Script Coordinator Pens Recent ‘Miami’ Episode

Script coordinator Robert Hornak works in the Writers’ Department for CSI: Miami. He recently got the chance to earn his first writing credit for the fourth episode of the show’s eighth season, “In Plane Sight”.

Hornak’s job description includes reading “every script draft that comes down the pike, scanning for errors of any kind, from simple typos to story inconsistencies, making sure they don’t end up in the final draft for all the world to see,” he explained in a recent post on the official CSI: Miami blog on CBS.com. “Good job if you’re looking to get a front row seat to big-time TV,” he added. “GREAT job if the people at the switch are as generous as this writing staff. Thanks to them, that’s my name you saw listed as ‘written by’ in the opening credits of ‘In Plane Sight,’ our Episode 804. For the first time, I got to follow a script on its trip through the guts of the process, from inception to airing.”

“I remember the first day of ‘breaking’ the story — the process of turning disconnected possibilities into a coherent story outline,” Hornak explained. “I was amazed that so many ideas were coming out of the writers’ heads, some sticking to the dry erase board, some dying a quiet death in the air just above the gum packets in the center of the table. I remember sitting there, finally understanding in a much more three-dimensional way that our scripts are not just written, but wrestled into submission by some wickedly dark imaginations.”

When he sat down to write the first draft of the script, Hornak was confident that he had Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and the other characters down pat. After all, he’d spent three years reading the writers’ scripts for the series. “I was wrong,” he revealed. “Because it’s not just putting words into the characters’ mouths, it’s finding a way to carry an entire story inside your head, knowing how this moment comes out of the last and how it fits with the next, and being able to find the emotional heart of a forensic-driven scene. Bottom line: not easy.”

During the first day of shooting “In Plane Sight”, things started to come together for Hornak. For the first time, he heard the actors speaking the words he’d written on paper. “It was then that things really clicked,” he said, “and the script became a living, breathing thing.”

“I remember the first time I sat in James Wilcox‘s editing bay, watching an early ‘rough cut’ of the episode,” Hornak continued. “The moments I’d seen on set were now, miraculously, pulsing with the vibrancy of an episode. That ‘big’, cinematic scope of the image, married to techno music and rudimentary sound effects – even in this early stage, it was a clear demonstration of how everyone’s talents come together for something much larger than the sum of its parts.”

“The producers aim for a feature film every week, and they reach it on a comparatively small budget with a fraction of the preparatory time,” he said. “I thought I knew all this going in. But seeing it first-hand helped me to truly understand and respect the people I work with.”