Gary Scott Thompson is a man who knows how to please the crowds.  He wrote the high-octane action film The Fast and the Furious, which spun off two sequels.  He also created the NBC drama Las Vegas, which enters its fifth season tonight at 9pm.  Thompson has the eye for what people want to see: beautiful people like Josh Duhamel and Molly Sims put in dangerous and wildly extravagant situations.  Season 4 ended with several cliffhangers, including a bomb exploding in the casino and the former owner being eaten by a giant squid.  If Ed Wood and Michael Bay collaborated, this is probably what they'd make.

BuddyTV spoke to Gary Scott Thompson all about the new season of Las Vegas, the circumstances under which James Caan is leaving, and the excitement of the cast's mothers when Tom Selleck was added to the show for this year.  Below you will find a complete transcript as well as the mp3 audio file of the interview.

Hi, this is John from Buddy TV, and we're talking to Gary Scott Thompson, the executive producer and creator of the NBC series Las Vegas. How are you doing, Gary?

I'm great, thanks.


OK now, your show is about to enter its fifth season. When you started, were you expecting it to last this long?

Not to sound arrogant, but that's always the plan, to get it to 100 episodes. At the time I actually thought we had something that wasn't on the air, that no one was doing. It was five seasons ago, so there was a lot of procedural dramas, a lot of cop stories. There was no one who was really doing anything fun, that was just fun and funny, and just pure entertainment. I thought we had a good shot.


And before you started on television, you were involved in feature films, you wrote The Fast and the Furious. What brought you to television?

Actually, TV came looking for me, to tell you the truth. After The Fast and the Furious…actually, I'll back that up. I had been approached by TV for a number of years and had really avoided it, just because of the hours. The hours in TV are extremely long, and it's basically a 24/7 job, and I had little kids and just really didn't think that was fair to them. I wanted to be there and see them take their first steps, and just take them to school and do all those great things. And so I avoided it for a number of years, until my kids got into school. And then after The Fast and the Furious, sort of the offers were fast and furious. Every studio in town wanted to develop something with me for TV, and I had a great relationship with the people at NBC, and that sort of happened.


When Las Vegas eventually runs its course, would you ever want to do television again? Or have you been turned off the medium?

No, I love the medium, I've always been a TV addict, even as a kid, I remember it was the greatest thing in the world. My mother, I'd come home from school I'd turn on the TV and she would yell at me and say I'd never get anywhere in life if I sit around and watching TV all day, which I remind her of constantly.


As an executive producer and creator of the show, what exactly do you do on the show? Because the writer and the director and the actor, that's all clear. But executive producer, a lot of people are unclear on what that person does.

As an exec producer on a show, and in this case it's called a show runner, where you're in charge of everything. You're in charge of budgets, you're in charge of casting. You're in charge of hiring the directors, hiring the writers, overseeing every script, making sure that all the voices are correct, and dealing with the actors, dealing with the production. Basically everything you could think of. I also write and I also direct, so I'm involved in all facets of those. The biggest thing I think as the show runners are making sure that the scripts are uniform, that the voices are always constant. That the storylines actually make sense, and that they are consistent throughout the entire season. And then you go into the editing room and do all the cuts.


Obviously the big change with the new season that everyone's talking about is the departure of James Caan, one of the show's stars and being replaced by Tom Selleck. How did that all come about?

Well, I don't like to use the word “replaced,” because first of all, I don't think you can replace Jimmy Caan, and second he's not replacing in terms of the same character doing the same thing. Tom Selleck's coming in as the new owner of the Montecito. As our loyal fans know, we sort of have a problem with our owners. They fly off the roofs of buildings, they get eaten by giant squids, they end up in prison for doing bad things. So it'll be interesting to see if Mr. Selleck's character, A.J. Cooper can stay around longer than the previous owners. In terms of Jimmy's departure, he just wanted to go off and do features again, and four years is a lifetime in this business. Especially with someone who's sort of, I guess for lack of a better word, approaching the end of his career. And that's only because age-wise, as we grow we start to lose out on job. I think Jimmy just really wanted to go off and do features again before he felt he couldn't. He'd taken himself out of them for four entire years, and as I said, this town has a very short-term memory. I think he just wanted to jump back in while he could.


Definitely. And I'm just wondering with getting Tom Selleck, when you realized, “We need a new owner for the Montecito.” Was there a big casting process? Did you figure in and say, “Tom Selleck, that's the guy we want.” Or how did that work?

Yeah, it was pretty much that. There was no big casting processs. When word started to come down, I mean what happened with Jimmy is every year he'd say, “Hey Gar, I got this offer to do a feature, can I do it?” And I'm like, “You can't, because we're…first season we had 23 episodes, second season 24.” You're talking about 10 months out of a year, which is a very small window then to do a feature. Features are anywhere from 30 days to 120 days, and to try and fit them in is pretty tough. And so when Jimmy said “I want to go back and do features,” and we realized that we'd be losing him as well, as we lost Nikki Cox too.

The only one that really came to my mind and one of my casting directors, Camille Patton and my wife, I'll have to give her credit too, was Tom Selleck. All three of us sort of came to the conclusion at the same time, and my wife and my casting director kind of called me within seconds of each other, and said, “Hey, Tom Selleck. Now that's easy to say, but to actually get the man was very difficult, considering he hasn't been a series regular since Magnum [P.I.]. So we floated it out there to his people, and I don't know why, but Tom just called me out of the blue one day and said, “Hey, I'd like to come in and talk you about this.” It was very interesting, because this call and he was like, “Hey Gary, this is Tom Selleck.” And I'm like, “Ooh, cool.” So he came in, and we sat and talked for probably about 14 or 15 hours over seven or eight days. Two hours at a time every day, and just sort of talked through what the show was, what the new character was. And Tom's been very crucial in sort of defining and coming up and helping with who this character is. When you bring someone in new like that, when you're talking about the fifth season of a show, they better be very good.


Exactly. And how is the rest of the cast? Because a lot of people who've been there since the beginning, how do they deal with such a huge shuffle of the stars?

I think that they were a little surprised at first, possibly that there was gonna be a big shuffle. They understand it, people come and people go on TV. They've seen it happen on shows that they liked, the revolving doors on Law and Order and ER, and other shows that are on NBC. It's very common, they knew from day one that this could potentially happen. Especially with someone like Jimmy who's a big movie star, and they also because they're here everyday, know what a grind this is, know how hard it is. Every one of them has had feature offers that they had to turn down, because they couldn't do it. So they know that he's had a lot more because of who he is.

So I think they really understood it, I think it might have been a little bit of a shock at the beginning. But then they understood it, then when they heard Tom Selleck was potentially coming, and once we'd got him signed they were like, “Are you kidding me? How did you get him?” So they were very excited about it. And what it does is really sort of inject new life into the show, because you have not just a new cast member, you have a new actor. A new person, a new persona. I mean, Tom Selleck is a TV icon, and so I think everyone's excited about that. And to a person, all of our remaining cast members, not one of their mothers has been more excited than the other. I mean, the moms are so excited about this. Molly's mom, Josh's mom, like “Oh my God, it's Tom Selleck.” So it's been really good.


With the new season, the new dynamic, can you give our readers anything to look forward to? Are there any big things going on in Las Vegas this year?

Yeah. Where we left off last year was a massive cliffhanger, with every character potentially in jeopardy. We had Vanessa Marcil's character Sam being kidnapped, put in a truck and flown away by one of her whales, Vince Peterson. We had James Lesure's character Mike Cannon chasing after her at the airport. We had Nikki Cox's character Mary Connell at a bar, potentially shooting her father with Josh Duhamel's character, Danny McCoy. And with Jimmy Caan's character Ed Deline, all three of them potentially killing Mary's father. And then we had Molly Sims' character DeLinda Deline in a suite with one of Danny's buddies from the Marine Corps, who has a bomb. There's been an explosion at the end of the season, and that's where we sort of left off. So to say that there's gonna be some changes would be an understatement.

So we've picked up right where we left off, I mean literally, the two seasons overlap each other. It's a fantastic two-hour season premiere, and we premiere on September 28 at 9 on Friday night. And then we're moving to a new time slot at 10 on Friday nights, which I think is gonna be great for the show, because It allows us to push the envelope a little bit more.

But we've got the Danny and DeLinda relationship where we left off, DeLinda's pregnant and Danny doesn't know it. We don't know who killed Mary's father, we don't know if Sam's gonna survive or what's gonna happen to Sam up in this plane with her whale. So that's where we take off, and then also we have the whole thing with the character played by Dean Cain, who's the previous owner. Casey Manning, who was eaten by a giant squid, has left $241 million in back taxes to be paid by his ex-wife Vanessa Marcil, who plays Sam. And she's trying to figure out some way to buy the place, so her and Ed Deline are trying to buy the Montecito, and that's where Tom Selleck's character comes in. He's the new owner, and we see what he's done. So obviously we have a hole in the side of the building, and have to deal with that, and then we have a new owner. And he may decide some people need to stay, and some need to go.


That's definitely a lot to be handling, especially as a show runner. To be juggling that many balls in the air all at the same time, it should be very interesting to see how all those things are resolved.

It's a lot of fun, the season's coming along…we started very early, so we've already shot 11 episodes. We start to shoot our 12th episode, which is a Christmas special, tomorrow morning. And so to really see how this cast, the new cast I guess we'll call it, sort of gels. It's no, I mean as no slight to anyone who's ever been here, but Tom Selleck fits in so well it's as if he's been here from the very beginning, and it's such a strange thing to see. And within three or four minutes of him showing onscreen, you kind of go like, “Wow, it's like he was always here.”



-Interview conducted by John Kubicek
(Image courtesy of NBC)