`X' MARKS THE PLOT; CREATORS AIM TO DRAW MORE THAN TV FANS : YOU WANT THE TRUTH?

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Strange. Alarming. Like nothing they could have imagined.

Yep, the guys responsible for TV's hit supernatural drama ``The X-Files'' sure wandered into an unknown universe when they decided to make a movie based on the show.

Set somewhere between the recently completed fifth season and the new episodes that start airing in the fall, ``The X-Files'' movie is a $70 million, two-hour version of the misadventures of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the FBI agents charged with investigating all things paranormal and paranoiac.

Starring series regulars David Duchovny as the I-want-to-believer and Gillian Anderson as the objectivity-challenged skeptic, the movie was co-written and produced by series creator Chris Carter and directed by Rob Bowman, who has helmed 25 ``X'' TV episodes.

``The trick was not to make it too different from the show, but to also make a movie that was accessible to people who didn't watch the show every week,'' explains Carter, a tanned, sun-blond 41-year-old who looks like he worked 13 years for Surfing magazine. ``We had to avoid alienating the hard-core fan, not bore him by reillustrating the world in which Mulder and Scully exist. I hope we've been successful at that; it was the trickiest thing.''

Spoken like a true ... writer-producer. According to Bowman, who made his feature directing debut with the forgotten teen picture ``Airborne,'' making the comparatively cinematic TV show fit for movie theaters required wholesale rethinking.

``I wanted to take the essence of what we had done on TV and just put it on the big screen,'' Bowman explains. ``But there are requirements for those two media that just innately mean that you do different things.

``Obviously, the size of the image matters; you cannot shoot two hours of close-ups and expect to get away with it. The pacing of the editing can be slower - cuts have more impact, since it's not just the little box that changes, but the whole wall that jumps. Your locations become much more important because they're huge now.

``As for characterizations, we just took what we built and tried to make 'em look like movie stars, make them fill the screen.''

For Duchovny, who's enjoyed a steady if not quite stellar film career (``Beethoven,'' ``Kalifornia,'' ``Playing God'') alongside TV superstardom, adjusting Mulder was a matter of fine calibrations - and some good liquor.

``I didn't really approach the movie as being different from the show,'' Duchovny says. ``You know, it is the same character, and I wanted to do justice to that. It wasn't like it was my Vegas routine, like, `OK, here's the big stage, so I'm gonna show you some real interesting tricks.' In fact, I wanted it, if anything, less on a bigger screen.''

Although a good percentage of the 20 million to 30 million people who tune in the Fox network series on Sunday nights can be counted on to show up for the movie, the unfamiliar still have to be oriented as to what was going on with the complex mythology that's built up over the course of 117 episodes. They also need to be clued in on Mulder's obsession with extraterrestrials and the powerful conspiracy that seems to be hiding their existence.

But do true X-philes want to hear all that again? Probably not, unless it's funny.

``I got to do this fun scene in a bar where I've had too much to drink and am pouring out my troubles to the bartender,'' Duchovny says. ``That way, I got to introduce the character to people who didn't know him - without insulting those who did. It's good that the character was drunk, and I put a burp in there at the end; I don't know if they used it.''

We're not going to tell. And even if we did, it might not be the same when you see the movie. Carter and company have a way of disinforming both casual viewers and ardent investigators. To keep the revelations of ``The X-Files'' movie secret, script pages were printed on noncopyable red paper, a key scene was not written and filmed until this spring (most of the movie was shot during the series' summer hiatus last year), and dummy scenes that were never meant to be filmed were disseminated over the Internet.

``I was real paranoid about plot leaks,'' Carter admits. ``I provided lots of opportunities for misinformation; if you put enough bogus information out there, it starts to work for you and against itself.''

Wait a minute. Isn't this what the government/international creeps/interplanetary weirdos do in most episodes of ``X-Files,'' and the kind of deviousness our heroes Mulder and Scully are forever crusading against?

``Well, there are some things that should be kept secret,'' says Carter, refusing to acknowledge the irony. ``I'm not devious. You've just got to be clever.''

Here's what we think we can tell you about the movie: It starts in 35,000 B.C. Texas, when it was very cold there. It climaxes in modern-day Antarctica, which looks a lot like Texas did 37,000 years ago. A building gets bombed, Scully gets abducted and experimented with for the umpteenth time, the Black Oil is sort of explained, a semi-recurring character seems to actually die, and the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) has something to do with everything.

Oh, and Mulder and Scully finally ... Well, like most things ``X-Files,'' what Mulder and Scully do remains inconclusive.

There was more, at one time, for devoted followers to chew on.

``At one point, there was mention of Mulder's sister, Samantha, in the movie,'' Carter reveals. (As a child, Mulder saw her abducted by what appeared to be aliens, and his need to know what became of her drives both the character and the series' mythology.) ``But we decided to take that information out. We felt that that was less important to the movie than the series, and it tripped you up if you didn't quite understand all its implications. It was one morsel of information too many to digest in the movie.

``This is another thing I learned about making movies,'' Carter continues. ``You try to take out any inessential ingredients as you go through and put it together. As a viewer, you don't want anything that is not perfectly integral to the whole.''

The movie crowd

Some big questions are still out there. Like, will enough nonfans come to theaters to make a series of ``X-Files'' movies viable?

``Some people just don't watch television, and a lot of those people do go to the movies on Friday or Saturday night,'' Carter hopes.

``It's hard for me to tell,'' a more skeptical Duchovny admits. ``I don't think you need to know the characters or the history of the show to enjoy this. I would say it's a big, smart, thrilling movie that's fun to watch - if you like smart, thrilling movies, which apparently some people do hate.''

If the film does enough business to justify sequels, then wither the series? Duchovny, Anderson and Carter are each signed up for at least two more seasons, but the actors, at least, would prefer to reopen ``The X-Files'' on a less strenuous, feature-every-couple-of-years timetable.

``I've always liked playing Scully, and making the show has always been fun,'' Anderson confirms. But the Emmy-winning actress would also like to be able to spend more time with her young daughter and take more advantage of the many movie offers that are coming her way. ``From the writing to the cinematography to the co-stars, just as a whole, the show works so tightly and so well. But I like the scenario of being involved in a movie franchise that gets us together every few years.''

Duchovny has been more vocal about his problems with series TV's demands. He's complained about the punishing schedule and threatened to leave the show last season unless its production location was moved from more cost-effective Vancouver to L.A. so he could be closer to his wife, actress Tea Leoni.

The ``X-Files'' movie was shot here, and the show relocates to Southern California beginning with the sixth season. But that won't solve the basic problem.

``It's not really the show, or Mulder,'' Duchovny says. ``It's just the bare fact of doing the same part. It's been five years. If you were in a series called `Hamlet' for five years, it would be the same thing. I would be tired of getting my mother to admit that she had slept with my uncle, just as I'm tired of shaking the Cigarette-Smoking Man and telling him to admit he slept with my mother.

``Hey, maybe it is `Hamlet'!'' the actor cracks. ``Maybe I'm happy to be on the show! The show will go on. The movies will go on.''

Carter seems the most optimistic about the show and the film franchise's future - which, by some logic, you can afford to be when you're the world's most successful marketer of paranoia.

``There's some apprehension about the move to Los Angeles, but I'm happy about it because it provides me with interesting problems to solve and creates opportunities to shoot things I couldn't have in Vancouver,'' Carter says. ``And, coming on the tail of the movie, it's going to be a fresh start for the series. I will always be interested in television, because there are things you can do there that you can't do in feature films, stories that don't take a big-screen approach. But it is a matter of stamina. It's such grueling, grinding, hard work.

``I think there's a point when you go into features because you just don't have the energy for TV anymore,'' Carter reckons. ``And I have been working in a vacuum of sorts, just doing television shows. I get the Nielsen ratings, I know how many people appreciate the show. But there's nothing like walking into a theater and seeing the instant reaction of people.''

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Photo

Photo: Agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), left, and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) investigate the bombing of a Dallas office building, one of their many duties and adventures in the ``X-Files'' movie.