Memorabilia

Television Shows

The FineDay founder David Watkinson has donated crew gifts and other memorabilia from his 43-year Hollywood career to help fund The FineDay Academy.

He’s currently organizing and presenting the memorabilia and memories for his work on movies from 1980 to 2004. Soon he’ll present here memorabilia and memories for Bones, Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville and other shows starting with Criminal Minds.

Criminal Minds

THE STORY BEHIND MY CRIMINAL MINDS CREW JACKET

Before working on Criminal Minds, I had spent years working on major feature films helping actors look like they were actually controlling all the content I created for their screens (everything from small computer monitors to enormous wall displays.)

On feature films, I often operated the displays myself; on television shows I usually programmed them so our on-set “Playback Operator” could easily control them.

When Bones began production, it hired an outside company to provide the show’s playback services. I worked for that company.

The same company was also hired by Criminal Minds to provide its playback services. When the person creating the Criminal Minds content had to step away because of a health issue, my boss begged me to take over that show, even though I was already handling Bones.

I agreed and enjoyed working with the people on Criminal Minds. I attended the show’s regular production meetings at a studio not far from my apartment in Santa Monica. But creating playback content for two network television series at the same time was a heavy workload. So I was quite happy when my boss finally found someone else to take over Criminal Minds for the following season.

Then things became amusing.

For the next season, Criminal Minds moved to another studio. My boss wasn’t happy about the move because the previous studio had been only about half a block from his home, while the new one was considerably farther away.

I later heard what happened at the first production meeting for the new season. One of the producers looked around the room and asked:

“Where’s David?”

My boss replied:

“He was so annoyed that you moved to a studio so far away that he quit the show.”

So apparently, without knowing it, I had quit Criminal Minds over my commute!.