Liver-eating contortionist Eugene Tooms  wasn’t there.  Neither were the Peacock Brothers. Extraterrestrials? Nope, not a one. But even without those memorable characters of any of the other paranormal beasties, shadow-government operatives or little green men from "The X-Files," fans of the spooky franchise turned out in force last week at The Grove in Los Angeles to question and cheer X-creator Chris Carter and key writer Frank Spotnitz.

The two longtime collaborators (or is that conspirators?) were joined by Matt Hurwitz, a co-author of the lavish new book “The Complete X-Files: Behind the Series, Myths and the Movies” (Insight Editions, $49.95). The event was on the third floor of Barnes & Noble and a crowd that went into triple-digits was eager to get autographs and answers, many of which were delivered by Carter with his wry, mellow-surfer baritone.  

Is Walter Skinner still infected with nanotechnology? “He’s been to the doctors a number of times.”

Is the Agent Dana Scully immortal? “It’s kind of true, if you think about it. I mean, she’ll never die. She beat cancer.”

Any plans to take "Millennium" to the big screen? “That seems to be the question all the fans want answered. Nothing has been discussed.”

Carter’s favorite episode? “Beyond the Sea” and “Home” make the short list, but, he insists, he has a lot of favorites.

When is the series going to be available on Blu-ray? “There’s a technical problem ... we just have to figure out how to solve it.”

But the pervading question of the night centered on one yearning hope: A third installment of “The X-Files” as a movie franchise, which would pick up where last year's "X-Files: I Want to Believe” left off. In an interview after the book signing, Carter was elusive ... but he did give fans a reason to believe.

Noting the lackluster commercial success of the second film, Carter said the venture was hurt by its timing. The U.S. release “was foolish, opening a week after the blockbuster hit “The Dark Knight ... it was really the worst weekend to open any movie.”

The film pulled in an anemic $21 million in the U.S., which fell short of expectations for a film that cost $30 million to make. It did go on, however, to make $47 million in foreign markets. “The movie did a lot of business worldwide so, I think, it’s really up to Fox to decide,”  he said.

Despite the lackluster grosses, there’s no denying the impact of the television series and its characters  on pop culture.  It demonstrated the potential of what the sci-fi genre could achieve on the small screen.  And though recent sci-fi series like "Battlestar Galactica" (a show Carter “likes”) and "X-Files"-influenced "Fringe" have picked up the torch, Carter said crime dramas have handcuffed TV’s limited programming schedules for scripted dramas. 

“When you look at what’s on television right now, there’s a little bit of science fiction, but there’s mostly cop procedurals,” said the 52-year-old Carter.  “People see every episode of 'Law & Order,' and all its incarnations, so I don’t know … if you do science fiction on television it’s a little bit of a gamble sometimes.”

But, hey, if that doesn’t work, there’s always the Internet, right? "X-Files" fans have proven there’s an audience out there for all the fan content they’ve created. From fan-fiction to mash-up YouTube videos, people have taken notice. Even the actors that inspired the content, Spotnitz noted.

“You know, there’s a story that David [Duchovny] told when we were doing the movie last year,” Spotnitz said, “about how Gillian had seen a YouTube compilation of all their kisses and David saw that and said it actually affected his performance in the film because it was like reminder of the power of their relationship. So it just tells you how meaningful they are. It really is part of what the 'X-Files' is now. It’s just the way the fans re-interpret it.”

And with the release of the book -- practically an encyclopedia of “The X-Files” franchise -- fans will now have more to interpret, because as one fan said, “The truth will always be out there.”

-- Yvonne Villarreal

RECENT AND RELATED

David Duchovny on Scully and Mulder, the "great love affair"

David Duchovny says "X-Files" is religion...? 

Frank Spotnitz, the Hero Complex Q&A 

Chris Carter and David Duchovny in crisis

Credit: David Duchovny photo by Karen Tapia-Andersen/Los Angeles Times. 

I just saw that Chris Carter,the mastermind behind "The X-Files," is reportedly getting medical care for exhaustion and "an acute sleep disorder." Whitney Pastorek at EW.com has this brief item:

Chris Carter, writer, producer, and director of "The X-Files: I Want to Believe," was hospitalized on Tuesday due to "physical exhaustion and an acute sleeping disorder," a source close to Carter tells EW.com. The source says the hospitalization stems from Carter "working on multiple films back to back over a two year period" -- the recently released "X-Files" sequel and "Fencewalker," a covert project he is rumored to have begun shooting earlier this year. He is expected to recover quickly.

This news follows the announcement last week by David Duchovny's attorney, Stanton Stein, that the "X-Files" and "Californication" star is in rehab to deal with his sex addiction. Roger Friedman at FOX is reporting that Duchovny was in a program to deal with his pornography addiction and went public with it because a fellow patient took that tidbit to the tabloids, which were about to pop the story. Friedman has been wildly wrong before so I would take that with a grain of salt.

It was a grim summer for the X-folks. "X-Files: I Want to Believe," was an afterthought even among sci-fi and genre fans because of the massive competition in the sector this summer. The $30 million film pulled in about $21 million in the U.S. (and about $57 million worldwide), far below expectations. I think it will do quite well as a DVD (people are accustomed, after all, to watching Mulder and Scully on the small screen), but I can't imagine we'll ever see another "X-Files" project at theaters. 

I interviewed Duchovny over coffee a few months ago for a feature on the film and he was great, very droll but bright and engaging. I wish him well with his efforts to keep his marriage and family intact. I'm sure he loathes that this happening in a public space now. It's hard to tell if there is some Hollywood code-talk at work, meanwhile, in the announcement about Carter's medical treatment. I hope things go well for him. I absolutely adored the early seasons of "The X-Files," and Carter has always seemed like a cerebral innovator as a storyteller.

-- Geoff Boucher

RELATED David Duchovny talks about the religion of "The X-Files"

RELATED Frank Spotnitz on "I Want to Believe"

UPDATE An earlier version of this post had some box-office figures for "X-Files" that were incorrect. So I have excised them and subbed in a correct figure.

Photo by Max Nash (AFP/Getty Images) shows Chris Carter at British premiere of "X Files: I Want to Believe" in London in July 30, 2008.

Photo by David Hogan/Getty Images, showing Frank Spotnitz, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and Chris Carter at the July premiere of "The X Files: I Want To Believe" in London.

I haven't made it yet to see "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" (I'll blame those five days gobbled up at Comic-Con) and I think a lot of other longtime X-fans fell into that category on the movie's first weekend of release. Maybe it's the passage of time or this summer's glut of must-see genre fare, but I just haven't felt a great sense of urgency to get out to see the movie.

Gina McIntyre, one of my colleagues here at The Times, had a chance to sit down recently with Frank Spotnitz, the producer of the film and longtime creative presence in the franchise's history, and here is her Q&A with him, appearing for the first time anywhere. Reading it does make me want to see the movie -- not unlike reading a letter from an old friend -- but it's still a surprisingly faint urge.   

You’ve said that the movie is a standalone story that doesn't require people to be all that familiar with the show. Was there a sense that the mythology became too complicated to update or were you looking to create something outside of those narrative constraints?

If we’re lucky enough to be able to do more movies, at some point, we will be revisiting that mythology. In the show, we said that Mulder believes the aliens are coming in December 2012, so that’s a date we’d certainly hit if we’re fortunate enough to keep making these. But for this movie, from the very beginning, when it was first discussed six years ago, we wanted to do a standalone. We had to do a mythology movie last time. We were in the midst of the TV series, and the studio wanted a big event movie that would clearly be something you couldn’t get at home for free. This time around, we didn’t feel any of those constraints. We felt we could really do what the show did most of the time, which was deliver a scary supernatural mystery.

You’re keeping the film’s plot secret, but can you give any sort of broadstrokes description of the story?

It’s real time, six years from where we last saw Mulder and Scully. It’s a scary, creepy intimate story, a mystery obviously. It’s really more about them and their relationship than the show usually was. When you’re doing a TV show, you’ve got to do so many episodes that unless you want to risk becoming a soap opera, you really can’t spend that much capital on their personal lives week in and week out. The audience would get compassion fatigue after a while. So, we were very stingy about that in the TV series.

What’s the nature of their relationship in the film?

It’s obviously one of the big questions fans want to know -- are they together? Have they been seeing each other these past six years? If they are together, what’s the nature of their relationship? Is it romantic or not? That’s one of the big cards that we’ve been trying to keep hidden until the movie comes out. But we didn’t want to take for granted that there would be any more movies after this. This could be it. If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully, we didn’t want to leave anything on the table.

These days, every major genre film and hit show has a significant presence on the Internet, but that wasn’t the case when "The X-Files" became a spooky sensation in the 1990s. David Duchovny said that, like his character Fox Mulder, the relentless faith of true believers is astounding to behold.

" 'The X-Files' was said to be the first Internet show," Duchovny said over coffee on a recent morning in Los Angeles. "We had chat rooms and fan sites and all that. Look, I’m usually five or six years behind whatever is hip. So it was around 2000 that I started doing e-mail and finally started understanding what all that was about."

And what was it about? The answer is religion, apparently.

"My initial response — and I still hold this to be true — is that it takes the place of some of the functions of a church in a small town: A place where people come together, ostensibly to worship something. But really what’s happening is you’re forming a community. It’s less about what you’re worshiping and more about, ‘We have these interests in common.’ Someone has a sick aunt and suddenly it’s about that, raising money to help her or sharing resources to make her life easier. That’s what it was about with 'The X-Files' on the Internet."

Duchovny and co-star Gillian Anderson are back on autopsy and trench-coat duty on July 25 as "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" pulls the FBI tandem away from the complicated conspiracy plots of the old series and puts them in the "monster of the week" mode of investigating an isolated supernatural threat.

Duchovny said that he has come to view the most loyal fans of the show as celebrants of self, not of celebrity.

"When I was at Comic-Con it felt the same as the small-town church thing. I’m not denigrating 'The X-Files,' but that fellowship isn’t essentially about the show. The fans came to Comic-Con to honor us but I think they’re honoring us because we inspire them to have a certain kind of fellowship. Now, I’m not saying we’re not worthy of that kind of honor. I want to be clear about that.”

Oh, that’s very clear; essentially, his point is that "The X-Files" is bigger than God and religion, right? "No, no! You’re going to get me in trouble. I didn’t say bigger than God. I said 'The X-Files' is equal to God."

-- Geoff Boucher

Photos: David Duchovny, Karen Tapia-Andersen/Los Angeles Times; Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, Diyah Pera / 20th Century Fox