David Rambo

The ninth season of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has seen quite a few changes, starting with the death of Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan) and leading up to the departure of lead William Petersen, as well as the addition of two new characters to the cast. Supervising Producer David Rambo took the time to discuss the big changes at CSI with CSI Files' Kristine Huntley as well as to delve into the story behind his latest episode, "Young Man With a Horn", which delves into a good deal of Las Vegas history.

CSI Files: Your latest episode, "Young Man with a Horn" married the rich history of Las Vegas with a very contemporary mystery.

David Rambo: Thanks! I'm very proud of it. The director was great--Jeff Hunt. He was our camera operator for many seasons and then he got his first episode as a director, which I believe was "Bite Me". And I was on the set with him for that because Josh Berman was creating his first pilot for Fox at the time so I was the writer on the set. ["Young Man With a Horn"] was the first one he got to do that I wrote. It was a great collaboration.

CSI Files: In our last interview, you mentioned you'd been researching it for two years.

Rambo: Actually a little more than two years. When I started working on "Kiss Kiss Bye Bye" in 2006, I got some research on the history of Las Vegas in the 50s and 60s. I realized even though my parents had gone there and I read about it and I watched the original Oceans 11, which I love, there was a lot of old Vegas I didn't know about. I didn't really know the whole Howard Hughes story and the whole Kansas City Mob Story of the founders, which was great to learn. And as I was learning it, guess what--Greg Sanders (Eric Szmanda) was learning it, too. And in some of this research, I kept coming across references to this casino called The Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino in Las Vegas. And the more research I did, I realized how really horribly segregated Las Vegas was. They called it "The Mississippi of the West," proudly at the time.

And this incredible club had opened. I think the showroom was called Club Rouge, and it was an instant hit, sort of what Greg talked about in the episode for our Chateau Rouge. Within three weeks, most of the audience was white; it was a club that was built in the black neighborhood, just north of Freemont Street. The club was filled with so many famous people and all the headliners on the strip, the white headliners, wanted to see the shows. They had Pearl Bailey and The Platters; the house band was The Benny Carter Orchestra, one of the great orchestras. They all came after their shows on the Strip, and of course the tourists followed. It's one thing to be in the audience watching Frank Sinatra on the stage, but if you followed him to the Moulin Rouge, you could sit at the next table. And the great thing was a source of pride to so many African American people in the whole country. Its opening made the cover of Life magazine in 1955.

But the part that intrigued me as a dramatist and a screenwriter was, six months after it opened, it closed. It shut down immediately. People went home from work one night and they came in the next day and there were padlocks on the gate. This fabulous showroom sat completely untouched for thirty-five years. I thought, that's great [because when people went in later] they discovered a moment in time. The Moulin Rouge also played a role in the Civil Rights movement; meetings were held there between the NAACP and most of the Strip hotel bosses.

CSI Files: I was wondering about that detail, the hotel only being open for six months, and whether that had been lifted from reality.

Rambo: Absolutely. It was only six months. I tracked down one of the young women who danced there in '55 and she still lives in Vegas and is very forthcoming. She took me to dinner at a Vegas steakhouse and talked a lot about the old days, who came in and what it was like to be a young girl at an exciting, beautiful time. And even though it closed so quickly, people look back on it with such affection. It was almost twenty years [after that] before the lines on Vegas shows were integrated, when they had black and white girls dancing next to one another. So it really was an anomaly.

CSI Files: Why did the Moulin Rouge close?

Rambo: It closed because at the time there were only seven or eight hotels on the Strip, so if you take a hundred people out of each of them at midnight to go down to the Moulin Rouge, that's hurting business. Vegas has always only been about the dollar as Catherine says at the end in that scene with Grissom. So that's what did it. They got together and forced the two white guys that owned it to close it. The two guys who owned it were not Vegas regulars. There's a theory that the mob left them alone because they were running the club in the black area, [which] they thought no one would go to.

I took [the story] to [Executive Producer] Carol Mendelsohn, [and] she said, "It's great, work out a story." It took me a while to get the right story because our show isn't Cold Case; it had to be a contemporary story. So we took the reality singing contest. It's all about who wants to be famous--who wanted to be famous then and who wants to be famous now. Vegas is always trafficking that, so it seemed a natural fit.

CSI Files: Did you enjoy spoofing American Idol?

Rambo: We had so much fun creating the character who was the host and producer of the show. It was a lot of fun. American Idol is such a huge hit.

CSI Files: Are you a fan of the show? There seemed to be a lot of inside references!

Rambo: I'm in favor of anything that celebrates talent. I think American Idol is a crazy phenomenon. I do think a lot of the early part of the show is about humiliation, which I don't like. And I don't like that they turn singing into pyrotechnics. They lose the connection to the singer and the song. Every song is a story; it's a musical way to communicate with an audience. But, they made careers and it's the talent version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, so why not?

When I was a kid, I competed in so many talent competitions, so it brings back a lot of memories. I played the piano. I won a lot of them, but I hated them!

CSI Files: The episode ended up really blending American Idol with Old Vegas.

Rambo: It was great; we finally got to have Holt [McCallany, Miami's Detective John Hagen] on CSI after he did Miami. He's such a terrific actor; I so enjoy working with him. On his first day, his first scene was with Paul Guilfoyle, and he started by just telling everyone, in front of the whole crew, how much he admired Paul Guilfoyle, what a great actor Paul Guilfoyle is and how much he's admired him over the years and what a privilege it is to work with him. He was really the Miami version of Brass, so really it a wonderful opening.

CSI Files: And then he got interrogated by Brass!

Rambo: He sure did! Flattery got him nowhere. The great thing about Paul Guilfoyle as an actor is that he always tells the truth. I think in many ways Brass is the most credible character on the show. He always, always tells the truth. That's a great quality. He's marvelous in everything. I loved him in "For Warrick." The cast and crew went through Warrick's death as if it really were a death. We said goodbye to somebody we'd loved for a long time and it was very difficult for everybody. It took us a while to get back in the groove.

CSI Files: How was the decision to kill Warrick (Gary Dourdan) off made?

Rambo: We had talked for years about shaking the show up, reminding the audience that law enforcement is not a fantasy. People get hurt, people cross boundaries and face consequences. An awful lot of these decisions as to who stays or goes are not made by people on the ground floor of our building at Universal Studios. They're made by actors and their representatives who want to do other things with their lives--that's the bottom line. We have to find a way to honor the work they've done and the decisions they're making in an involving and dramatic way. Gary was great about it and he gave an astonishing performance, particularly that death scene. I don't think anyone in our crew watched that episode without bursting into tears. When he died in Grissom's arms, it was one of the most moving things I'd ever seen, and it was the most emotionally exposed I've seen William Petersen in anything ever, on stage or film. It was a really profound moment. I think people, especially long-time viewers, were aware, Billy was really invested in that character, in all the characters. He helped create this. It was letting go of something that can't come back. At the time we were filming Warrick's death, Billy knew that Jorja [Fox, Sara Sidle] would be working two days later. So it's not like Sara was irretrievably lost at that point, or at any point really. He just let it all out.

CSI Files: It was the first real loss in the show, aside from Holly Gribbs' death in the second episode. It was the first character that we'd come to care about over the years that died. Was the decision to kill the character made by one person, or by everyone involved?

Rambo: That's a decision, because it involved a regular character, that was made at every level. It was in the room, it was made in Carol's office, in Naren[ Shankar, executive producer]'s office, it was made in Les Moonves's office, it was made in Jerry Bruckheimer's office--everyone has input. It was a bold move but it felt like the right move. We needed to do something big. and it shook the show up. And it opened some doors, too.

CSI Files: Do you think Warrick's death is contributing to Grissom's decision to leave CSI?

Rambo: I think Grissom has endured a lot of loss, and I think there's a part of Grissom that Grissom thought working as a CSI would fulfill, and it hasn't fulfilled it. The great thing about Grissom is that he's always asking questions; he's never satisfied. I read a description of great artists once that said artists have a pervasive inner sense of not being satisfied. And I think that's Grissom. I believe that's William Petersen as an artist, too. Being satisfied is different from sitting back and realizing what a great life you have. You can do that and still not be satisfied. One thing is about how great a bed you have and what restaurant you get to eat dinner in, but the other part is about your work, and that's really who you are. All the rest is just decoration.

CSI Files: That scene with Grissom and Catherine (Marg Helgenberger) at the end of "Young Man with a Horn" was very telling. Do you think he made the decision to leave in that moment, or had he already made it?

Rambo: A lot of people thought that scene was about Sara; the girl Grissom was talking about, the girl from college days he thought he loved, wasn't Sara. He talks about when he was in love with a girl but science took the pot. Catherine makes the joke that he hasn't met the right girl yet. It's about what the role of science is in his life and what his real happiness will be. I don't know that he actually made the decision to leave there. I think the decision-making wheels were turning full force. I think he'd made the decision to maybe it was "time to up the ante," which was not the original line we'd scripted. There's been a few times in my life in my life on the show when Billy went over with me every possible way to write a scene, the dialogue for Grissom. One of course was the monologue at the end of "Butterflied". The other was this scene. He knew how important this was; he loved having this last scene before the [Laurence] Fishburne [Ray Langston] episodes began. He was very excited about that. We had Universal City Walk standing in for Freemont Street, which worked great. Originally we had a song lyric, "Taking a chance on love," but that didn't feel like Grissom. We tried to tie it to what the girl was singing earlier. I forget the original last line, but Billy came over to me and we improvised the dialogue. He'd throw something out, I'd throw something out, he'd throw something out and then we'd look at each other and go, "Write that one down!" And that's how we did it. Billy contributed the line, "Science took the pot," which I like very much. It was pure Petersen!

CSI Files: What do you think "upping the ante" means for Grissom?

Rambo: Well, he lied to Catherine in that scene [about] the last time he played. He doesn't want her to know he's checking his cards out. And he is checking his cards out.

CSI Files: There are a lot of legendary actors in "Young Man With a Horn." Was that always the plan, to get Hollywood legends to play some of the older roles?

Rambo: Absolutely. They bring something nobody else does: they bring their legends with them. It was so exciting. When Tippi Hedren walks onto set, the whole crew knows it's Tippi Hedren. That voice is so familiar. Our culture becomes part of our collective DNA, and she is a part of what we all share. She's a part of our culture. And she's so good. I really love working with her. Every time the director yelled "cut," while they were re-lighting her, people would say, "Tell me more about Alfred Hitchcock." She was very forthcoming. We loved working with her.

The poker game is interesting. We worked on it very, very hard. We came up with lots of different combinations of cards. We played a lot of Texas Hold 'Em. We played a lot of them with Chris Barbour, who was one of the writers of "Lying Down with Dogs", who worked in our office. Chris is a pretty good poker player. Robert Guillaume I was thrilled to have at the table. Somebody had to tell the story of the Chateau Rouge from a very personal point-of-view, what it meant to a black entertainer living in Vegas. And when Grissom goes to Chateau Rouge, he encounters Officer Mitchell who says, "Chateau Rouge--my parents came here. They still talk about it." Larry Mitchell actually used those words to me! He remembered the Moulin Rouge. Seeing those characters able to give that point of view was very gratifying for me.

A lot of people are not aware that the heavyset guy at the table was Daniel Holstein, a real-life famous CSI who inspired the character of Gil Grissom! So there we had the real Gil Grissom and the TV Gil Grissom at the same poker table. Daniel flew from Vegas on his day off to do it. And the guy at the table, George Schlatter is really George Schlatter! He's a great television creator and producer. He created Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In among other shows, and George gave me my first break in network television! I was an actor, one of the stars of a variety/comedy/drama series called The Best of Times. And while we all had a ball it was perhaps not the best of shows, but the cast was great. Two of the stars were Crispin Glover and an actor then known as Nicholas Coppola, now known as Nicholas Cage. And here we are thirty years later and I called George and said, "I want you to play yourself!" George is the real deal. When he talks about booking those people in a big room on the Strip, that's what he was doing back then! George was Dorothy Dandridge's manager when the incident happened that Guillaume talked about. So he was the real deal, and he had a ball. It was a great reunion for the two of us. We looked at our pilot again from all those years ago; I cringed a little. I had eighties hair!

CSI Files: How do you feel William Petersen's departure is going to affect CSI?

Rambo: It's going to be a huge change. At the same time, it's all mitigated by knowing how happy Billy is on stage in Chicago. He has never in his life been happier than he is there, and I've seen him with 50,000 people cheering for him in a stadium! Acting another character in front of a couple hundred people in one room is so gratifying for him. He's ecstatic. So I'm glad he's so happy. I'm at CSI because of Billy. He wanted a playwright on the staff and that resulted in me coming in, so I'm very grateful. I understand where he's at.

But what does that mean for CSI? The first thing that means is that Laurence Fishburne is joining the cast. That is so incredibly exciting. The character of Ray Langston is going to surprise a lot of people. He's not really like anything Fishburne has played before. He's a surprisingly vulnerable character. He has great authority and great gravity, and yet, he's CSI 1! He's the newbie. He doesn't dust perfectly for prints and he doesn't leave behind the rituals of medicine in his background very easily. He shows up for his first day at CSI wearing a tie. The only time you see Nick Stokes (George Eads) in a tie is when he's testifying or at a funeral. The cast loves working with him and the writers love writing for him.

We're starting to give Lauren Lee Smith (Riley Adams) more of a role. Riley is able to do more, to express herself more. She and Langston work a case together and it's not all candy and roses between them. Riley's a tough love girl, which I like about her. I think it's interesting watching George Eads, who has just grown into such a fantastic television actor, and I mean that in the best way possible. He is someone we really look forward to writing for. He's willing to try so much. He's so brave. It's great; it's kind of like watching your kids grow up!

CSI Files: Why haven't we seem more of a reaction to Warrick's death from Nick?

Rambo: Well, you're making an assumption that somebody dies and everybody flips out. I don't think Nick's not feeling it. My feeling is that Nick has such a good work ethic--that he's the guy who shows up and does the job even though his heart's breaking. That has nothing to do with the job. People are victims of a crime and it's your job to figure out what the evidence is so that whoever did it can be brought to justice. And that fingerprint doesn't care if Warrick Brown is dead or alive. You've got to dust it, retrieve it, process it. You have to do the job. That approach is not without input from George. George really knows Nick, maybe better than anybody. He doesn't think Nick breaks down a lot or goes down memory lane a lot at work. He just does the job.

CSI Files: Are there sparks flying between Riley and Greg, or do they just like working together?

Rambo: I think they really like working together. As writers we like putting them together because they're fun to see together. There was almost a brother/sister aspect to Greg and Sara; it's a lot more vibrant I think with Greg and Riley. If you're asking me if there's a romance, I don't know if there is or isn't to be honest. We haven't gone there yet. We've had other fish to fry.

When I was first on the show, the character that intimidated me the most was Greg. I did not think I could speak or write Greg Sanders lines. Eric Szmanda helped me with that. "Who Shot Sherlock?", I call his bar mitzvah episode because that's the day he became a CSI. And I loved that episode. It really wasn't until "Kiss Kiss Bye Bye" that Eric and I could sort of sit down and say, "Wow, this is who Greg Sanders is. This is a whole new guy we didn't know about." And I have to say it was Carol Mendelsohn's idea that Greg who was the one to know about Old Vegas. It would be Lois O'Neill's book that would start him on that path.

CSI Files: What's the status of Greg's book?

Rambo: If I recall correctly, he said something like it didn't work out. But that doesn't mean we've heard the last of it. But if you notice, CSIs who write books aren't very successful with it. Like Langston wrote this book that got him in a bit of trouble. It's a book that makes its way around CSI very quickly. It's wonderful to see Langston with Doc Robbins (Robert David Hall); they have a shared special language.

CSI Files: Can you tell share anything coming up for any of the characters?

Rambo: There's some really good stuff coming for Wendy Simms (Liz Vassey). Liz Vassey is a terrific actress. Maybe [she'll have] a little more fieldwork, but her whole veneer in the lab [is changing]. In "Let It Bleed", [writer] Corinne Marrinan very bravely took Wendy to the morgue. There was a question about whether a sample of DNA was corrupted, and who corrupted it--was it the DNA lab or the morgue. It was a real sort of territorial argument with Robbins, and he says "Great, I'll cut a new piece." And he pulls the drawer out and Wendy has to deal with the idea that this tissue sample was once part of a living, breathing beautiful young woman. And she deals with that in the abstract in the DNA lab, but to go over to the morgue and actually be confronted with it was a profound experience for her. And I love how they both played that scene.

CSI Files: How did the "Lab Rats" episodes come about?

Rambo: Naren Shankar loved the lab rats. He's a scientist; he has a science background, so I think he really relates to them. The lab rats let us stretch the elastic of the usual boundaries of writing for characters, and it's so much fun! It's really fun to feature them because they usually get one scene. Liev Schrieber (Michael Keppler) was in his trailer one day [when he was on the show] and said, "Okay, I got it: I realize the evidence is the star of the show." He's right; it's a show about discovery, and the lab rats get to make the discoveries. Usually it's in the form of a report, but [in those episodes], we get to go beyond that.

CSI Files: Is there a character you particularly enjoy writing for?

Rambo: No. It depends on the story. I love writing for Catherine and her parents, whether it was Sam or Lily. I hope we see more of Lily because they're marvelous together. It was hard when Sam died; that was hard. Marg was so good in that scene; we shot that at 2:30 in the morning. It was a hot night; the temperature went from 103 to 101! We loved Scott Wilson; just before we shot his final scene, he made a short speech and said, "I love this girl" and kissed Marg. I'll tell you if that didn't make his death scene moving, I don't know what would! I like writing for Catherine and her parents. I miss being able to write for Sara.

CSI Files: "Butterflied" was such a key episode for Sara and Grissom. How did you feel about their relationship?

Rambo: I've asked Billy about this a lot over the last six years, "Did Grissom and Lady Heather really do it?" Sometimes he says yes and sometimes he says no. I think even he's not sure whether it really happened because their intellectual relationship is so intense. Grissom and Sara are really great to write because some of the most romantic stories are where the two people are absolutely right for each other and absolutely wrong for each other, and they have to make a decision: either I'm going to be with you and it's going to be imperfect, or I'm going to be without you and settle for less. I like that they are two really intelligent people. Each of them knew that the other had something that they weren't going to get from anyone else on the planet, and boy, Grissom tried! I think they just need to get over themselves.

CSI Files: Can you hint about whether they'll end up together?

Rambo: I think it could go either way. If they were or were not going to end up together, I wouldn't want to know! I want to discover it when they discover it.

CSI Files: Can you tease anything that's coming up later in the ninth season?

Rambo: People are really going to see Nick Stokes' character deepen and grow. He's taken on a lot more; he's a leader, and he's going to have an opportunity to be that leader. I think the journey of Ray Langston is going to be really thrilling to watch. Our 200th episode is coming up; William Friedkin is directing it and Dustin Lee Abraham and Evan Dunsky are writing it. It's going to be a mind-blower. As for what's in store for the other characters, I can tell you this: a lot of people are saying without Grissom, it won't be CSI. They're wrong: it won't be Grissom's CSI, but it is an exciting CSI. In many ways, it's the shot in the arm we needed. Our crew loves working with Fishburne; Marg loves working with him--those two are dynamite together! I think in many ways, this might be our best season ever. It's so challenging. I'm always in awe of this writing staff--they're always challenging themselves to do better than last season. This is not a show that has a formula. I hate the word "procedural" because it makes it seem like we're just following procedure; that's the last thing we do. We reinvent the wheel every week.

CSI Files: How did you come to CSI?

Rambo: It's a great story. William Petersen, after three seasons, missed theater so much--he knew he wasn't going to be working in theater for a while--thought he'd bring the theater to CSI. He wanted a playwright to come in and write an episode. He called his friends from Chicago theater who are in Los Angeles now who gave names of playwrights they liked to Carol and Billy. I'd never written for television before; CSI was my first TV job. I went out and they read my play, a two-character play I'd written called "The Ice Breaker." It's about a scientist who falls in love with a younger woman, which led everyone at CSI to believe that I could write science and character--CSI. They brought me in and I got a masters degree in writing television! They brought me into the writers' room for the story break of "Jackpot". I went to screenings of other episodes that were being edited at that point. And then we started to do "Butterflied." The original concept was I was going to write a two-character play for Billy and Marg. After the teaser everyone went away and it was just Grissom and Catherine at a crime scene for the next forty minutes, just the two of them. It just wasn't possible to make a CSI episode with just the two of them--we needed the team, we needed the lab. Finally we got it together and did the outline and [the interaction between Grissom and Catherine] is one scene--where Grissom is eating peanut butter.

I went off with the outline to write my first draft, which was called "Fishing in Vegas" and was all about a young nurse who was fishing off the company pier, running through doctors in her bedroom right and left. And I think my original draft was about 75 pages; a CSI script is about 55 pages. Carol Mendelsohn, poor thing, I remember the look on her face the next morning after she read it! I overheard Carol and Naren saying, "What are we going to do? It's so long, it's overwritten...." They just said "We'll just start at the beginning." [Writer] Richard Lewis, who has a theater background, came up to Carol's office as we were starting the rewriting together with [CSI creator] Anthony [Zuiker] and said he had an idea. He said, "I read a girl last week who I couldn't cast because she looked so much like Jorja Fox. They could be twins. What if we cast her as the victim? What does that do for Grissom?" Well, suddenly, we have a whole new episode. Carol, Anthony and I were locked in her office, passionately writing--there was a lot of listening, a lot of shouting, a lot of fast typing. We argued a lot, we agreed a lot, but we turned out a passionate draft. Then the cast weighed in, particularly William Petersen and Jorja Fox. They had great notes; we rewrote it again and again. We finally started filming it. We were so exhausted! I'd never been on a film set before. Carol was so worried that the actors would try to change all the words because I was new or something. It actually went perfectly. I loved working with the cast, especially with Richard.

We got to that last scene, Billy's monologue, at the end of the episode with Jorja watching. And we had rewritten that thing two dozen times. If I was happy, Billy wasn't happy, and if Billy was happy, Carol wasn't happy--it was a round robin. And finally Billy just took a lot of what I wanted and a lot of what she wanted, and he wrote it on a piece of paper. The one line that was in my script from the very, very beginning to the very end was when he says to Dr. Lurie, "The only other time we touch another human being is when we're wearing latex gloves."

The call came to join the staff the following March. I was in Denver working on a play actually thinking about moving back to the East coast. As I was looking at real estate online, the phone rang and it was my agent with the CSI offer. I thought, "calls like that don't come in every day" and I accepted. Thank god I did.

CSI Files: Can you share any stories about your early days as an actor?

Rambo: When I was a young actor starting out in New York, I was in an acting class on the Upper East Side and formed a friendship and did many, many scenes in class with a young actor named David Caruso. We loved working together. I recall we did some great scenes, and I also recall that the teacher couldn't stand either of us. Often we were sort of treated more harshly than the other actors in the class! We were very good together. I remember the most exciting thing at the time about David aside from his blazing, blazing talent and great intelligence was that his sister was dating John Travolta. That was supposed to be a big secret. It was right after Saturday Night Fever; Travolta couldn't have been hotter. It was a long time ago. I've only seen him once in the intervening years; he remembered me and said hello.

CSI Files: You weren't on CSI at the time "Cross-Jurisdictions," the Miami intro was done, were you?

Rambo: No. I was doing "Butterflied" just at the time they were trying to decide where the third CSI would be set. There was a lot of talk about New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and finally it was Anthony [Zuiker] who said it has to be New York. That's where the great stories are. And I'm glad, because that opened up opportunities on the writing staff and that was the door that opened for me. I love Anthony. He's not in our office much [anymore]; New York is really his show, but he comes in and it's always a huge hug. People have no idea how much good fortune Anthony Zuiker has brought to so many people. He's a very, very generous spirit. As the years ago on, I realize the quality I admire most in people is generosity. Anthony has it and Carol Mendelsohn has it. Anthony has made so much possible for so many people; he has this crazy, reckless imagination. The match up of Anthony and Quentin Tarantino on "Grave Danger" was about as perfect a marriage of minds as you could hope for. They both have that imagination that doesn't have an off switch. They're rapid-fire, exciting guys who make a room more fun to be in.

CSI Files: Has the writers room changed drastically in the time you've been on CSI?

Rambo: Yeah, it has. And it inevitably will because the personnel are different. What's been great has been watching the new voices come in; since I've been there, Allen MacDonald, Jackie Hoyt and Corinne Marrinan have come on. That's been exciting. I'm talking about writers who've gotten their first break; other writers have come in. It's so exciting to watch a writer find his or her voice and find a way to become a part of this incredible mothership. It's a nice job; sometimes I wonder if I'm too happy!

CSI Files: Are you still working in theater?

Rambo: I am. I have not written a new play in two years. But I've just started working on something. What I do is spend my Christmas break and my hiatus working on that so it takes longer than it used to, but that's okay. What's great about writing for the theater is after writing these huge, huge science-action-romance episodes every week, when you write a play, you get to put four or five people in a room and see what happens and it's more intimate. So that's kind of fun, too.

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