Backstage Exclusive: Shooting Las Vegas

To capture the (fictional) dark side of the city, popular forensics drama CSI goes behind the scenes at Ka at the MGM Grand

By Steve Friess
Vegas – October 2006

There was a time when Marg Helgenberger and William Petersen could be out on the Strip in their now iconic black Windbreakers picking over a fictitious crime scene and, even with film crews swarming them, nobody would pay much mind.

Six lucky years later, deep in the bowels of the Ka theater at the MGM Grand, the same actors are pacing through the routine processing bit that opens yet another season of America’s most popular drama, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It’s a tedious experience, cramped in a dark, hot, labyrinth-like corridor beneath the Cirque du Soleil production’s hypertechnological stage, and all Helgenberger and Petersen have to do — about a zillion times — is walk off an elevator and around a corner.

Yet for this their every move is being followed by a battery of rapt entertainment journalists from Jan Karl to Julie Chen, not to mention awestruck Ka performers and technicians. And with just the whiff of anything CSI occurring on the premises — no matter how far out of reach — gaggles of fans loiter hour after hour near the theater’s entrance hoping for a glimpse of their favorite fictional forensic scientists.

Going from “Who Are You,” as their theme song infectiously toots, to this kind of fame can only be as dizzying as those weekly swooshing aerials of the Strip. Vegas has been the setting for plenty of popular television shows, both permanently and in sudden bursts intended to juice up the ratings, but rarely has a show become so firmly connected with the city’s identity. To wit, a few years ago the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority polled Australians about what they’d want to see if they came here, and, along with Caesars Palace, showgirls and the Hoover Dam, “the place where CSI is shot” came in near the top five, according to a top LVCVA official.

“That’s great,” says executive producer Carol Mendelsohn, who had not heard about that research before. “The San Fernando Valley, where we film, does look a lot like Las Vegas off the Strip. But when we really need to be on the Strip, whether it’s the Paris or Venetian or Mirage behind us, we come here. There’s no substitute.”

The show started out having a peculiarly awkward relationship with the city. Unlike the NBC prime-time soap Las Vegas, whose producers vowed to film large chunks here but quickly realized that would be untenable and prohibitively expensive, CSI was set in Vegas only grudgingly by Jerry Bruckheimer Television and with no significant commitment to the town. Show creator Anthony Zuiker pushed to put his crime procedural here because he’s a Vegas native and because, as mentioned in the pilot, the city’s crime lab is the second-most active in the United States, after the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Plus, the transient nature of the city, both on and off the Strip, creates unusual mysteries for the TV sleuths to solve.

“They said, ‘Okay, you can set it in Las Vegas as long as Las Vegas is not a character. The show needs to be set in Anywhere, U.S.A.,’” Mendelsohn recalls. “Those were our marching orders and, hence, our flyover shots that are so iconic for CSI, in which the camera would go down the Strip and then veer off. That is how we got our geography. Everybody was concerned that we could be perceived as doing a show about Vegas instead of a show about forensics.”

Ironically, spin-offs of the show were set deliberately and explicitly in Miami and New York. (The franchising decision angered many involved in the original, including Helgenberger. Petersen, in fact refused to appear in any other versions of CSI.)

And clearly, Vegas-as-a-character has become more central, with the cast and crew popping in about four times a season to shoot on location. The 2006-07 season-opening two-parter, in fact, features three deaths in uniquely Vegas circumstances: an accidental death backstage at Ka, a suicide from a rooftop nightclub overlooking the Strip, and a murder on Fremont Street.

Still, as desirable as it is to be featured on the popular show, casinos and other entities are cautious of how they will be portrayed. Even Cirque du Soleil, which heavily courted CSI for years before the Ka scenes, needed to be sure the TV program wouldn’t suggest that Cirque has an unsafe operation or that its performers are homicidal maniacs. The CSI folks tread carefully every time they use real places to shoot so they don’t disrupt their own access, admits director Ken Fink, who handled the series opener.

“The casinos are usually incredibly good to us, but they’re not so happy to have a crime take place there because they don’t want it to translate to prospective customers that it’s a dangerous place,” Fink says. “I understand that, although everybody knows this is a TV show. People aren’t going to say, ‘I saw a crime at the MGM on CSI, let’s not stay there.’”

Many of those involved — including Helgenberger, who stars as blood-splatter expert Catherine Willows — believe CSI would benefit from more on-site shoots.

“It informs how the characters relate to one another,” says Helgenberger, who rose to fame as the star of the critically acclaimed ABC drama China Beach. “You just can’t get that in California. I mean, a lot of things take place out in suburbia, and we don’t need to go to Vegas for any of that stuff, nor should we, because that would just be a waste. But when we do go to Vegas, they want to get their money’s worth.”

Yet Fink notes that sometimes the scene he envisions doesn’t quite exist. He scouted every rooftop club in Vegas for the scenes in the opener but ended up building one on a sound stage surrounded by green screens so he could digitally insert the perspective of the Strip he wanted.

“Just because we’re not shooting there doesn’t mean the ethos of the city isn’t permeating the show,” he says. “I can bring the Vegas skyline into my show, or the suggestion of a casino, whenever I want.”

Mendelsohn isn’t sure how long the show will continue — it remains atop the ratings, and that other popular crime drama, Law & Order, seems to have perfected the art of the perpetual TV run — but Helgenberger says she’s unlikely to stay past her contract, which ends in 2008.

The actress does admit she’ll miss one aspect of the show when she’s done. “I’ve always liked shooting in Vegas, it’s such a character. It’s so visually stimulating.”     ♦