Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(71)
When we came back from the tour, I said yes to CSI: NY. Just before we shot the pilot, I met with Anthony and told him I liked the character, but I didn’t feel like a “Rick Carlucci.” Could we change his name? I also wanted to give him a military background before he became a detective, to reflect my support of the troops. Anthony liked my suggestions, and we made the main character a veteran of the Marine Corps who served with the First Battalion Eighth Marines, surviving the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing attack and deploying in Operation Desert Storm. (In the third season, we did an episode called “Charge of This Post” where my character talks about his past with the Beirut bombings.) One of his most memorable lines is when he says he wants to serve his country more than anything else in the world.
Anthony asked me for ideas for a new name, and I gave him a list of suggestions for both the first and last name. The name I liked most was Mac, for obvious reasons. For the last name, I suggested the surname of Lieutenant Dan. Anthony wrestled around with the suggestions, along with some others, before coming to me and saying, “Let’s do it.” Right away, I felt gung ho for my character’s new name: Mac Taylor.
In the spring of 2004, we shot the pilot episode in New York as an episode of CSI: Miami, near the end of their season. David Caruso’s character in Miami must go to New York to follow up with a case, and while there, he meets Mac and the CSI: NY team. Even before the pilot aired, CBS execs decided to proceed, and we started shooting our first regular season in July.
CSI: NY officially premiered September 22, 2004, and the first episode, titled “Blink,” did well from the start with more than nineteen million viewers tuning in. Anthony added the idea that Mac Taylor had lost his wife at the World Trade Center on 9/11. I had become friends with several 9/11 family members by now, so the idea of honoring family members and first responders this way—by having Mac be a character who shares their loss—appealed to me. In the first episode, a crime victim is in the hospital in a coma, her eyes wide open. Toward the end of the episode, Mac Taylor sits with her while nobody else is in the room and shares a story about how, after the 9/11 attacks, he went back to the apartment he shared with his wife. In the closet was a balloon, inflated by his wife, and Mac realized the breath of his now-deceased spouse was still inside that balloon. It’s a beautiful scene.
After that moment in the episode, Mac goes to Ground Zero. We were filming in the summer of 2004, and television crews had not yet been allowed to shoot at Ground Zero. Anthony secured permission, but we needed to go there at 2:00 a.m. when nobody else was around. At the time, Ground Zero was just a big, empty fenced-in pit; nothing had been rebuilt. We took a small crew, and we shot Mac simply standing there, near the pit. There’s no sound, and I rest my head on the fence and close my eyes in thought. You see Mac’s wedding ring on his finger. The camera pulls back and tilts up in a wide shot of the night sky where the Twin Towers used to be. It’s a very powerful moment.
That first season we worked hard and put in lots of long hours. When a show is just beginning, everybody is finding their feet. Between the first and second season, CBS execs took a closer look at the show and decided to reshape its look. The mood of the show was a little dark at first. The offices were set in what looked like a warehouse, and the entire season I wore a dark suit and tie. At the end of the first season, CBS execs decided to rebuild the entire set. Our new offices were now set on the thirty-fifth floor of a high-rise where the sun blasted through the windows and lit up the rooms. In the first episode of the second season, you see us moving boxes into the new offices, and I throw out a line, something like, “I’m just about done moving.” That was all the explanation given. Yet behind the scenes, the move had been major. CBS invested a lot of money in the new set, and the new look really improved the show.
Right around that time I started getting more serious about golf. A number of my buddies played a lot, and I wanted to join them. I’d dabbled for years but had never been much good, always too busy to practice. But now I decided that if I ever found a spare moment, I’d head out to the range and hit a bucket of balls or try to sneak in nine holes between responsibilities. I even took lessons and worked with a pro for a while. Somehow the CBS execs found out.
Each year, CBS televises a big charity pro-am golf tournament sponsored by AT&T. It’s all for a good cause, and the idea is that two professional golfers team up with two amateurs, the foursomes play together, and it’s broadcast on national TV. I still didn’t know much about golf, but somehow in 2005 I got asked to play in the tournament. Actually, the term is “strongly encouraged” to play. CSI: NY was still young, and network execs recognized the opportunity for publicity when announcer could introduce me and plug my new series.
I headed to the tournament in Pebble Beach, between Monterey and Carmel, California, my knees shaking. You play for three days, then if you make the cut, you advance and play a fourth day. Each of the first two days is at a different course. The third and fourth days are at Pebble Beach. Samuel L. Jackson and I were in a foursome together, and each of us was paired with a pro. To call Samuel an “amateur” is misleading. The man is an absolute golf ace. (He’s actually talked publicly about the clause written into his contracts stipulating he gets to play golf at least twice a week while making movies.) The other celebrities in the tournament were all aces too—Andy Garcia, Ray Romano, Kenny G, Michael Bolton, George Lopez, Tom Dreesen, Bill Murray. I, on the other hand, am a golf knucklehead.