Comment by sho_hn
7 hours ago
There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.
Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context.
https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162
“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.
I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...
3 replies →
I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit.
[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
Hey, I looked into this too! And I came to the conclusion that it's completely true.
The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:
https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...
Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.
Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...
Wow, thanks for doing this digging. In the interview Gillian recounts Chris Carter saying "Look, no widows."
Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?
"No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence.
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.
I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way.
I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.
I'm also reminded of how David Milch supposedly wrote a lot of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. I only learned about this after seeing the show, but I did pick up the "Shakespearean" feel of some of the dialogue. Constraints often force creativity.
Meanwhile Xfiles has a montage on YouTube of all the times the boom mic crept into the shot.
So I can’t super accept that these are geniuses - it was cheap TV.
In hindsight sure, whole cult following etc. but doesn’t mean it is well designed or even thought out.
What does the writing quality, genius or otherwise, have to do with the boom mic though?
Bugger all - particularly given the boom mic operator and other framing "gaffs" are (as I recall) all part of the "wide screen" 16:9 later release on BluRay etc that were somewhat rushed out the door.
A number of show of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio
No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post production for TV phase saw to that.
Later wide screen releases were rushed with no real post production budget to address these and other issues - that's on the studios wanting a second grab at money, not the original creative teams.
Similar complaints abound for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (IIRC) The Wire (?) and their wide screen releases.