Jerry Bruckheimer Television’s Jonathan Littman

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

As head of the television
division of Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Jonathan Littman and his group of
producers and writers came up with the idea of taking feature-film production
values and special effects and applying them to television series. The result
was CSI. Then came CSI:
Miami and CSI: NY, as well as Cold Case, Without a Trace, Close to Home, and the series Justice, which does to the law profession what CSI did to forensic medicine.

WS: Your team is credited with having transformed
drama series into “feature television.” Was it a concerted effort to do so with
CSI, and what did you want to offer viewers?

LITTMAN: It was a concerted effort. The very first time I
met Jerry [Bruckheimer] and talked about a TV division for the company, he
said, “You know, I believe we live in a time where a lot of people watch TV
with their thumbs. There are so many channels that they flip and click and
click until something catches their attention, and you need to be able to catch
their attention.” You hold them with a great story and great storytelling. CSI
conceptually allowed us to tell a
story with pictures as well. What we wanted to do was not only the forensic
mystery and the freshness of that arena, but also bring it vividly to life. We
had evolved to a time in television production when special effects were much
more viable and affordable, and we could really take the viewer inside the body
to see how a bullet goes through it and what it does when that happens. What a
fingerprint the size of a TV screen really means when you look at the patterns
of it. What was unique with that show is that we could start down that road and
make it as much a visual experience as it was a dialogue experience. TV always
had this real bad rap—that it was radio in pictures. CSI created a whole new narrative and we’ve taken that
notion of having other ways of conveying a story all the way through the
series.

WS: How much longer can the CSI franchise last?

LITTMAN: Years. I think that franchise is chugging
along—it’ll have its up years and its down years. CSI definitely has competition with Grey’s Anatomy now on Thursday night, but the show is still going
gangbusters, and it’s going into its seventh season and it’s still the number
one scripted show on TV. CSI: Miami
is still [one of the most successful shows around] the globe, and that’s
fantastic. CSI: NY is doing
great. There’s a lot of life in them. People asked during the very first season
of CSI, “How are you going to
do 100 of these shows?” My response always was, “As long as people keep finding
unique ways to kill each other, we’ll always have stories.” And as long as we
always tell a good mystery, and we always tell it in a compelling manner with
great science, the audience will come to us. Nobody ever walks out of a good
mystery. That’s what we strive for—a really good mystery.

WS: How do you introduce new storytelling techniques
with your other shows?

LITTMAN: It has to be organic within the show. That’s the
most important thing. In Without a Trace, it was very organic to have the ghosting of missing persons, and the
way we morphed into the flashbacks was perfect for that show. In Cold Case, it’s the same thing. We’re doing a time-travel
show, and we use music and film stock in those flashbacks to always make it
look exactly like the period that they’re in. [Those techniques] created that
ability for that narrative. With our new show Justice, we are taking you to a new place in the law
profession that never gets seen—behind the scenes. Visually, we’re doing
the story at a much faster pace than a normal courtroom show has ever been done
before. We’re shooting the courtroom like you’ve never seen it, to give you a
different perspective and different look at defense law. And the style of the
show is to always look at every scene from a different angle than you’ve seen
it before.

WS: All your series have self-contained episodes as
opposed to serialized ones, where plot lines continue from episode to episode.
Was that done by design?

LITTMAN: It was by design to a certain extent. We as a
company love this type of television show. We chose self-contained episodes
from a business standpoint, too, because they’re just more valuable at the end
of the day. It’s a form of storytelling that we like, and we’re a company not
only full of executives and producers that make television, but we all watch
television, and a lot of it! And it’s the shows we find ourselves gravitating
to. We know what we do best and what we enjoy doing seven days a week, 24 hours
a day, so we’ve sort of stayed in the area that we find the most interesting.

WS: How do you nurture talent and get the best from
the people who work for you?

LITTMAN: To really nurture talent, you have to be in the
boat with them. And you have to create an environment so they feel very
protected and very safe, where they can spend the bulk of their time creatively
and generating great stories and great scripts. We take on a lot of the
day-to-day management, the minutia and dealing with larger issues that they
don’t have time for. And we protect their vision. A lot of times writers feel
themselves left alone to battle either a studio or a network that might have a
different viewpoint of how the series should go that wasn’t necessarily what
the writer had conceived of originally. It’s a tough process—the amount
of layers you have to get through to get a show from concept to air, and we
find that we can be very helpful in just guiding and standing right with the
writers and saying, “You know, we’re here to protect you and we’re here to help
you understand.” And I think that the writers that work with us really respond
to that. They always feel that they have a safe haven. To get great work out of
people you first have to get them relaxed and comfortable.

WS: What’s been your experience with the networks? Do
you get a lot of notes as you produce your shows?

LITTMAN: I have to be honest with you. We come to it from a
somewhat different perspective. We have very good relations with all the
networks we work for. They pay the bills. They’re putting the show on their
air. So when you go into the process, you have to be an adult about it and say,
“Wait a minute, we’re on their network, they really get to call the shots.” A
good note is a good note, no matter where it comes from. We have assistants in
our office who will read scripts and go, “What about…?” And we’ll say, “Oh, my
God, that’s great, what about that!” But it is a big process. At the beginning
of a show, there are a lot of voices. That is part of why we’re here. We’re
there with our show runners to help guide them through all those voices, to
really interpret the notes that are being given. But you know what? It’s the network’s
dime, and we respect that. We work within their process.

WS: And talking about dimes, how can you contain costs
the best you can, and yet put the quality you want on the screen?

LITTMAN: It’s an extraordinary struggle. One network
executive who’s been in the business a long time said to me, “You know what?
I’ve been in this business through lean times, I’ve been in this business
through flush times and it goes in cycles, and we’re in a lean cycle.” And we
are. It is a very, very difficult task. The money is basically flat, yet costs
of production do keep going up. Partly because the bar has been raised so high
and the audience now has larger TVs and better TVs and so many other outlets to
entertain themselves on, that you have to compete with that. And the networks
and the studios are really going to have to figure out the answer. We
ultimately get told what we can make a show for. Sometimes you can flourish
under some constraints and really think in different ways. The reality is
that’s where the business is now, and you have to work within that and try not
to just rack up a level of debt at which point the show becomes financially
unfeasible, and both the network and the studio want to cancel it.

WS: You have specialized in dramas. Would you like doing
a comedy? Would you be interested?

LITTMAN: We did a comedy last year on
the—unfortunately crumbling—WB, so it didn’t see much light of day
when it premiered in the spring. But comedy is definitely a big area that we
want to explore. We’re going to develop a couple this year and we’ll keep
intrepidly knocking [on doors] and hopefully we’ll have something.