive interview with one person that was important in the making of that movie but that we had never heard of previously: storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman, who has had a very full career since! Courtesy of the “Hey Danny It’s Mulder” podcast.
Some notes and highlights:
He did pencilling for comic books. He started doing storyboards when the comic book industry contracted in the mid-1990s. As a huge “Twin Peaks” fan, he went to a book signing with Mark Frost; in the line, he met a guy, they almost collaborated in doing a CD-ROM of what would have been season 3 of “Twin Peaks” [wow TP fans are just as dedicated as TXF fans!]; he introduced him to who became his agent, and got him his X-Files job. He was just 22 years old, it was the first big movie he worked on. The recommendations he got from working on FTF were what got his career going.
In a bungalow in the Fox lot that became Carter & Bowman’s office for the whole shoot, he came in to read the script for what was then called “Blackwood“, it was printed on red paper. He was essentially the first person recruited, and was present for all the shooting until the very last day (not just for pre-production). Robb Bihun was the other storyboard artist.
He draws visual storyboards, including camera cues, lenses, movement of camera, the frame… He submits an idea to the director, who gives notes, he refines it, does another pass… The storyboards were updated as various design decisions were being made. Nobody could come up with a good design for the big ship at the end; production designer Chris Nowak told him to give it a shot, this is the drawing that is in the making of book. He learned a lot from director Rob Bowman, practical things about filmmaking, visual storytelling tricks and ideas, how to design shots interestingly and economically.
He had a good collaboration with director of photography Ward Russell — but it can be that there can be tension between storyboard artist and DP. The DP was who said it was OK for him to direct the second unit. [This was great that he was given this opportunity!] What he shot was with a helicopter, driving the car in the desert, coming to a stop on a crossroads — the shots without the actors.
He got along well with producer Dan Sackheim — stories about Dan having trouble unboarding a helicopter, and about Dan being stung by a bee! He flew to the glacier for location scouting. Going on location makes it specific, allows to adjust the storyboards. Shooting the hives scenes: they needed a wide lens to show the big space, but it was impossible to capture the small bees at the same time. The bees ended up being computer generated, the shooting was complicated by the bees that ended up not being needed.
Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was a big visual influence: the shot of Mulder & Scully in the desert, pull out to reveal a road barricade; or the shot with kids going over a berm, revealing the secret base. There was going to be a car chase à la “French Connection” (Mulder after the ambulance that got Scully, instead of being shot in the head). The script specifically said “the car chase of Rob Bowman’s dreams”. But it got cut as there was too much in the movie already.
He still has the boards. They were pen & ink and grey marker on paper. The criterion was whether it could be photocopied and faxed well. For references for likenesses he only had some magazines and production photos — no internet, no computers.
About Carter: Carter stayed in a producer role, he didn’t get in Bowman’s way. Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” had just come out, and Carter was not thrilled, he thought Sagan got bitter at the end — it turns out 30 years later Sagan was correct. [That magnificent 1995 book about tending the fragile flame of scientific thought against lack of education and superstition came out shortly before Sagan died in 1996.]
Gabriel’s storyboards, in sequence, were included in the Blu Ray for the movie, the whole thing lasts for an hour and it’s like a mini-movie previsualisation itself! The intermediate level between script and what became the image that was captured by the camera.
Recently, the Millennium Group Sessions Redux podcast released two interviews that were conducted for the 25th anniversary of Millennium, which was in October 2021, so these are not quite recent intervews but they are newly released nevertheless. They make for some very interesting listening, Carter being his typical tight-lipped self and Spotnitz very well articulated.
If there’s one thing I’d highlight here is that Carter not only has (had?) high hopes for a Millennium revival, but that he has given thought to where the characters are and what the setting is, which…1) I want to know all about this! But also 2) How incredibly optimistic! Given how much time has passed, given how the XF revival was received, and given Frank Black’s age. I suppose it’s still possible with Jordan as the lead character, or as a complete reboot with a recast, but it’s quite a stretch.
Below, important quotes (made easy with automatically generated episode transcripts) [and my comments]:
Chris Carter
“[MM] actually maintained what I would call a solid audience through its three years. I think the show could have gone on, and for reasons that I regret, the show did not, but we had very solid ratings that could have carried us on.”
[On the 3 seasons] “I think of it as three different shows. I think of it as the first season. I think of it as the second season, when I had to step away. And I think of it as the third season, when we had to really respond to and answer to the second season, which was a departure. So I think the show benefited from that infusion of energy, and I think that, as I say, the fourth year and beyond would have been a very interesting continuation of something that I think still held a lot of promise and energy.” [Since this interview he has opened up that it was his call to cancel MM. We will be left wondering.]
[On handing over s2 to Morgan & Wong] “I don’t remember exactly what the hand-off constituted or what constituted a hand-off, but I know they had very strong feelings about the show, the characters, the relationships, and the storytelling.”
[IWTB and the rumour at the time that Frank Black would appear in it] “It’s funny, it has a Millennium theme to it, certainly a storytelling. The second movie was inspired by something that actually took place, and I met with a doctor in Cleveland at Case Western University who had actually conducted a head transplant on a chimp, and so that was kind of the inspiration. I don’t remember if Frank Black was going to appear in the movie or not, I’m not sure now looking back, he might have appeared in the movie. That said, I always look for any opportunity to feature Lance.” [He can’t recall for something as HUGE as Frank Black’s return? This is hard to believe.]
“You try to be an audience pleaser always, but you try to make sure that you are following your own instincts. Shows can be I think directed and misdirected by audience feedback. Looking at The X-Files, while we heard our audience, we were always true to the characters and the situations and the mythology, and I think the same could be said for Millennium.” [Completely agreed on both directed and misdirected by the audience.]
[Whether Peter Watts is actually dead or not?] “I actually can’t answer that question. It’s funny that in the season finale of the last reboot of The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi’s leg was the last thing you saw. So I think those are wonderful coincidences.”
[MM on streaming or Blu-Ray?] “I hope so, and I think so. I don’t know that it’ll come out on Blu Ray, which seems to be somewhat of a dying thing, but I think that it ultimately will find its way onto some platform, probably Hulu, which is owned by Disney/Fox.” [Still waiting.]
[TXF s10-11] “there’s a trick, and the trick is being respectful of the original fans, the fan base, people who have held the torch, but at the same time wanting to attract and entertain a new audience. With The X-Files that was the trick, we were responsible and receptive to fans’ desires to see the mythology and the stories within that mythology be continued, but at the same time we had to be mindful that we had a whole new audience.” [Nice insight — but whether he followed his own advice for the XF revival is up for debate.]
[A MM revival?] “If the show came back, I have some strong ideas about the direction of the show, the relationships, the characters, the situations, the circumstances, all those things are I think are have been on my mind.” [In typical Carter fashion, he doesn’t give us more — but it’s incredible that he has given it this much thought, he really thought there was a big chance for this to happen. Is this why he can’t answer whether Peter Watts is dead or not? It’s been 25 years! I think the boat has sailed, especially 4 years later after this interview. I hope he does open up eventually and will share these ideas with us.]
“Glen Morgan told me he had a meeting with some executives at a studio, I think it may have been Warner Brothers, and one of the executives says, if he had a show to bring back, it would be Millennium. Unfortunately Warner Brothers does not own the title, and so while that is always music to my ears it’s the wrong studio. That was recently.” [That’s impressive!]
[On continuing TXF without Gillian Anderson, possibly partnering Mulder and Frank Black in an episode] “I think that would be pretty cool. Actually, it’d be great crossover.” [That would have been very cool indeed.]
[On the TXF: Albuquerque animated show project] “I can tell you that, as it stands, that series is on the shelf, and for a variety of reasons I don’t think you’ll see it anytime soon, if you see it at all.”
[On what he’d do different in a MM revival] “You look at television now and people roll out 10-episode series, and we did 22 episodes a season roughly. […] I think I would look forward to doing a shorter run of the show and being able to write all the scripts before you ever went into production. […] It would be great to have the luxury of not writing while you’re producing and trying to stay one step ahead of this monster, this all-consuming monster who requires you to do way too many jobs at once. That would be a dream come true, and it would be make Millennium a better show.” [Good idea, although he still didn’t manage to do that with the 6 and 10 episode seasons of the XF revival, when he was still writing while shooting the episodes.]
[On offering Frank Spotnitz to run MM s2] “I had no idea about that. I don’t remember doing that. Frank was actively involved in The X-Files series and The X-Files movie. I think that would have been triple duty for him, so that actually is something I don’t recall. That may have been the case, but it has slipped my memory.” [see Spotnitz’s reaction below]
Frank Spotnitz
“the show didn’t reach the popularity of The X-Files, but the impact the show had on the people who saw it was really profound”
“Millennium was was really uncompromising in its way, and, honestly, I think that’s probably what limited the size of its audience, particularly in a network television landscape […] it was both what was great about it and also what probably kept it from being more popular than it was.”
“it was very much a movie type story every week”
[On his s1 episodes ‘Weeds’ & ‘Sacrament’] Weeds: “it was really about fathers and sons and the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons” Sacrament: “in a very different way in Sacrament I kind of explored the same idea, which was not so much the sins of the fathers, but sort of the gifts of the fathers, if you will, the gift that Frank had and how that affected Jordan. But that’s an interesting theme to me, just generations and fathers and sons.”
“it’s one of those shows that we found as we went along, and that changed dramatically each of the three seasons. So I certainly had no idea from the first episode what the show was going to become, I don’t think anybody did.” “I think that that first hour is as good or better than anything Chris ever wrote, which is saying a lot, because Chris is such an incredible writer. I remember seeing it in a in a theater in Los Angeles because Fox so proud of it that they rented out theaters for the for the premiere, and just being absolutely blown away by it as a piece of filmmaking and a piece of television.” “we certainly didn’t know where the show was going to go, that it was going to ultimately embrace some supernatural elements.” “each season, it was like a triptych, each was a different way of seeing this world”
“the studio and the network were frightened by the show […] they could see that we were limiting the size of the audience by our uncompromising approach to the storytelling.” “the reason the show evolved is because we were eager to grow and not repeat ourselves, so I think there was this restless creative spirit that kept causing the show to reinvent itself.” “from the beginning of the first season, Chris sort of let go the original creative team and so he and I ended up doing double time on X-Files and Millennium that first season. And then obviously Glen and Jim came to the rescue in the second season, and then Chip and Ken in the third season.” [I don’t recall this about the original creative team, I wonder what happened.] “the third season, we all felt really proud of the show and what it did become, and we were pushing so hard for that fourth season that we ultimately didn’t get, I think because the network believed if they put something else in there, the ratings would grow, which turned out not to be true.”
[On being offered to run s2] “I was really flattered and grateful. But honestly, I don’t think I was ready at that point, and I certainly wasn’t ready to let go The X-Files either. So it was a tough call because I really did love Millennium, but I think I made the right call.” [I also think that was the right call, especially since we got Morgan & Wong’s s2, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to both MM s2+ and to TXF s5+ if Spotnitz had switched teams then.]
[On IWTB having some Millennium elements] “there’s a lot of truth to that. I think tonally it feels very much like Millennium, and it’s barely supernatural, so it could quite easily have fit into Millennium. But that’s where Chris’s head in particular was at at that point in time when we came back to The X-Files, he was more interested in the horror, psychological terror, and the thematic richness of it.”
[On the XF ‘Millennium’ episode] “we were so upset that Millennium didn’t get an ending that we were determined to give it an ending on The X-Files. I have to be honest, we didn’t appreciate how difficult that was going to be, because they are completely different shows, and we wrestled with that episode a lot. […] it was part of The X-Files, so it had to be an X-File first. I could totally get why some Millennium fans would be frustrated by that episode because it is more an X-Files episode than a Millennium episode. It’s an X-Files episode with Frank Black in it. […] it didn’t end up being the Millennium finale that we wanted it to be, but I couldn’t figure out how else to do it.”
[On Millennium compared to today’s television landscape] “X-Files and Millennium, to my mind, were both ahead of their time in terms of their cinematic ambition. In terms of the thematic element and the ambition of Millennium, it still gives all those [current] shows a run for their money, even twenty five years later, a lot of those shows don’t necessarily reach for the same complexity of theme and aren’t necessarily always as thought-provoking as Millennium was.” [Completely agreed, and that goes for all of Carter’s shows, it’s not ‘just’ good visuals or ‘just’ good plot, it’s a whole worldview, a philosophical stance.]
[Emma and Frank] “there was no social-cultural-racial agenda, it was like we loved Clea and what we thought she’d be bringing to the part and and that’s why we cast her, and I’m especially proud of that.”
“it was obviously influenced by Seven”
[About the three different seasons] “No, I don’t think it was a hindrance to the show at all. I think the show got as big an audience as it was always ever going to get, and it was creatively really strong and interesting all three seasons. […] What nobody realized in 1999 was that network television was already in decline, Fox [hoped to] recapture the X-Files numbers, which they never did. […] We were more a victim of changing viewership habits than of any creative mistakes or change of direction we may have made in the seasons.”
[On season 4 ideas] “I thought Chip [Johanessen] was going to do the fourth season and I think Chip really did have some ideas what he wanted to do. By the third season, it was not my show in any way at all. Chris and I would come in and make our contributions, but it was really Chip who was defining the show. I was really excited by what he was doing and was looking forward to, obviously, the actual millennium being on the show.”
“I really put my heart and soul into Millennium, like like I do all of these shows, and you do it because you’re hoping you’re going to reach other people. […] When people not only watch the show but like it enough to remember it and honor it and and keep it going for years, it’s incredible, I can’t tell you how gratifying that is.”
