Jack Kerouac had this quote that it took him three weeks to write On The Road but seven years to live. Talk to me about Criminal Minds and the weaving of fact and fiction in your storytelling.
A couple months after I had my bone marrow transplant, I got a call. I was in isolation at my home. I was in and out of the hospital, I think it was two months after my transplant and I was living in a clean environment in my home and that meant no other human beings could come in because I couldn’t survive anybody else’s germs. So i got a call from a buddy of mine who said ‘hey, I’m taking this actor around and he wanted to talk to profilers but the guy said isn’t there anyone around here with any personality?’ and he said ‘Would you mind talking to this actor?’ And I said ‘You can’t come to my house but I can meet you if I wear gloves and a mask. I’m just not allowed to have contact with humans at this point, I still don’t have a good, functioning immune system. ‘And he said fine and so we met at a bagel shop and Mandy Patinkin walks up to me and he goes ‘HI, I’m Mandy Patinkin,’ and I go ‘Of course you’re Mandy Patinkin, you think I’m stupid?’
And he laughed and you know I just felt like breaking the ice because I felt like a jerk with all this stuff on, but he said ‘Tell me your worst case and your best case.’
And I said ‘I’m not gonna tell you my worst case because it’s not for entertainment purposes and I don’t want to burden anybody else with it, it’s horrible. I hate that I have to know it myself, but I’ll tell you my best case.’ And I tell him the story of Davry Chen, who was a six-year-old boy that was abducted. And very late in the game they called me and I was able to figure it out right away and I was able to direct them to where the guy was and they didn’t believe me and I had to fight with the police and the DA to get them to kick in the door and when they finally did, they found him, he was barely alive, but we saved his life. I showed Mandy a picture that I keep in my wallet ever since then, of that boy because most of the cases don’t turn out like that, most of the cases have horrible endings and all we can hope for is to put the bad guy away so he can’t do it again. So this was the case that motivated me. When I told Mandy that, he called up Mark Gordon of Mark Gordon Productions and told him,‘I will do the show.’ And that show was Criminal Minds. A couple months later he brought me out to meet the show runner and the writers and I started telling them stories and those stories all ended up as episodes and I became the technical advisor. I would make sure all the profiling was correct and what I did was I made sure it was authentic. Writing stories, ripping them from the headlines, they would use my stories but blend them together. So we don’t just use one case, we’d take aspects of one and another and maybe another and we’d blend them together. So we’re not exploiting or reminding the victims or their family of what happened to them. But we can use the lessons we learned from those cases to help teach people how to be safe. And I’ll tell you that twice now, since I did this, since I started with Criminal Minds, and it’s been ten seasons now, I just wrote the finale for Criminal Minds this season, it’s airing May 6th by the way, and twice now I’ve had people call me and say ‘you’ve saved my daughter’s life’ or ‘you’ve saved my niece’s life because she learned something that she saw on Criminal Minds and she used that to help get out of a situation where her life was in danger.’ That, in and of itself, is enough. It’s better than I could have wildly expected, but I was hoping to teach people through Criminal Minds. Because network television reaches millions of people, tens of millions of people in the United States, like maybe a hundred million people worldwide. That is an amazing thing. It’s an opportunity to teach people while they are being entertained.
So that’s how I got into TV writing, but writing my book was a totally different thing. I actually wrote it out not intending to publish it at all. I wrote out my story as a therapeutic exercise. I was told that taking it from the theoretical side of your brain, to the practical side of your brain by actually writing it down by hand, is therapeutic in one sense. Then I also found that when I got done writing the story, no matter how bad it was, it was finite and it was somehow more manageable. It wasn’t as horrible as it used to be. But after that, I put it on the shelf. It took me maybe a few months to write it down; it took me thirty years to publish it because it was such an important and difficult story to tell.
