Television and Cinema Verities: Sound Designing The X-Files

"The beginning years were the hardest because every episode presented new challenges.  The X-Files was a unique show.  I mean, the first five years had a lot of exploration and turmoil and we all had some really insane fun. We had a wonderful group of sound editors, facing the challenge of creating a real and not real world.”

- The X-Files' sound designer, Thierry J. Couturier, discusses the making of the landmark series with X-Files Lexicon author and series scholar, Matt Allair.  The entire exclusive interview is posted at The X-Files Lexicon and is a fantastic behind-the-scenes read. Check it out.

Television and Cinema Verities

“Dragon’s Domain” had just been done, and it used the technique of the voice-over. I realized this was a valuable perspective and decided to use it in “Testament of Arkadia.” It’s a very useful technique because it can help you bridge over story gaps. Also, it lends viewers the notion that what they are seeing is history, in the past. For an origin myth, looking back across ten thousand, three thousand or even three hundred years of history that seemed very appropriate to me.”

-Space: 1999 author Johnny Byrne (1935 - 2008) discusses the writing of the episode “The Testament of Arkadia,” in an interview I conducted with him in the year 2000. 

Television and Cinema Verities: Frank Oz Edition

“The work was play. That's what we learned from Jim…He would make whatever work there was exciting and fun. He just would. So it wasn't leavened by fun, it was fun.”

-Frank Oz discusses his time working with Jim Hensons and The Muppets. (From an IGN interview with Kenneth Plume).

Television and Cinema Verities: Buck Rogers Edition

"Actually I was offered it three times and turned it down. I didn’t want to do a cartoon character. I wouldn’t even read the script."

- Actor Gil Gerard on accepting the role of Buck Rogers in the 1979-1981 TV series. From an interview at the Collector's Club of Great Britain.

Television and Cinema Verities

“It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10..” 

- Viggo Mortensen discusses his reservations with the Lord of the Rings sequels, in Entertainment Weekly.

Television and Cinema Verities: Land of the Giants Edition

"The first set I walked on to had the Spindrift - the interior - and I remember that vividly, and it was so exciting to see and the next thing I remember, very vividly, was walking on to the big soundstage and they had done a jungle set. They had made all the big trees and they had the full Spindrift lodged into where it crash landed. It was a huge set and it was a very dramatic set because it was so big. You'd come in and it was like walking into part of a forest with boulders and things. You were caught up in the fantasy of it and when people visited the set, they were always so impressed."

- Land of the Giants actor, Gary Conway, discusses his first time on the set, in an interview at actor database.com. 

Television and Cinema Verities: The Black Hole Edition

The script at the end said... I forget now how it was worded, but it made it clear that there was an ending that they were going to keep secret until they shot it. My assumption was, "Oh, boy, this is going to be a good ending. This is Disney, these guys know what they're doing, they're really gonna put something great out there." And when I saw the picture, I was really confused about what that ending was all about. So, with the exception of the ending, I liked the picture a lot."

- Robert Forster discusses the making of The Black Hole (1979), at A.V. Club.

Television and Cinema Verities: Terminator 2 (1991)

“I wasn’t prepared for the buzz about my body – how hard I’d pumped up and worked out.  All that seems to have overshadowed my acting to some degree. Sure it was tough to do, but not once did I think, Oh this is going to get me noticed. I did it because it was so much a part of Sarah’s evolved character and my work process. There’s a lot more to her than the “Woman with a Gun” subtext going on that’s been overlooked. Journalists seem eager to talk about the scene in which I condemn men. Sarah does that because she’s bitterly screwed up and meant to be unsympathetic. It’s not my personal polemic.”

- Linda Hamilton discusses her physical and emotional transformation in Terminator 2:Judgment Day, in Starburst Magazine, from 1992.  

Television and Cinema Verities: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Edition

“It started very well the first couple of years. Then it went downhill, I think, in the third or fourth year. They made it more for kids. I think the saving grace was that some of the acting was so good and my relationship with Basehart was terrific. We had a great rapport.”

David Hedison remembers his time as Captain Crane on the Seaview in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, at The Los Angeles Times.

Television and Cinema Verities: Dracula Edition

“I didn’t play him as out and out evil. It’s a delicious cocktail because you know he is like the devil. But I’ve tried to show the good and bad paralleling one another – there’s a dynamic there. The film image I can’t get away from is Bela Lugosi. He was really onto something: the way he moved, the way he sounded. I based my voice on his a little.”

- Gary Oldman discusses playing the famous vampire count, in The Making of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Television and Cinema Verities: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) Edition

"I screened the final cut [of Halloween], minus sound effects and music, for a young executive from 20th Century-Fox (I was interviewing for another possible directing job). She wasn't scared at all. I then became determined to "save it with the music."

- John Carpenter discusses one movie executive's response to his first cut of Halloween (1978), in the liner notes of the films soundtrack album, from Varese Sarabande. "A Note from the Director and Composer," by John Carpenter, February 5, 1983.

Television and Cinema Verities: William Girdler Edition

"Manitou was something that had never been done before. So I did it. It's a cross between 'The Exorcist' and 'Star Wars.' It has a lot of shock in it as well. I'm a director who believes a lot in the instant shock theory…”

- The late director William Girdler discusses his last film, The Manitou (1978) with Starlog Magazine, in 1978.

Television and Cinema Verities: Breakaway Edition

"It's interesting, but the thing that is pinpointed as the weakness of Space: 1999, the premise, is in fact the stepping stone into everything that happened, all those inexplicable things. 

And if you take the even larger arc view, you seem to learn more about the series. 

In your book, you spotted an overall arc, and I think you are right. It is there, but it has this almost subconscious kind of sweep.  On most normal TV, the writers look for the purpose of it all, what is the point of it all.

I think on Space: 1999 it is nearly subliminal. The very circumstances of this story, this epic journey, became I believe, an unconscious arc. 

Had we been aware of it, perhaps we would have taken on a more directed theme. Unconsciously, we started seeing similarity and patterns, and a way things could happen. The further into the show we got, the more we mirrored the Alphans in their situations, because it was happening to us on that very level. That carried over into the stories, the way in which the humanity of the thing unfolded."

- The late, great Johnny Byrne, story editor and writer on Space: 1999 Year One (1975 - 1976), discusses the season's story arc, in an interview I conducted with him in 2000.

Television and Cinema Verities: Dark Water Edition

"I feel it's less a kind of just visceral, more kind of unsettling, more emotionally provocative. That's my feeling about it. I think it's subtler, but still scary. It ha a kind of moral, get under your skin scary. More thought-provoking. That's really because of the script and Walter and his - I think he felt like with supernatural scenes he wanted to anchor the film in reality."

- Jennifer Connelly reflects on the differences and similarities between The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004) and Dark Water (2005). From an interview with Devin Faraci in Chud.com.(June 9, 2005).

Television and Cinema Verities

"You make the choice that the material is laying out the premise and the information that, yes, this guy is in fact an arm of evil and can be destructive. Therefore, you get out of the way and don't play that at all. You let the writing take care of that. If you try to play the character trying to be dark and menacing to people, it's not as interesting...and not as menacing. It's much more disturbing to see someone smiling and patting people on the back, knowing that he can destroy them at any moment with a smile on his face."

-Gary Cole discusses playing Sheriff Lucas Buck in American Gothic (1995).

Beach Week: Verities

“I was naive about the ocean, basically. I was pretty naive about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank. But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”

-Director Steven Spielberg recalls the making of Jaws (1975) in Entertainment Weekly in 2011, with interviewer Chris Nashawaty.

Television and Cinema Verities

“I think it failed in terms of its consistency. It was very good some weeks, quite bad other weeks. But this, I think, is pretty much the track record of most television, by virtue of its desperate overexposure and the brevity of time allotted to us to produce something that is qualitative. But overall I would say that it was a creative series.  We did much more creating than we did imitating.”

- Rod Serling discusses The Twilight Zone (1959 - 1964) and its legacy.

Go Ape Week: Verities

“I don’t see any reason to remake them. Why? They’re there, and they are potent as ever. On the other hand, I’ve always thought it would be very sensible to continue the canon and I can’t imagine why nobody’s done so.”

-The late Roddy McDowall, discussing the possibility of further Planet of the Apes sequels. TV Guide Online, September 1998.

Television and Cinema Verities

"My original vision for V was something different from what the show has become. I’ve been with it since its inception, and my idea for it as a series was that it could be sort of like Mission: Impossible mixed with a little Hill Street Blues, suspense combined with interrelationships between the eleven main characters.  I really felt that it would be more effective if, instead of smashing heads, we used intrigue and disguises and infiltration as our main weapons.”

-Faye Grant discusses V with interviewer Robert Strauss, in the midst of making the series in the 1980s. At the V: Out of Print Archives.

Television and Cinema Verities: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

"I could tell from the way the ongoing story and the characters' back history was outlines that Captain Power was going to be much more ambitious and mature than your normal Saturday morning cartoon show. I mean, they brought Captain Power's former lover back on one show and for my money, they made it very plain what their relationship had been."

- Captain Power lead actor Tim Dunigan discusses the 1987 series, from an interview with March Shapiro in Starlog Magazine (#121).