MAY 2007
Career Change in Hollywood
Photo by David Strick
Trained to be a suit, Josh Berman redirected himself to the talent side of television.
“You turned my pickle into a light bulb?” Sara Sidle couldn’t quite believe that her boss, Gil Grissom, the lead forensic investigator for the Las Vegas Police Department, had just wired both ends of the pickle that accompanied Sidle’s takeout lunch and then flipped the switch. “I’m electrocuting it,” Grissom explained.
The zapping of a borrowed kosher dill to prove a murder is one of the famously quirky scenes in the make-believe world of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The writer and co-producer responsible for this particular slice of weird science is Josh Berman, Princeton grad, Fulbright scholar, and Stanford MBA/JD ’96.
Berman began his career on the business side of television. His interview of Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment, for the GSB student newspaper The Reporter led him to a summer internship at the network. Berman was invited back to NBC after graduation and rose to director of prime-time series before leaving in 2000 to become a writer for the fledgling CBS crime series CSI.
It was an unusual career move. As Berman explains it: “There are two different paths in Hollywood: You can be a suit or you can be the talent. My whole life I was training to be a suit, but I wanted to be the talent. It was a big leap, but I felt more creative, and I felt like it was more rewarding to be a writer than to be somebody who manages writers.”
Berman approached the creative side with the same thoroughness he applied to his earlier pursuits. He took courses in forensic science and attended—even spoke at—conferences of coroners and crime scene investigators. “The conferences put me in contact with real-life CSIs. They’re constantly emailing me story ideas,” Berman says. “One of my most helpful CSIs is in Bakersfield. So when the Bakersfield crime lab needed funding, Jorja Fox, the actress who plays Sara Sidle, and I went up there and helped them persuade the powers-that-be to give them the money.”
Berman’s CSI research bordered on the bizarre. He threw fake bodies off buildings to show the impact that would have on a human. He watched bugs eat pig flesh to approximate an insect’s life cycle on a human corpse. And he learned how to electrocute a pickle.
Ah, yes, the pickle. “The pickle was for an episode where I wanted to explain how electricity works,” Berman says, “and electricity is a really complicated concept.” He searched online for a way to explain it simply and found a children’s science experiment where the kids learn to conduct electricity through a gherkin. “Nobody at the studio believed it would work, so our props people did the experiment on their own, in advance. When it succeeded, everyone started talking about it, and the next thing I knew the entire crew was watching the props guys electrocute pickles.”
CSI was great fun. It also was a solid hit. Berman was writer, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, and/or executive co-producer of 39 episodes between 2000 and 2006. He was nominated for two Emmys and won five People’s Choice Awards.
Over the past year and a half, Berman wrote the pilot for the series Killer Instinct and created and co-produced a 24-type serialized thriller called Vanished. Unfortunately, both shows have done just that, but Berman takes the cancellations in stride. “Just getting Killer Instinct on the air was a success for me,” he says. “I only wrote the pilot, and it went on without me.” As for Vanished, Berman takes solace in the fact that the networks launched six other serialized thrillers last year and all were canceled by January. “I don’t take it as a reflection on me,” he says. “I just look forward to the next challenge.”
That challenge is a contract to develop new shows for 20th Century Fox through 2009. Berman will miss CSI, but he paraphrases another crime fiction writer when he explains his decision to move on. “Twentieth made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he says.
