CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 7/25/08

Co-Conspirators:
Vince Gilligan and John Shiban
Remember The X-Files

By jason davis

As The X-Files: I Want To Believe unspools on the big screen, CS Weekly catches up with series alumni Vince Gilligan and John Shiban.

Along with creator Chris Carter and fellow executive producer Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban were the heart of The X-Files writing staff for much of the series' nine-year run. Gilligan penned his first episode as a freelancer in season two after his agent arranged a meeting with Carter. The Virginia-born writer set aside his comedy feature writing career and joined the show in season three, eventually carving out a niche as the series' resident comedy writer. Shiban met Spotnitz in the AFI's screenwriting program and the latter recommended him to Carter while staffing for the show's third season. In the weeks before The X-Files: I Want to Believe hit theaters, Gilligan and Shiban spoke with CS Weekly about knowing the end before you start the beginning, constructive OCD, and the origins of "the butt genie."

What was it like walking into the X-Files offices for the first time as a staff writer?
John Shiban: It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I was so inexperienced on what a working writer's life was like that it probably saved me from just running away and breaking down in tears. It's a big deal, and I didn't realize how big a deal it was until I got there. It was a special place, and the great thing about Chris was he didn't really care much about titles. He just wanted smart people around him. The first week I was in the room helping them break the season three opener.

How did you adapt to Ten Thirteen's rigorous boarding procedure?
Shiban: I really responded to it. The reason why I ended up in a software day job was because of the way my brain works. The logic to it clicked with me. Frank and I would end up breaking 80% of the stories. I have an affinity for the structure.

Vince Gilligan: That's another thing I learned from The X-Files. When I wrote those previous movie scripts before I had the X-Files training, I would just fill composition books with notes, write outlines in longhand, and, invariably, I'd get bored with outlining. I'd be itching to write 'cause I had a lot of good stuff for the opening scene and for the second act, and I'd get bored before I'd figure out the ending of the movie and I'd just start writing. That's why I had a lot of act-three problems in those early movies. For me, I need structure to know where I'm going. The X-Files taught me that you're not ready to start writing until you know what happens right before you type in "The End." You need to have the whole thing in your head before you start because, in a way, it liberates you. It makes you more creative, 'cause it allows you to know where you're going in the back of your mind and then you have the fun of dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's and putting in all the small details that get you from start to finish.

Do you still board stories as you did on The X-Files?
Shiban: I'm doing it right now—looking at a board for another project as we speak.

Gilligan: I still use it on Breaking Bad. My writing staff always laughs at me because they think I'm obsessive-compulsive with it. It's good-natured laughing, but they laugh at me nonetheless. It's right down to the way Chris did it: we use a specific kind of Sharpie, we squash the end of the new Sharpie down so it's just thick enough for the boldness of the line, the lettering has to be as perfect as we can make it, you can't have words get all squashy at the end of the card as if you're trying to fit too much, the line of cards with the thumbtacks in them has to be perfectly level… It's a little OCD. It's a little ritual, and you need those rituals. You need whatever it takes to get you in your comfort zone so that you put yourself in a good place to get the writing done efficiently and quickly. Rituals are important.

John, how did you conceive your first story, the paraplegic murder mystery, "The Walk?"
Shiban: I had to do the crash course from the time I got the job. I got my hands on as many VHS tapes as I could and caught up on episodes. I pitched a couple ideas that ended up being later episodes, including my first one, which was "The Walk." While I was watching a bunch of these X-Files late at night, I turned off the VCR and this old Marlon Brando movie called The Man was on, which is about a World War II vet who is paralyzed from the waist down. It's a '50s social drama and it just occurred to me…because of my science fiction and fantasy background, I had read about astral projection. It just popped into my head, and I remember pitching it. Chris and Howard [Gordon] looked at each other and said, "That sounds like an episode—work on that one."

Vince, where did the idea for "Pusher" come from?
Gilligan: I cannibalized the starting point of that episode from a movie script I had written the summer before. It was a script in which a bunch of bad-guy Air Force officers based out of Nellis Air Force Base use this Cold War technology to cover up a big casino rip off by making it look like it was some sort of UFO. It was a mish-mash of ideas and it never went anywhere, but at the tail end of it was a code word that one character says to the other: cerulean. When the guy had that word put into his head, it made him drive in front of a truck. So, thought, what if, just with a word, someone could make you do anything he wanted you to do, no matter how self-destructive? As soon as I had that idea, it all started falling together.

How did Vince become the go-to guy for more comedic X-Files?
Gilligan: Darin Morgan (Millennium) was the first guy to write a comedic episode, and he was an extraordinarily funny guy and great writer. He had left the show and I came from comedy. When I got the X-Files job, I worried that I wasn't going to be able to do it, because I'd never done straight drama before. I had written a few episodes that had worked out pretty well, and I went to Chris and said, "Can I write a funny one?" I'm glad he let me do it. I certainly wasn't the first and I wasn't the last either. There was a writer named Jeff Bell who wrote a really funny episode called "Rain King," and he did a great job with that one. It was fun to do those. They were just as hard to plot, but more fun to write on the whole.

How did the frequent writing partnership of Gilligan-Shiban-Spotnitz develop?
Shiban: We all had a similar sense of humor. When Vince came on, we clicked and started doing boards together. We had a script from an outside writer that came in and the draft was just not there—this was probably season four, or late three—and Chris asked Frank to divide it up between him and me and Vince. That was the first time we did it, and we liked doing it that way, so it became something that we weren't doing just to fix people's [scripts]. It was a way to get the job done, and we all trusted each other and knew our strengths.

Vince, how did you get the job of writing the Lone Gunmen-centric "The Unusual Suspects" in season five?
Gilligan: David and Gillian were not available for one episode, because they were finishing up shooting the X-Files movie. So, we sat around saying, "What the hell are we going to do? How do you do an X-Files episode without Mulder or Scully?" I can't remember whose idea it was, but one of us had the idea, "Why don't we have an episode about the Lone Gunmen?" I got to be the guy to write it, which thrilled me 'cause I always loved the Lone Gunmen. The first board we had was something I'd come up with with John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz. We pitched it to Chris and he wasn't mean about it, but he politely picked it to pieces. It was the only time ever we left with nothing. He basically said, "I don't think any of this works," and he was right. It was an episode with nanotechnology, and it would have been the first episode of what became the Lone Gunmen TV show, a show of where these guys investigate something completely on their own. Chris said, "What if you just tell the origin story of how these guys came to be?" As soon as he said that it was like, "Of course!" It was so much fun coming up with how these guys met and the fact that none of them liked each other at first…that Byers was so pro-government…it was so much fun coming up with that, but it was all because Chris threw out the first board.

Along with Vince, John co-wrote the second Lone Gunmen-centric episode "Three of a Kind." How did writing for the Gunmen differ from doing the traditional X-File?
Shiban: The Gunmen could really be comedic characters, and that was very refreshing. You could have an X-File that was still scary, but it was really refreshing and fun to be able to do a scene that was slapstick. It was interesting to see how malleable the show was. When "Humbug" was done, I know there was a lot of anxiety—is the series going to survive this episode? It did. For the X-Files world to still make sense proved that, if the audience loves your characters, they'll go a lot further than you would ever imagine.

John, who was Arthur Dales and how did he become immortalized in "Travelers" as Mulder's X-File-investigating predecessor?
Shiban: Our screenwriting teacher, that Frank and I both had, was an amazing man named Howard Dimsdale. He had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and kept working. One of his pseudonyms was Arthur Dales. He passed away soon after we graduated, and we were looking for a way to give a nod to this guy. "Travelers" was a way not only to name a character after him, but to deal with some of the issues that he dealt with in his life, namely the blacklist, communist scares, etc.

Season eight's "Badlaa" eclipses even Chris Carter's sewer extravaganza "The Host" as the most disgusting concept in the show's history. How did John conceive that story?
Shiban: I came in with a pitch about this guy with no legs on the cart—the Indian mystic who uses his powers against people. One of the powers in my pitch was that he can manipulate his own body size and squeeze into something. I had this scene I pitched to Chris where he takes his hand and starts to push it into this guy's ear. He's squirming in horror as this guy climbs inside his head. Chris said, "Why his head? Why not his ass? That's scarier to me!" And so, the butt genie, as we started calling him, was born.

How did directing the series change you as a writer?
Shiban: It was very educational to see some of the things that you would sweat over [as a writer] that didn't matter and other things that you hadn't sweated over mattered greatly. I think my writing has definitely changed and I find myself fretting more over blocking than I ever did—where are you going to put these people when they're having this conversation? There are ways to imply camera position by just the way you write and how little you say. If you're trying to be scary, you have to control what the audience sees and when they see it, so the script needs to do that, too.

Gilligan: I had expressed my interest in directing an episode and Chris was very nice to let me do it. Once he said yes, I started getting nervous. I've gotta be responsible for four-and-a-half million dollars of Fox's money, and I'm gonna have 100 people standing around on a set waiting for me to say something. I hate being the center of attention. A week or two out, I began to think there's no harm now if I back out of it. My girlfriend Holly said, "What's the worst that could happen?" I said, "The worst that could happen is I shut down on the first day and sit there catatonic." She said, "So what happens then? They put another director on and lose 50,000 bucks Fox can stand to lose. In other words, the worst thing that can happen is you get embarrassed." She said, "I think it's worth the risk," and she was right.

Since the show's demise, Shiban has written for Star Trek: Enterprise and Supernatural and is now developing features and other television projects. Gilligan's new series, Breaking Bad, has just earned him an Emmy nomination for directing. Evidently, Holly was very right.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

The X-Files courtesy 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

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