Proposal

American Author Proposal
The author I want to study is the screenwriter Chris Carter. Carter has written the screenplays for several television movies, Cameo by Night, and The Nanny. He is perhaps most famous as the creator, producer and writer of The X-Files. He produced 201 episodes of The X-Files, 67 episodes of Millennium, nine episodes of Harsh Realm, thirteen episodes of The Lone Gunmen, and the X-files feature film. This is a huge body of work, equalling any sci-fi novelist.
Over the course of his career, Carter has had a huge impact on American science fiction, and his work builds off the ideas and styles of previous sci-fi screenwriters, as well as sci-fi novelists. Carter was originally inspired to write screenplays in 1982 by the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1985, Carter started working for Disney and wrote screenplays for several series such as Cameo by Night, Rags to Riches, and Brand New Life. He soon began developing his own style, and in 1992, 20th Century Fox asked him to write three series for them. The first series was The X-Files, which became a worldwide hit, and which became an important part of Science Fiction history. His second series was Millennium, which produced episodes for three years. The next two were Harsh Realm and The Lone Gunmen, which both fizzled. Although unpopular, they are nonetheless import in the Chris Carter story, and exemplary of his style.
Chris Carter’s unique style of writing, as well as his substantial body of work available for quotation and analysis, will make it quite easy to write a ten page thesis-based essay on Carter’s work. One way that this will be made even easier is that the entire ten seasons of The X-Files are more or less serial, and make up one complete story that, as a whole, follows the story arc. The overall plot is very complex and typical of Carter’s writing. An interesting topic to explore in a paper would be how previous science fiction authors have influenced Carter’s writing.
To complete the reading requirements, I plan to read the screenplay for The X-Files (movie), and read the teleplays (if available, otherwise watch), the ‘mythology’ episodes of The X-Files (episodes that contribute to the overall plot). As well, I will read or watch all of the first, second, and third season of Millennium. Although similar, The X-Files and Millennium are driven by different themes, which would be an interesting topic for a paper; comparing these different themes and how they reflect how Carter and his writing may have changed from when he conceived X-Files to when he conceived Millennium.
I can see how actual reading might seem like a weak point in this proposal, so I therefore plan as well to read Carter’s book Parapsychology and the Skeptics. This book, the feature length screenplay of X-Files, the mythology episodes of X-Files, and all three seasons of Millennium constitute quite a chunk of reading that I believe satisfies these requirements, and will give me a good amount of material to analyse in my paper. Furthermore, if in the course of my research I find that there is a particular writer that influenced Carter (which I expect I will), I can read some of their works and incorporate that into my paper as well.