The TV Zone

On press tour, there are no days off. Heck, there are no meals off. GSN sponsored lunch today, and its execs and talent jabbered on from the stage about two upcoming game shows while my fellow critics and I downed some sort of Mexican wrap thingies laid out on restaurant tables in the Beverly Hilton hotel ballroom. We don't ask what it is, we just shovel it in to fuel up for the next session.

You go to 10 press conferences a day seven days a week for three straight weeks, and you learn a lot about the goals of upcoming shows, the shape of the fall season, who's side-splitting even out of character ("Curb Your Enthusiasm's" Larry David) and who's not (Hallmark mystery-movie star Dick Van Dyke; a lovely man, however). But you don't actually get a lot of stop-the-presses news. This is Hollywood, and they're too much on-script to let things slip.

Until just now, when in the 10th hour of today's events, five minutes before it was over for the afternoon and we could head upstairs to compose breathless dispatches to You The Reader, David Duchovny just happened to mention, in Showtime's session for his new self-destructive-writer half-hour "Californication" (yes, the series deserves that title; it is, after all, on Showtime), that he was, by the way, expecting to see a script this week for another "X Files" movie.

Say what?

Duchovny continued that it's been written by "X Files" creator Chris Carter and longtime collaborator Frank Spotnitz, and that "Gillian is on board" to do it, too, meaning costar Gillian Anderson. So that sounds like it's actually going to happen, nine years after the previous theatrical film and five years after the Fox series' end.

You know. No biggie.

Just thought you might wanna know.