Behind the scenes with CSI: a romantic, educational experience

MIAMI -- Who says educational television is dead? Rex Linn has learned a lot of stuff since joining the cast of "CSI: Miami." Right at the top of the list: When his acting career is over -- as it could be any minute; more on that in a few paragraphs -- he'll go to work emptying garbage or patching potholes or just about anything but being a crime-scene investigator.\n"We romanticize it in the show," says Linn, who plays Detective Frank Tripp on CBS' loving tribute to South Florida psychosis and homicide. "But it's tricky work. And it's gross, too."\nLinn has done more scenes than he can count with headless torsos and shark--gnawed limbs, but the day it really got to be too much, he and series star David Caruso (playing Lt. Horatio Caine) were supposed to discover the bullet--riddled corpse of a teenage boy in an abandoned cemetery.\n"His head is bloody and there's maggots all over his face and mouth -- 'real' maggots -- and I don't know what it was, but I just couldn't get my lines out," Linn recalls, not at all fondly. "All I had to do was lean over and say, 'Looks like an exit wound,' but every time, I'd start laughing."\n"After a while, David asked me, 'Is there something about maggots you find funny?' The corpse guy, who was a real actor, wasn't digging it too much."\nLinn, Caruso and the rest of the "CSI: Miami" cast have just wrapped up a week of shooting. Most of the show is produced in Southern California, but about five episodes a year are done in South Florida to catch what Caruso (who actually lives in Miami) calls "the power of the city, the seduction of the city."\n"The real fans know the difference between the episodes shot in studios and those done on location," Caruso says. "It's obvious to them."\nSo there they were recently, imposing law and order on the anarchic, rapacious mayhem of the Brickell neighborhood's condo canyons for an especially grisly season finale that will spill across two episodes on May 15 and 22.\nThough the Mala Noche street gang was basically leaving Brickell knee--deep in corpses, the real nemesis of the "CSI" team seemed to be the passing airliners that disrupted scene after scene while the actors wilted in 90--degree heat.\n"Any time you have a noise or an interruption or something that startles an actor, you've gotta start over," said Duane Clark, the director, slightly hoarse from yelling "Cut!" so many times. Finally he gave up and announced that any futzed--up dialogue would be rerecorded ("looped," in TV jargon) in the studio. "We stop for no man or plane!" Clark shouted. "We go, plane or shine."\nThat was fine with Linn, whose shiny pate was visibly pinkening under the sun.