Anthony E. Zuiker Biography

Anthony E. Zuiker (pronounced , ; born August 17, 1968) is the creator and executive producer of the American television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He produces all three editions of the CSI franchise: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. Besides his work on CSI, he also founded the murder mystery show Whodunnit?. He also assisted in the writing of Terminator Salvation. He is currently involved in Blackbox TV, a YouTube series and is the executive producer and writer of the web series Cybergeddon.

Life and career

Zuiker was born in Blue Island, Illinois, in the same hospital as CSI: NY star Gary Sinise. When he was six months old, his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where his mother, Diana, worked as a blackjack dealer, and his father as a Maître d'. Zuiker attended Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, for three years and then transferred to the University of La Verne in La Verne, California, before transferring to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he graduated. During all four years he was involved in competitive forensics, advancing as far as semifinals at the national speech tournament.

At the University of La Verne, he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

In a talk at the International Mystery Writers Festival in June 2008, Zuiker said that he was working as a tram driver in Los Angeles when he came up with the idea for the series. He said he was about to go out to play basketball with some friends when his wife asked him to stay in and watch The New Detectives on the Discovery Channel. "I decided to stay, and that changed everything". He also freely admitted that he knew nothing about writing for TV and therefore his pilot script "broke all the rules," thereby creating the programs' characteristic visual and storytelling styles. He also attended Chaparral High School which is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. The picture of the theatre is the school theatre at Chaparral High.

Criticism

On October 25, 2007, he received the Big Brother Award Austria 2007 in the category of communication and marketing. The jury stated among other things, "The CSI television series present computer surveillance, DNA-analysis and the overthrow of civil rights in an uncritical, trivialized and dangerously onesided kind of way". Furthermore the rights of people in general and the suspects in particular would be pictured primarily as impediments of investigations.

Books

On September 8, 2009, Zuiker released Level 26: Dark Origins, a book with associated web-based motion picture and interactive elements which he terms a "digi-novel". Zuiker has produced 20 cinematic cyber-bridges, which readers will be prompted to view online using special codes embedded in the book's text every 20 pages or so. The Level26.com website and online community was created with the help of Miles Beckett, the creator of hit faux vlogger lonelygirl15. "I wanted to tell a story 'too hot' for television while at the same time giving the existing crime reader a different experience," says Zuiker.

On October 14, 2010, Level 26: Dark Prophecy was released and a third Level 26 book was released in 2011; it was also released as an iPad application, which was designed and developed by Hooray.

Sqweegel, the forensic-proof serial killer from the first Level 26 novel, appeared in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Zuiker posted on his Twitter page that Sqweegel might appear in another episode, which makes his return more likely since fans are voting on it and since Sqweegel is not mentioned in the second book. Fans have hoped that he would return in time for the season finale, but reports have shown that he won't return in time. By the season eleven finale of CSI, Carol Mendelsohn revealed that fans can expect to see a familiar nemesis during season twelve, possibly hinting Sqweegel's return, but instead turned out to be the former under sheriff McKeen, who murdered Warrick Brown, one of the former lead characters.

Philanthropy

A new school theater is named after him: the Anthony E. Zuiker Theater at the Chaparral High School (Nevada). Zuiker is a 1986 graduate of this high school.