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The best news for CBS is that although Bruckheimer isn't afraid to spend, he does spend wisely. CSI looks like an hour-long car ad but costs a little more than $2 million an episode. While that's not cheap, an episode of ER costs $13 million (though you do get Noah Wyle). Bruckheimer is able to do this because he's an expert at making everything look rich, even if it's just the equivalent of putting a Target bracelet in a Tiffany box. It's also because he doesn't hesitate to call in favors. The Black Hawk Down special-effects team does odd jobs on all three Bruckheimer shows. After all, who would turn down a request from a guy who has $200 million to blow on his feature films? It would be like not leaving cookies out for Santa.
Bruckheimer's first few attempts at television were disastrous. Dangerous Minds (1996) made the classic mistake of trying too hard to mimic its film progenitor, and Soldier of Fortune, Inc. (1997) finally overestimated America's interest in killing foreigners. Then he hired Jonathan Littman, the Fox executive who oversaw The X-Files and Beverly Hills, 90210, to run his TV company and instructed him to develop a show about a crime-scene-investigation lab. "We basically said we wanted to make Quincy for people who don't need an oxygen mask," Littman says. "We go into the body, making it almost three-dimensional. We have made TV director-centric as well as writer-centric. TV is moving toward high definition. We'd all better develop a more visual attitude."
To emphasize the importance of director-driven TV, Bruckheimer hired film director Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) for CSI and also made him a writer on the show. "We're doing feature television," says Carol Mendelsohn, an executive producer on CSI and a co-creator of CSI: Miami. "The one thing Jerry Bruckheimer said to us from the beginning is, 'When people are surfing, I want them to stop and say, "That's a Bruckheimer show."' Brand identification--that's what we strive to do."
They're able to accomplish this because many of their directors, set designers, costumers and even makeup artists come from movies. "We have all this expertise and talent we draw on for our features," Bruckheimer says. "Some of these art directors weren't getting a chance to move up. We've been able to corral guys who are feature directors who needed a break and are about to explode." Explode, they hope, a planet or two in the next Bruckheimer feature.