In the room with the writing staff of CSI
Anthony Zuiker: Well, my wife was watching The New Detectives on the Discovery channel and she said, "You should take a look at this. This is kind of a cool world." I watched it, and there was this monotone guy talking about crime and science, and I was enthralled. It was pretty fascinating. A week later Jonathan Littman (president of Jerry Bruckheimer Television) called me - he had read my Harlem Globetrotters feature script and liked it as a writing sample - and said, "Are you interested in TV?" I said, "Something forensic."
We called up the crime lab director in Las Vegas and asked if I could pick his brain and do some ride-alongs. Then I rode along with the CSIs on the graveyard shift for five straight weeks and learned about crime and saw a real murder and saw my first body cut up.
Then we went in and pitched ABC, and they passed. I was like, "Oh. Okay." It was past NBC's and Fox's deadline, so we pitched Nina Tassler (senior vice president, Drama Development) at CBS, and she said, "I love it. Great. Start writing. You have three weeks."
Ann Donahue: It was the last pilot, right?
Anthony Zuiker: The last pilot picked up. The last pilot shot. The last pilot to test, and the last show put on the schedule. There were four pilots [at CBS] in consideration for the final production slot, and Carol wrote one of them. I just wrote the best thing I possibly could, and they selected mine. Then I got a call saying, "Billy Petersen (Gil Grissom) may be the guy to star." And I'm like, "Who? Billy who?" I didn't know who he was until I started doing some research.
Anthony Zuiker: Once Jonathan, Billy, Cindy Chvatal (Billy's producing partner) and I got the green light, we had to hire an experienced showrunner because I didn't have the experience to run a show. I had been in the business only a couple of years, and this was my first TV script. Suddenly Carol comes in. I hadn't read her pilot, but she was the nicest lady in the world, and we were both from Chicago. So I just said to myself, "This is the person for us." She was perfect.
Carol Mendelsohn: I met Anthony the first day the were filming the pilot, and my agent called and said, "We can't make your deal. The show's not going to go anyway. So don't go to work. We'll find a better job for you."
So I didn't show up the second day and sat around until about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Then I called my agent and lawyer and said, "This is ridiculous. I love this show, and I'm going to work. You just make it work."
Carol Mendelsohn: Yes. We really needed a third person to complete the team - somebody with a lot of experience who is a great writer. And from the very beginning, Ann was the only person we really went after. And she was a difficult courtship, but not because of Ann.
Ann Donahue: I wasn't resistant at all. It was all about business, and we both have the same agent. And he's a good agent. He told me to leave the CSI office until he got the deal he wanted. So I walked.
Carol Mendelsohn: We were still trying to make a deal with Ann, and I got in my car to drive home and Ann called and said she too didn't care what our agent said. This is the show she wanted to do.
Ann Donahue: But Anthony was so new, I think, he was taking it personally.
Anthony Zuiker: It's true. I was like, "What's going one here?"
Ann Donahue: The Fugitive was going to be the hit. That's where all the money was, all the advertising, all the noise; and we were supposed to just try and hold up half their lead-in or something.
Anthony Zuiker: Eighty-five percent of their initial premier numbers - retain those, and we would be considered a viable success. Which we surpassed by 23 percent.
Carol Mendelsohn: It took people that read from their heart and their gut and believed in it. Marg Helgenberger (Catherine Willows) read the pilot, and she said she just knew that it was going to be a big hit - that people were going to be compelled to watch it.
Ann Donahue: It's there in Anthony's script. His newness and his passion has made the show and one thing he did, which I didn't appreciate at the time, was he used flashbacks. At the time, the rules were, if you were using flashbacks, you hadn't properly figured out your story. I never would have used flashbacks in storytelling in 1,000 years, but it made me fall back in love with writing.
Carol Mendelsohn: It was a new way of doing TV because most of TV's talking heads. Anthony created something where, [for example] we had a scene in the fetish club episode "Slaves of Las Vegas" where Billy had to two-minute forty-five second scene without dialogue. It was just about processing a body in the autopsy room. That just doesn't happen in television, but everthing we've done stems from the pilot script.
Ann Donahue: And up front, Billy said, "You know, my character doesn't have to know everything" - which is such a release for writers, "Oh God. The hero can fail, can be embarrassed."
Carol Mendelsohn: His character can say the wrong thing to Catherine or to Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan)
Ann Donahue: Alot of action stars, they.....like their characters to be right. It becomes a habit.
Anthony Zuiker: Billy could have been ego-driven, read the pilot and said, "I'm not going to do a series where I'm upstaged by a toenail - upstaged by a hair fiber - upstaged by a blood drop. Why would I do that?" He had the foresight to know that the evidence would be the hero, but that ultimately Grissom would be the glue to the stories. That's foresight.
Ann Donahue: He'll hold up a toenail, and we'll rack focus on the toenail. And there aren't many stars of his caliber who would go for that. But he's like, "Yeah."
Carol Mendelsohn: An even bigger discussion is notes. For everybody on the show, their heart is in the right place. Everybody wants to make the show great, but the cumulative effect of all of these voices is often detrimental.
In the beginning, it was tough for us to get it and tougher for everybody who was one step removed. As a result, we all found the show together. And note [fortunately] came in the form of, "What do you think? I'm not sure this is right."
I think that the best thing that I did was realize from the beginning that nothing about the show can be traditional. It had to be extremely collaborative. We all work together. We rewrite together, and [from] the chemistry of all of us comes the magic of the show.
Ann and I come form the original Cannell and Spelling camps where things were done by teams, by staffs and you treated your writers well. I remember the first thing that Cannell said, "If you're a producer, you get paid a lot of money. You don't put your name on writers' scripts." We teach all our young writers. Throw them on the set. Throw them in an editing room, and they learn quickly.
Ann Donahue: It's sitting with the director to make sure they "get" the episode because they might read the script and want to go off and do a different theme than what you're hoping for. And you start to wed the director and the script.
Carol Mendelsohn: It starts before prep (the week before filming where the bulk of the planning for the shoot is done) We have three directors [on staff]: Danny Cannon (co-executive producer who directed Anthony's pilot), Ken Fink, and Richard Lewis. You catch them weeks before the prep.
You do the same with the actors. You don't want George Eads (Nick Stokes) or Gary not to know that they have a big episode coming up.
Anthony Zuiker: It's important for them to start thinking and mentally preparing for the episodes and to get us some feedback right away to avoid potential problems down the script trough.
Ann Donahue: And we'll start talking to E=MC2 and Stargate (the special effects guys) three weeks before [a shoot] and ask, "Can you create a fire in the desert? If we lock off and get a picture of the desert, can you create a fire? Can you create embers and flames and dead bodies?" And they start building.
Carol Mendelsohn: They even come to us. Last year, before the season began, Larry Detwiler of Stargate and Brad Tanenbaum (our associate producer) said, "We have an idea. We call it Double-Exposed flashback, DX flashbacks." And we used a DX flashback in 'Burked', the first episode out of the gate of the second season.
Ann Donahue: It's like a ghost shot.
Anthony Zuiker: Say a suspect come in when you are interviewing me and shoots me in the head. [When the CSIs look at the crime scene and role-play 'What if'] you'll see the ghost guy walk in and shoot me in the head.
Ann Donahue: That became one of our new signature shots. Again, the storytelling is visual, not talking heads.
Carol Mendelsohn: Well, that came from us as producers saying, "If you have ideas, we are collaborative." As producers, we talk to everybody.
Ann Donahue: Little by little, if we change five things an episode, and we do, we'll find something unique. And that's a ton of work.
Carol Mendelsohn: We always want the show to evolve. And everybody, especially our post people, our directors, our Stargate and all our editors, are all looking to visually evolve the show. But none of it can start until the scripts are in good shape, and every week we manage to (knock on wood) give them really good stories.
In the first and second seasons, we unsuccessfully tried to develop a forensic love story for Grissom. Finally, we had to go to Billy and say, "It's not working because we need to pick your brain. Talk to us about Grissom." And we talked at length about Grissom's sex life, Grissom's love life. And now that we are on the same page, I think we will pull it off this year.
Carol Mendelsohn: This year we do. Everybody says CSI is not about the characters. Our character moments happen, [for example] when Ann wrote that Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) touches Grissom's cheek in 'Scuba Doobie-Doo' and wipes the dust off him. That was huge.
Ann Donahue: That's a sex scene on CSI.
Carol Mendelsohn: But this year we have a lot of balls in the air. We have Grissom and his hearing, his relationship with Sara and his relationhsip with Catherine, which we dealt with a little in the first season - that is Catherine's eagerness to move up in the crime lab but always sort of stepping back for Grissom - so far. Warrick's gambling addiction. And Nick and Warrick. Captain Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) and his daughter and how he treats people.
So this year, we talked about where we were starting everybody and where they want to go. For Grissom specifically, we know where we are going for the next three years. Four years, in terms of his hearing because we have to know where we want to end up to be able to write it.
Carol Mendelsohn: After we shot the pilot and we were in that limbo period waiting to find out if we got picked up, Jonathan and I read scripts. In terms of the entry-level staff writing position, I knew Eli Talbert. I had met him briefly at Providence, where he was a researcher. He asked if I would read his Sopranos and NYPD Blue. I read them, and they were really good.
If a year later you can remember his scripts, that's pretty damn good. So Eli I hired because I liked his scripts. And the two story editors, I was really responding to the material and responding to the people.
Carol Mendelsohn: As Nancy Miller (who is running our Miami show) says, so much of it is asking yourself if you can work with that person for twelve hours a day, everyday?
Ann Donahue: Josh Berman (producer) was a network executive.
Carol Mendelsohn: Josh's story was compelling. I read it from beginning to end. And, although he wasn't what we were looking for, we met with him. We needed a mid- to upper-level writer, but Jonathan and I had the best meeting with him; and when he left we both said, "We love him, but he's not what we're looking for." And we said, "Well, maybe we should change what we are looking for."
Ann Donahue: Liz Devine was a real CSI, a tech advisor, and the way she would tell stories was so immediate. She was this natural-born storyteller. We hired her to write, and now she's one of our story editors. So there are lots of ways in.
Carol Mendelsohn: Andrew Lipsitz (producer), who was a story editor the, found an article about an incident on a Southwest plane from Salt Lake to Vegas. One of the passengers went crazy, tried to get into the cockpit and open the hatch. He was subdued by passengers and later died in Vegas. It became 'Unfriendly Skies'.
And we did a spontaneous human combustion episode that came from a story Billy told us about some guy that he knew who watched a guy spontaneously combust on the street in front of his car.
Ann Donahue: Urban myth.
Carol Mendelsohn: We debunked it and then thought, "Can we debunk another urban legend?" We also do stories like 'Stalker' that prey on your fears and 'I-15 Murders' [which] asks the question: "Where do you feel safe? Do you feel safe at Gelson's? Can anything bad happen at Gelson's or Ralph's? You don't think it can, but it can - when you let the cable guy into your house - when you let the telephone guy in."
Carol Mendelsohn: I don't think we have a pitch type show. The idea alone isn't worth anything. When Anthony did 'Stalker he spent a month researching.
Anthony Zuiker: We pick out worlds we want to explore, and go from there. It's an idea base and you go with it.
Carol Mendelsohn: But the "go from there" part is significant. It's not enough for someone to come in and say, " I want to do a cat episode." When we have used freelancers, we say, "Come in and be a writer with us for as long as it takes to do your episode."
Ann Donahue: In terms of outside writers pitching, their approach [would] tend to be the same. People would pitch us about a wooden bullet or a bone bullet or a meat bullet, and that's not enough to write a story around.
Carol Mendelsohn: Our show now is really about relationships. When Anthony was riding along, he formed strong relationships [with the real Las Vegas CSIs]. And the first thing he said to us was that these relationships need to be protected and cherished because every body in the Vegas crime lab felt a part of his vision.
I don't know how anybody on the outside could really do CSI because so much of it is getting the science right. And that's one of the reasons you can't just come into our show and just pitch.
Ann Donahue: The show is the research - getting the science right. And you get that only from [the] real people. And I think our show does so well and some shows suffer because they blow right [past the science] to the interesting part.
Carol Mendelsohn: Take Eli's teaser in episode '35K O.B.OB' It opens on a crime scene where it starts to rain. It was based upon a real case that Liz had, and for every moment, every second, Liz told us what happened. She broke it down in terms of the minutiae because that's what you have to feel.
Ann Donahue: You gotta' go to the emotion. What's so personal that it's universal? That's what you pitch.
Carol Mendelsohn: Do you remember the first pitch you sold?
Ann Donahue: God, it was an Alfred Hitchcock. It was all about passion. It was about someone killing somebody in an office just because they couldn't take [hearing] his voice anymore. Everybody could relate to that.
Carol Mendelsohn: Mine was Fame, and I said they were going to condemn the school, and they were going to have to move. And the kids didn't want to go to a new school.
Ann Donahue: That's perfect because now everybody is up in arms in trouble. It's not about a new dance. It's not about a play opening.
Carol Mendelsohn: And another element to pitching and writing is hearing the voice of the show. When I was writing Remington Steele, I heard Pierce Brosnan ('Remington Steele', for the not familiar with the series) in my head.
Just because you read Lew Hunter and John Truby and know all these rules, you don't just get quiet in here (re:her head) because shows have a voice. A good show, like the one that Anthony has created, has a distinct voice. And it's so important to tune into that. It's ringing in each one of our ears, and you have to trust that. That's such an important part of writing. Call it your muse. Call it whatever you want.
On a show like this, all you have are our instincts, and you gotta' listen. And I think for writers, it's working up here, in your head, hearing that voice and trusting it.
Ann Donahue: A writer goes to the board and literally writes 'End of Act One, Two, Three, Four'" And we go, "The end of the teaser is this scene. The end of Act One is that scene, and so on." Once you've established the act breaks (which are big emotional or plot points), we go back in and fill in the scenes that build to those moments. I much prefer the term 'playwriter' to 'screenwriter.' Wright is old English for 'build,' and that's what we do. We build stories.
Anthony Zuiker: And then you [go,] "Something in Act Two is facocked" and you start erasing and rewriting and erasing and rewriting.
Carol Mendelsohn: And somebody will say, "You know, I read about mildew......and it's an interesting thing about mildew. You can step in it...."
Ann Donahue: And now you have a timeline for the murders - mildew on the shoe. And when it's all up there, you step back and go, "Oh, we're never going to open there. We're going to want to open with the dead body on the slap."
Carol Mendelsohn: The thing about our show, and this is especially beneficial for our junior writers, is that nobody's going to fire you because your draft doesn't work. On some shows you're so scared to turn anything in. On our show, it's a starting - off place. All of ours need work, but the end result is what matters.
Ann Donahue: And these two were so tender with me on my first script. My flashbacks were in the wrong place. I was trying to recreate flashbacks, and they go, "Well, ah...see, it already happened...and then you are...discussing it." They were really so tender. They were sooooooo good to me...
Anthony Zuiker: It was so funny. (He hold out an imaginary script and mimics her flipping the pages, reading the notes and responding.) You were like, "Oh, you guys are being so nice. Ah...oh, yeah (embarrassingly afreeing with the note)...Oh,...yeah."
Ann Donahue: And I hated myself and the script. And they were so sweet. So I was able to take my humiliation and go home and do it right. And that relationship has just carried on.
Carol Mendelsohn: So the most important thing our writers can do is write the story we've all collectively worked out. Bring some of themselves to it, and really make the science entertaining and correct. Then it's easy for all of us. Together we can rewrite anything.
