MUMBAI: CSI mastermind Anthony Zuiker has signed a two-year deal with CBS Studios.
He will remain as an executive producer of the three “CSI” series, but the focus under the new deal will be on developing new projects — primarily scripted and reality TV as well as publishing and cross-platform storytelling — through his production company Dare to Pass.
Zuiker came up with the name for the shingle after ABC famously passed on the Touchstone TV-developed CSI which ended up at CBS.
“If you pass on a project it may end up somewhere else,” Zuiker said. “I‘m daring them to pass.”
Weinberg, most recently a partner atmanagement/ production company Guy Walks Into a Bar, was the last person Zuiker interviewed for the job, but the two go back 10 years, before Zuiker became an overnight success with his first TV pilot script, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
At the time, Weinberg worked with Zuiker‘s longtime manager Margaret Riley and helped him with a feature script on which he was working. “I remember (Weinberg) brought out the best of me in writing the story,” Zuiker said.
Besides his relationship with CBS, Zuiker has been working on Level 26: Dark Origins, a multimedia “digi-novel” that Zuiker described as “an edgy version of CSI. Slated to be published by Dutton on Sept. 8, it‘s a book supplemented with three-minute “bridge” videos — on which Zuiker made his directorial debut — featuring characters from the novel.
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