elizabeth.snead

Talk about life, and death, mirroring art. On April 8, Valerie Schields — location manager for the new CSI spinoff CSI: Miami — got an ominous call from the Miami Film Commission office. "They wanted to know if we'd extended our permit and moved location by five blocks," says Schields. "We had been shooting a crime scene on 19th and Collins Avenue on Miami Beach, and they'd had reports we were set up on 14th and Collins." Turns out, the real Miami-Dade CSI had taped off a crime scene there. Real detectives were investigating the murder of Zaida Rootes, a young woman whose body was found in the trunk of her own car. It looked so real — or so unreal — that one of the CSI: Miami actors walked onto the crime scene, thinking it was the crime drama's set. He was then run off by the real cops! Eerily, the gruesome incident is mirrored in the May 9 ep

At the premiere of HBO's upcoming World War II miniseries Band of Brothers — held June 6 in Normandy, France on the 57th anniversary of D-Day — producer/director Tom Hanks faced his most feared critics: author Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book it's based on, and the subjects, the surviving veterans of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne. The 10-part miniseries — which debuts on Sept. 9 — tells these paratroopers' war stories: from two intense years of training to their D-Day jump behind enemy lines through the Battle of the Bulge to capturing Hitler's Eagle Nest. "The truth is we know only a fraction of the memories carried by these men for the past 50 years," Hanks told TV Guide Online. "I just hope to show some of the shared struggles, horrors and triumphs that bond together this band of brothers." After the screening, the clearly shaken vets gave the ambitious project two firm thumbs-up. "It's amazing," C. Ga