X-Files mythology, TenThirteen Interviews Database, and more
Aug
15
2025

Interview: Angelo Vacco, PA and photographer

The “Hey Danny, it’s Mulder” podcast did a nice little interview with Angelo Vacco, who was a production assistant for nearly the entire run of The X-Files, plus he had small roles on the series: a gas station attendant in “F. Emasculata”, a victim in “Milagro”, plus a doorman in “Talitha Cumi” and a bartender in “Improbable”. He also holds an Instagram account with his own photos from the making of the show: “My Life on X-Files“!

Here are the cliff notes:

  • Fresh from New York to Los Angeles, he wanted to be an actor. He didn’t know TXF at all. He approached production between seasons 1 and 2, he was 22. On his very first day, Joan (Chris Carter’s assistant) told him he would be a “temporary production assistant”, in the LA offices.
  • Typical tasks would be to get coffees, make photocopies, distribute scripts, get dailies from Vancouver to be screened to the LA producers and executives. Wash Carter’s car.
  • Eventually the producers had to make a decision on him. Howard Gordon said “we have to keep Angelo”. He ended up staying for 8 seasons!
  • In the early years, the LA crew were few people. The editing was done in a movable trailer on the Fox lot. Building 49, Carter’s office, was an old 1920s bungalow. There was no space on the Fox lots.
  • Working on TXF was a dream job. They were a work family, doing 16-hour days. 
  • He did photography, developed his own photos, and took a lot of photos while at work. Many of these can be seen on his Instagram, “My Life on X-Files”.
  • He met Carter when he was returning from shooting “Duane Barry” (the first episode he directed). The episode was initially named “Duane Garry” but they had to change it when they found there was a real FBI Agent named that. He asked if he could be an actor.
  • The “F. Emasculata” script reads about the gas station attendant, “he looks so much like Angelo Vacco we could swear it’s him”! So he didn’t audition for that role, but he did for the others.
  • The Vancouver pool of actors was small, so there was the “X-Files rep”, a répertoire of actors with repeat roles.
  • He auditioned for “D.P.O.”.
  • “Milagro” was shot in Griffiths Park. He did ADR on his own scream.
  • He has a lot of stories to tell about shooting the Bree Sharp music video for “David Duchovny, why won’t you love me?” song, where he is also credited. The video’s two directors were involved in Millennium (Will Shivers, uncredited?) and TXF (Charles/Chuck Forsch, assistant to Chris Carter and to the producers). It started as an end-of-season video made by the crew. Then Bree sent the song, it got to David. They did the music video on the Fox lot and hence got people like Brad Pitt (shooting Fight Club), Sarah Michelle Gellar (shooting Buffy), he drove around with the golf cart and just asked.
  • (See also David Duchovny’s recent interview with Bree Sharp on his podcast!)
  • Here’s the video, remastered by Lyle:
  • Angelo also works in ADR (automated dialogue recording) doing things like background conversations, voices of police officers on the radio, TV presenters. He has been doing work with the same ADR group for 25 years and he did ADR work for the TXF revival seasons
  • “Paul Rabwin knows everything” about making The X-Files. [somebody interview that man!]

Here’s a selection of Angelo’s photos, there’s much more on his account!

Shooting “Talitha Cumi”
Shooting “Milagro”
Mark Snow’s studio
With Mitch Pileggi, Thierry Couturier (sound editor), Nick Lea
Season 3 writers (Darin Morgan, Jeff Vlaming, Kim Newton, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban)

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode4

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Aug
07
2025

RIP main title designers Bryant and Johnsen

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.

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Jul
29
2025

RIP editor Chris Willingham

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!

https://www.deadline.com/2025/07/chris-willingham-dead-24-editor-three-emmys-1236472500

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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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Jun
19
2025

Interview with “Fight the Future” storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman

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.]

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode6

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.

Can also be found on YouTube:

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