Beyond CSI: Inside Anthony Zuiker's New Cross-Platform Experiment

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Anthony Zuiker | Photograph by Sam Jones

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CSI: NY, with Gary Sinise, Zuiker, and A.J. Buckley | Photograph by Monty Brinton/CBS

A Man crouches on a 3-foot-by-3-foot glass-top table in a dank basement near the Los Angeles River, just outside of downtown L.A. The man is a contortionist. He's wearing a skintight, hooded latex body condom, bone white, zipped up the back to the top of his head, with holes for his eyes and a zipper over his mouth.

He nonchalantly folds a leg behind his neck and scratches his head with his toes. Next to him is a gallon jar of snails, and on a table, a pile of salt has been cut into lines in the shape of a maze. With a razor blade, the contortionist scrapes the glass clean between the lines, then deposits a snail in the center.

Snails disintegrate in salt, of course, so the dozen or so people watching this scene on a monitor in the next room lean forward, rapt. The contortionist sets his featureless face inches from the glass and tries to coax the creature forward. The snail begins to move, ever so slightly, closer to a wall of salt, and ... stops. No payoff. No spectacular death melt, no triumphant exit from the maze.

"Cut!" Anthony E. Zuiker, the creator and director of this scene, is not happy. "Guys," he yells from the adjoining room, "for the 5,000th time, a dry snail will not move. Please. Dip another snail in shallow water, put him in the hero position, and let's try this again. I've got an actor with his feet behind his neck. Let's get the shot and move on!"

Zuiker is the creator of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, one of the most-watched television franchises in history. Since its launch in 2000, the original CSI or one of its CBS spin-offs -- CSI: Miami and CSI: NY -- has been among the top-rated shows in the United States. There have been almost 500 episodes, airing in nearly 200 countries. As many as 75 million people watch an episode every week. Yet if CSI has become known as a moneymaking machine -- the show has generated an estimated $6 billion in revenue -- it has also defined a signature visual style: supersaturated colors, graphic violence, surprising camera angles, and uncomfortable close-ups. All of which are on display today. Red light washes through the warehouse, a smoke machine hisses a sinister cloud every few minutes, and torture instruments lay scattered about the set.

But the snail sequence is not for CSI. The contortionist is a serial killer named Sqweegel, who's being chased by a brooding, handsome federal operative named Steve Dark. And the scene itself is part of a two-minute video Zuiker is shooting for his first major post-CSI project, something he calls a "digi-novel," a hybrid book/video/Web enterprise titled Level 26 that debuts in September.

Published by Penguin's Dutton imprint, the first book (there will be three) is a bizarrely -- even perversely -- violent murder mystery. Every 20 pages or so, there's a prompt to log on to the Level 26 Web site and enter a code to unlock a two- to three-minute video "cyberbridge," a short scene that brings the story to life and moves it forward, but not so much that you'd miss anything if you just kept reading through. On the site, there's other interactive content, and Zuiker is developing an iPhone app that merges every part of the endeavor -- a "total sensory experience," he says. "I think that's the future of consuming books, period."

Zuiker has enlisted an all-star cast of partners: The creators of Lonelygirl15 and KateModern have built the site (their company, Eqal, also consults for CBS Interactive); Creative Artists Agency is helping wrangle possible product integrations; veteran crime-novel and comic-book writer Duane Swierczynski wrote the actual text around a 60-page treatment by Zuiker; and hip-hop-culture impresario Marc Ecko was creative director on the book. Zuiker likes to say he's going to "revolutionize the publishing industry." "What I think Anthony means by that," says Dutton president and publisher Brian Tart, who bought all three Level 26 books for a reported $2 million based only on a verbal pitch, "is he's going to expand readership to an extent that hasn't been done since the dawn of the mass market."