Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Catching up with ‘CSI’ creator and ‘Vegas Dreamer’ Anthony Zuiker
‘CSI’ creator Anthony Zuiker makes peace with past, explores future projects
ANTHONY Zuiker says Las Vegas isn’t the same place he left almost two decades ago, when the TV show he’d created — “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” — debuted on CBS, spawning one of the most successful franchises in television history.
But that’s OK. He’s not in the same place, either.
Happy to have survived what he calls the “‘CSI’ tsunami,” Zuiker — who turns 50 in August — is in “a place of peace,” he says. “It took awhile.”
One key to Zuiker’s contentment: finally making peace with his father’s death. Along with all of the painful memories of a life he longed to share with his father but never did.
Zuiker’s parents separated when he was 5; his mother raised him, along with his stepfather, both of whom still live in Las Vegas.
Zuiker remembers when
he was a ninth-grader, practicing a school speech about “Dungeons & Dragons” and eagerly anticipating a get-together with his father. His dad never showed up, Zuiker recalls, describing the moment as “super heartbreaking.”
There would be more heartbreaks to come.
‘Why, is he dead?’
In 2006, the real-life counterpart to “CSI” investigator Gil Grissom called Zuiker in Hollywood to ask, “‘Do you know an Edward Zuiker?’ ” Anthony
Zuiker’s response: “‘Why, is he dead?’ ”
Indeed he was. Zuiker’s estranged father had put a sawed-off shotgun barrel into his mouth and fired — the same night his son won two People’s Choice Awards for “CSI” and “CSI: Miami.”
So the son came to Las Vegas and put on “my gloves and booties like a real CSI” to investigate the scene of his father’s demise.
“The body was gone, but I was looking for something,” Zuiker recalls. “I tore through everything.” But there were no mementos indicating his father knew of his “CSI” success.
Zuiker did find a disc marked, in felt-tip pen, “Father and Son.” But it wasn’t a DVD; it was a CD recording of the Cat Stevens song featuring the lyrics “How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again — it’s always been the same, same old story.”
The ‘Divinity’ cross
For five years, Zuiker kept his father’s ashes in an urn at the Universal Hilton, where he was living at the time. “I would say goodbye, and I would say hello,” he says.
That is, until someone called him to ask for a CBS contact to propose a model of “Star Trek’s” Starship Enterprise — one that could “float” with the help of magnets.
Zuiker wasn’t interested in the pitch. But “I hang up the phone, I take seven steps,” Zuiker recalls, “and I thought, ‘What about a cross? Can you levitate a cross?’ ”
Thus was born one of Zuiker’s latest pursuits: the Levitational Co., which he founded to sell Divinity, billed as the “World’s First Keepsake Urn,” with space for a photograph and a keepsake drawer to store ashes — along with a cross “invented to levitate inside the base to give the perception that it is being held by God,” according to Divinity promotional materials. (The cross is suspended by gravitational pull, using magnets.)
Those promotional materials also refer to Zuiker’s estrangement from his father, noting how “I cried every Christmas Eve when he’d never call. I spent my whole life trying to get him to love me. … Years later, I decided to invent the ‘Divinity’ cross to ease my own pain.”
‘Father and Son’
Zuiker visited Las Vegas to promote Divinity at the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association’s 2018 convention at Mandalay Bay.
By that time, he thought he had said farewell to his father’s ashes, because a post-production supervisor on “CSI: NY” had taken the urn, volunteering to bury it at sea during an offseason sailing trip to the South Pacific.
At least until the moment, during the funeral convention, when a levitating crystal cross in the Divinity booth stopped floating and dropped.
A few hours later, Zuiker received a cryptic phone message with the barely audible words “CSI: New York” and “South Pacific.” He almost erased the message but instead texted the phone number, asking the person to text the message.
The next day, as the funeral convention was wrapping up, Zuiker sat in his car — awaiting a call to pick up Levitational Co. crosses, banners, brochures and other materials. When he started up his car, a song he hadn’t listened to for a decade played on his iTunes: “Father and Son.”
As for the person who sent the cryptic message, it turned out to be the postproduction supervisor who, after eight years, finally sailed the South Pacific to the Equator. He relayed the following to Zuiker: “Hi. Geoff Hemwall here. Finally (crossed) equator. Edward Allen Zuiker ceremony was 4/18/18. May he rest in peace. He traveled un mundo for 8 yrs. Be well.”
The time stamp on the message, Zuiker says, was 5:06 p.m. — the same time the Divinity cross stopped levitating at the convention booth in Las Vegas.
‘The happy accident’
“When I speak around the world, I tell people, ‘Embrace the happy accident,’ ” he says. “It can lead to great stuff.”
For example, there’s the script Zuiker wrote, as a fledgling screenwriter, about the Harlem Globetrotters, which ended up on the desk of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, leading to the debut of “CSI,” a $12 million, four-series behemoth seen in almost every country in the world.
Zuiker cites, as a more personal example of the “happy accident,” his marriage to his second wife, Michelle, who for 18 years taught at Vandenburg Elementary School in Henderson.
She lived three miles from Zuiker’s former Southern Nevada residence, he muses — but they met on Facebook. (They celebrated their fifth anniversary in March.)
“The Lord likes to be secretive,” he says with a smile.
Zuiker and his wife are collaborating on Zuiker Press, which debuts in November with two graphic novel-style books aimed at helping young people with problems ranging from cyberbullying to divorce. (Zuiker’s own memoir, “Mr. CSI: How a Vegas Dreamer Made a Killing in Hollywood, One Body at a Time,” was published in 2011.)
‘Living the very best life’
Zuiker has 10 reality TV shows in development, along with a Broadway musical based on the ’70s dance show “Soul Train.”
“It’s not about the next ‘CSI,’ ” he says. “It’s about using my creativity.”
Putting “CSI” in the rear-view mirror of his life “is allowing me to reimagine myself as a father, a husband, a businessman and a partner,” he says. “I have great success, wonderful friends, an amazing wife and three kids trying to find their way.
“I’m living the very best life in all categories.”