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Comment by consumer451

8 hours ago

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

6 comments

consumer451

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cpeterso  5 hours ago

“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.

  • rectang  4 hours ago

    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...

    • gucci-on-fleek  3 hours ago

      > 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.

      This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

      > A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

      But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

      [0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

      [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)