CSI Files
Captain
<p>The ninth season of <i>CSI: Crime Scene Investigation</i> has seen quite a few changes, starting with the death of Warrick Brown (<font color=yellow>Gary Dourdan</font>) and leading up to the departure of lead <font color=yellow>William Petersen</font>, as well as the addition of two new characters to the cast. Supervising Producer <font color=yellow>David Rambo</font> took the time to discuss the big changes at <i>CSI</i> with CSI Files' <font color=yellow>Kristine Huntley</font> as well as to delve into the story behind his latest episode, <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/csi/season9/young_man_with_a_horn.shtml">"Young Man With a Horn"</a>, which delves into a good deal of Las Vegas history.<p><b>CSI Files:</b> Your latest episode, "Young Man with a Horn" married the rich history of Las Vegas with a very contemporary mystery.<p><b>David Rambo:</b> Thanks! I'm very proud of it. The director was great--<font color=yellow>Jeff Hunt</font>. He was our camera operator for many seasons and then he got his first episode as a director, which I believe was <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/csi/season6/bite_me.shtml">"Bite Me"</a>. And I was on the set with him for that because <font color=yellow>Josh Berman</font> was creating his first pilot for Fox at the time so I was the writer on the set. ["Young Man With a Horn"] was the first one he got to do that I wrote. It was a great collaboration.<p><b>CSI Files:</b> In our last interview, you mentioned you'd been researching it for two years.<p><b>Rambo:</b> Actually a little more than two years. When I started working on <A class="link" HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/csi/season6/kiss_kiss_bye_bye.shtml">"Kiss Kiss Bye Bye"</a> in 2006, I got some research on the history of Las Vegas in the 50s and 60s. I realized even though my parents had gone there and I read about it and I watched the original <i>Oceans 11</i>, which I love, there was a lot of old Vegas I didn't know about. I didn't really know the whole <font color=yellow>Howard Hughes</font> story and the whole Kansas City Mob Story of the founders, which was great to learn. And as I was learning it, guess what--Greg Sanders (<font color=yellow>Eric Szmanda</font>) was learning it, too. And in some of this research, I kept coming across references to this casino called The Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino in Las Vegas. And the more research I did, I realized how really horribly segregated Las Vegas was. They called it "The Mississippi of the West," proudly at the time.<p>And this incredible club had opened. I think the showroom was called Club Rouge, and it was an instant hit, sort of what Greg talked about in the episode for our Chateau Rouge. Within three weeks, most of the audience was white; it was a club that was built in the black neighborhood, just north of Freemont Street. The club was filled with so many famous people and all the headliners on the strip, the white headliners, wanted to see the shows. They had <font color=yellow>Pearl Bailey</font> and The Platters; the house band was The <font color=yellow>Benny Carter</font> Orchestra, one of the great orchestras. They all came after their shows on the Strip, and of course the tourists followed. It's one thing to be in the audience watching <font color=yellow>Frank Sinatra</font> on the stage, but if you followed him to the Moulin Rouge, you could sit at the next table. And the great thing was a source of pride to so many African American people in the whole country. Its opening made the cover of <i>Life</i> magazine in 1955.<p>But the part that intrigued me as a dramatist and a screenwriter was, six months after it opened, it closed. It shut down immediately. People went home from work one night and they came in the next day and there were padlocks on the gate. This fabulous showroom sat completely untouched for thirty-five years. I thought, that's great [because when people went in later] they discovered a moment in time. The Moulin Rouge also played a role in the Civil Rights movement; meetings were held there between the NAACP and most of the Strip hotel bosses.<p><b>CSI Files:</b> I was wondering about that detail, the hotel only being open for six months, and whether that had been lifted from reality.<p><b>Rambo:</b> Absolutely. It was only six months. I tracked down one of the young women who danced there in '55 and she still lives in Vegas and is very forthcoming. She took me to dinner at a Vegas steakhouse and talked a lot about the old days, who came in and what it was like to be a young girl at an exciting, beautiful time. And even though it closed so quickly, people look back on it with such affection. It was almost twenty years [after that] before the lines on Vegas shows were integrated, when they had black and white girls dancing next to one another. So it really was an anomaly. <p><b>CSI Files:</b> Why did the Moulin Rouge close?<p><b>Rambo:</b> It closed because at the time there were only seven or eight hotels on the Strip, so if you take a hundred people out of each of them at midnight to go down to the Moulin Rouge, that's hurting business. Vegas has always only been about the dollar as Catherine says at the end in that scene with Grissom. So that's what did it. They got together and forced the two white guys that owned it to close it. The two guys who owned it were not Vegas regulars. There's a theory that the mob left them alone because they were running the club in the black area, [which] they thought no one would go to.<p>I took [the story] to [Executive Producer] <font color=yellow>Carol Mendelsohn</font>, [and] she said, "It's great, work out a story." It took me a while to get the right story because our show isn't <i>Cold Case</i>; it had to be a contemporary story. So we took the reality singing contest. It's all about who wants to be famous--who wanted to be famous then and who wants to be famous now. Vegas is always trafficking that, so it seemed a natural fit.<p><b>CSI Files:</b> Did you enjoy spoofing <i>American Idol</i>?<p><b>Rambo:</b> We had so much fun creating the character who was the host and producer of the show. It was a lot of fun. <i>American Idol</i> is such a huge hit.<p><b>CSI Files:</b> Are you a fan of the show? There seemed to be a lot of inside references! <p><HR ALIGN="CENTER" SIZE="1" WIDTH="45%" COLOR="#007BB5"><p>To read the full interviews, please click <A HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/interviews/david_rambo2.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
