Dave: What time is your show on?

William: 9pm

Dave: You know this will be great, because your show CSI has done very well on Friday which, I don’t need to tell you, is not necessarily in TV a big night. Most people go out.

William: Some people go out.

Dave: And then others come in while you’re out and steal your TV. But the show has been such a hit on Friday, which is virtually an impossible task, especially here and they’ve not moved it to Thursday following Survivor. The thing is going to go through the roof. You must be very excited.

William: Well, we’re thrilled. Yeah, it’s an honor to do that. I mean Thursday is a great night of television, there’s a ton of great television on Thursday night.

Dave: That’s right. It’s a big night everywhere. We’ve got Survivor blockbuster and there you go, you’re going to the moon.

William: Right on to Dan Rather. Right behind us.

Dave: Tell people about CSI. What do you do?

William: We’re crime scene investigators.

Dave: I see. That’s all you need to know. Do you know anything about crime? Have you ever committed a crime?

William: No, no, I’ve always been on the right side of the law.

Dave: Good for you, I appreciate that.

William: These guys are very interesting. I mean, they’re scientists.

Dave: When you hear the word forensics applied in this context, what does it mean exactly? Forensics, I think of things theatrical.

William: Well, forensics basically is an argumentative exercise, only it’s allowable in a court of law so we can use it as a deductive basis for proving different things. They use it in pathology and they use it in crime investigation. It’s a way for us to take some piece of evidence and prove what actually happened. Which is what’s very different about these guys and the homicide guys because homicide guys like to chase down what we like to think are people’s accounts, which are often varied. These guys can tell you that regardless of what they said this is what actually happened. These clues lead us to believe that this happened and therefore this guy is innocent or guilty.

Dave: Deductive reasoning but refined to a very high extreme. How was your Super Bowl Sunday? Did you have a nice Super Bowl?

William: It would have been better had the Giants won. Not that I’m a Giants fan, but we all had money on them.

Dave: Were you at the game because I know CBS flew its stars down to the game.

William: No, we were working on this very show, CSI, in Vegas so I had the whole crew over to my hotel sweet. We had about 70 guys in this tiny room all with money on the Giants, so it was a long afternoon.

Dave: Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Did you host the event?

William: Yeah, we made some chili, had some sandwiches, drank some bear.

Dave: Right there in the hotel?

William: Right there in the hotel.

Dave: I appreciate that. That’s nice.

William: Hotel’s cleaning up still today.

Dave: Now you spent some time in the Midwest doing some theater?

William: A lot of time.

Dave: Where was that?

William: Chicago.

Dave: What did you do there?

William: Well, we started a theater company in 1980 and did off and on 30-40 productions there along with all the guys from Stepenwolf.

Dave: This is John Malcovich and others?

William: Yeah, it was an amazing time in Chicago from 1975-1980. I mean, every one of my friends had gone on to have really sort of fabulous careers.

Dave: It was a good group of folks.

William: Yeah.

Dave: Now, whenever we have someone from that group or whatever they’re connected to now, you read about them, that in their productions people often get hurt on stage. Now, is that true? Is it a coincidence? Was it a theme of the theatrical company?

William: I think that all of us weren’t so sure on how talented we were. We just knew that we had to work as hard as we could and do as much as we could in order to make these shows work. I mean they called it rock and roll theater back then, but we didn’t know how to do a lot of stuff, so when it came time to stage fight or any of that we just did it.

Dave: So, were you injured?

William: I was injured all the time. I was mind of the poster boy for Band-Aids. I cut a finger off during a show. I had to stop the show.

Dave: Was it part of the play?

William: Actually Sam Shepherd wrote all these plays that I kept getting injured in. Truth of Crime I was having a knife fight, the guy’s having a knife fight on the stage, an imaginary one with himself and I missed.

Dave: So you just took your finger off.

William: Yeah, I opened it up, fell open and I had to say "I gotta go to the hospital, sorry, no more show."

Dave: And that’s the end of the show. How big was the theater?

William: Small, about 120 back then.

Dave: So now everyone sees you removing your finger.

William: Yeah and then they go home and never want to come back to the theater again. One night I was doing another show, actually it was Stepenwolf, we were doing another Sam Shepherd, Fool for Love. I had to lasso a chair in front of my girlfriend cause I was showing off. I dragged the chair across the stage and I had rigged the chair with these screws. I would loosen them up before the show so I could break the back of the chair over my head just to show off. One night I broke the chair and the screw went right into my neck. And I thought for a second I had done the jugular because it was just pouring blood and I thought "uh-oh.’ My career’s over in ten seconds, like done and gone. Then I realized it wasn’t but I had to keep doing the show and I couldn’t stop the blood. Eventually I took my shirt off and tied it around my neck.

Dave: The old tourniquet around the neck.

William: Yeah, and we finished the show.

Dave: When stuff like this happens do people think this is part of it? Or do they think this is very strange? It must put the audience off a little bit.

William: At that point they thought I was psychotic and they weren’t sure they wanted to be in the room. There were a lot of times back then that they weren’t sure they wanted to be in the room.

Dave: Now have you ever worked on live theater when you were drunk? I know a lot of guys who’ve done theater have worked drunk.

William: Well, I actually was in Stepenwolf in that very same play when the director asked me if I’d do an experiment cause the guy’s drinking tequila throughout the whole thing. So, of course, the actor I was working with was horrified that this possibility might happen.

Dave: Normally you’re just drinking water? What happened?

William: Well, the performance was kind of fabulous, I think.

Dave: I’ll bet.

William: Fortunately, it’s just an hour fifteen-minute show, but the guy keeps swigging on the bottle. I didn’t really get drunk until the end of the show and then I was a lunatic because now I had all this going. I was hammered and I went out on the street and I was like what am I going to do now? So I started running around. Eventually I just fell down right out there on the street.

Dave: All right. So this is great. I want to mention this again. Nine O’clock on Thursday nights right after Survivor. Nice to meet you.

William: Thank you very much, Dave.