'It's About Being A Good Storyteller'

The man behind the production of such JBTV hits as the CSI franchise and Without a Trace shares how he got where he is today.

"I've always wanted to be in the entertainment business, since I was a little kid," Jerry Bruckheimer Television president Jonathan Littman told Watch with Kristin. Littman started out in the theater, but he explained that "when I got out of college in the '80s, theater in New York was pretty much nonexistent. It was the darkest part of Broadway's depression, and a close friend of mine suggested, 'Why not work in TV, since all you do is watch TV?' That made complete and total sense the minute he said it."

Littman's first job in television was as a secretary for ABC. He worked with late-night and children's programming, which were combined into one department. From there he moved to the daytime department at NBC and then the prime-time department at Fox. "It was a journey," he said, "and what I learned along the way was that I wanted to be at the very beginning of the process. I wanted to make the shows as opposed to having them made for me as a network executive."

Littman met Jerry Bruckheimer through a mutual friend, but he declined to meet with the other man several times. Littman explained that he was reluctant because of his "experiences working with feature producers in television—they just never really do the job. They like the idea of television, [but] they never get to work." In the end, Bruckheimer had to schedule a meeting through Littman's assistant without the other man knowing about it. "[B]y the end of our meeting, he had me—hook, line and sinker. There's no ego with Jerry at all—he loves producing, and that's very infectious, and you sort of get to that point of, 'Why are you being an idiot? It's a job with Jerry Bruckheimer.'"

Littman said that his day-to-day job is to "develop new shows and oversee all the shows that are on the air: CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Without a Trace, Cold Case and The Amazing Race." But what does it really mean to be a television producer? "It's about being a good storyteller," Littman explained. "Everyone who is successful in film, television and theater has that sense of telling the audience what it wants hear. Being a TV producer is probably somewhere between being an architect and a contractor, so in addition to the creativity, it's also about organizing an enormous number of people around a common goal, and then letting them do what they do best: Letting writers write, letting cinematographers shoot, letting directors direct, and making it possible for them to do it." He said that he also does "whatever I can to make the writers' job easier, taking certain things off their plates, like budgeting or dealing with the network, because it's hard enough to get out 24 episodes out a year on top of having to do all the other business."

When looking at potential writers and show ideas, Littman said that he's looking for something unique and original. "The old joke is that there are actually only 12 stories to tell in this world, going all the way back to the Greeks, but it's how you tell them," he explained. "When a writer has the ability to tell a story you've seen before, but in a unique way…A perfect example is CSI, which is Quincy, M.E. It's the series with Jack Klugman that I watched growing up as a kid, except Anthony [Zuiker] brought it to life in a completely different way that made those characters so fresh. The execution of it is so different that it blew the audience back."

The original interview is from E! Online.

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