Comment by diurnalist
6 hours ago
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?