Third Victim on Left ...

For a while, I've been giving some thought to the anonymous.

Boy, that sounds a lot more meaningful than it really is, because the anonymous I initially started wondering about were the ones in movies.  You know, in those epic films, when the aliens land or the volcano erupts or whatever, and the shock wave blasts through, followed by the rolling cloud of flame ... all those people you see running in front of it, or sitting in the cars that are thrown about like toys, the people put there by the filmmaker to give scale to the event.  We're all watching the main protagonist, the hero who will dodge into a convenient doorway at the last minute and escape.  But those figures in the background -- we might be given a short glimpse of a pleading face to add pathos to the scene, but little else -- what about them?

Well, naturally, a movie can't be populated entirely by heroes.  That would be ridiculous, not to mention really hard to follow.  Imagine all the plot lines.  However, I often think of a great line by the brilliant novelist Patrick O'Brian.  I can't find it exactly now (I'll add it later, as I have actually copied it into a notebook, the wording is so excellent), but a young character announces he is totally unafraid of death, because he is the hero of his story, and everyone knows the hero never dies.

The quote, I think, is ingenious  in a number of ways (as O'Brian's writing often is), partly because the author would often kill off major characters in his books without so much as a preamble.  Some were simply obliterated offscreen, as it were, in between chapters.  ("After the death of --"  WHAT?!)  However, I think it is more interesting as to what it says to real life, because we all trundle through our own stories, knowing we are at the center of them and everyone else are merely supporting players.  While we can't possibly wrap our heads around the idea of infinite heroes living infinite stories, that's really going on around us all the time.  "The universe," said Muriel Rukeyser, "is made up of stories, not atoms."  It's an interesting thought.

I guess I've been playing around the edges of this concept for some time.  For example, we've been trying to get a project on White House news pictures funded for some 20 years.  The idea is to get some of the old photojournalists that covered the place to tell their stories, and use that to show how a president's image can be permanently shaped by a single photograph, or perhaps a series of images reenforcing each other.

Similar ideas have been done, but usually with either the official photographer, or some big-name photographer like Annie Lebovitz or Harry Benson, who parachuted in to Washington from New York to take a grand tour at covering the presidency.  I was always much more interested in the guys who had been there day in and day out.  You probably know the pictures, but not the photographer.  And I suspect you most likely never will.

Or, for another example, take Star Trek.  After nearly 50 years, it has seen many incarnations, the newest being the second reboot for theater release by J.J. Abrams.

So, you hear that?  At the very end, the noise they cut to, that peeping, sort of sonar like sound.  If you're old enough to have watched the original series in the 60s, you recognize the bridge viewer screen noise.

So let's pause a moment here: that's just one of a spectrum of sounds designed from, well, nothing by a professional to build a realistic bed to make the idea that we're watching guys actually traveling through space.  There's that peep, there's the tones made when they throw switches, there's the iconic whoosh of the doors -- all that stuff was added post production.  Somebody had to come up with it and mix it in.

Have you ever seen outtakes without all that?

The video's terrible, and the audio's pretty muddy, but I think you see what I'm getting at.  It's just flat, like a high school play, without all the rich depth of the additional sound.  The bridge is just another room on a soundstage.

So who did all this?  What genius is celebrated for his work?  It took three Google searches and a great deal of plowing through IMDB to find the name Doug Grindstaff, listed as the Sound Effects Editor.  No personal details, aside from a birthdate of 1935.  Nothing on Wikipedia.  Further searching finds he won five primetime Emmys from 12 nominations.  The last win was in 1987 for "Max Headroom," but none of the nominations was for Star Trek.  All the same, you could only call that a successful and rewarding career, with credits on successful primetime television shows for a solid three decades.

Is he still alive?  As his last credits seem  to be in the late 80s ("Dallas" and "Knots Landing"), I'm guessing he retired.  It would be fun to find him and talk to him, that third guy in the production team on the left, because that ping instantly puts me (and apparently J.J. Abrams) back on the bridge of the old Enterprise.  And that's quite a trick, isn't it?

But in the end, and I guess this is my point, unless someone hunts him down and celebrates what he did, no one save some family and friends, and maybe a few audio obsessives, will remember who Doug Grindstaff was, even as science fiction movies for decades to come draw on the work he did.  He's just become another guy in the crowd, obliterated not by a fireball but by the rolling tide of time.

Maybe we need to take a minute to think about the guys in the crowd.