Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
34 I m ps e . o rg created for the show was lost after it was canceled. As is typical in television, the schedule was tight. "You were making things every week, and that was the tough part," he recalls. "I'd try and get as much ready as I could a couple of weeks before we got an episode, so that when the show was turned over to the editors, I had the sound effects pretty well set, and could tell them the right spots to put everything. I also always insisted on having a sound effects editor at every mix." With his crew, Grindstaff created the signature sounds of the series. For the turbo-lift doors opening, the main element was a shoe squeak. One of his challenges was to create the sounds for the cute but invasive Tribbles, basically balls of fur. "I had to go from a single Tribble to the sounds of thousands of them filling the ship," he said. "I ran them backward and forward, put them on the variable speeder and edited loops, so I could have multiple tracks and mix them at different levels for different spots in the ship. The Tribbles, they would rear up and be mad at you," he said, "so I'd use a screech owl for that," as well as the sound of a squeaking balloon. In scenes where they were calm, he used the murmuring sound of doves or rats squeaking. Grindstaff said the most difficult episode was for the backdoor pilot "Assignment: Earth," which had a computer even more advanced than the one on the Enterprise. Grindstaff recalled that on arriving for work, "the secretary gave me 11 pages of notes that Roddenberry had dictated to her on that one episode." To create the sound of the Enterprise transporter, he blended a few musical effects and electric generator sounds. Then he would create his own fades by shaving the mag sound with a razor blade. "I created my own fades because I didn't trust the mixers to get it the way I wanted it," Grindstaff said in an interview with CineMontage. "We also did all our own Foley and ADR looping." For the background in the transporter room, he recorded an IBM Selectric typewriter hum up close. The Selectric was still a new device at that point. Roddenberry wanted a different sound for each section of the Enterprise. The sound of the ship's engines was created partly from that of a noisy air-conditioner. "In a lot of cases, I used the same background, only treated differently. By slowing it up and adding something to it, you came up with a different effect. I don't know how to explain it, but I could just see it and get the background that will just fit." Ben Burtt, the sound designer of Star Wars and the voice of R2-D2 and Wall•E, said in CineMontage, "Each place that you went on the ship had a different tonality and sound to make it clear to the audience where you were, and that hadn't been done in science fiction." When Burtt was hired to work on Star Trek (2009), the first thing he did was put in more of the original sounds (although after talking to Grindstaff, he re-recorded them for better fidelity). "The key to it—and Grindstaff must have had a good ear for this—the sounds were very musical," Burtt said. "When you pressed a button to activate something on Spock's workstation, it played a little melody. It wasn't just a single beep or electronic noise." At Roddenberry's insistence, each planet visited by the Enterprise had to have its own sound, Grindstaff would use variations of an orchestra tuning up. Grindstaff knew that the sounds had to be "futuristic," but synthesizers were new (the Moog was introduced a year before the pilot was mixed), hard to find, and expensive, so he hired Jack Cookery to record a Hammond organ playing electronic sound effects. "I had him for one day. That's all the studio would pay for." In an interview with Cinefantastique magazine, Grindstaff explained that to create one sound effect, "I had a two-and-a-half-ton truck dump a bunch of dirt on a stage. The head of the department just about came unglued," he said. For the flying aliens in Operation: Annihilate! he used … a kiss. "Gene and I got along really well. They needed that old computer sound with telemetry. I had about three or four telemetry setups of the computer. I told him which one I liked, and he said, 'No, Doug, this one's great. I like this one.' I said, 'Gene, it's going to drive you crazy.' 'No,' he said, 'This is beautiful what you've done.' We got on the dubbing stage, and about halfway in the show, he turns around and says, 'Doug, you were right. The thing is starting to drive me crazy. Can you fix it?' Well, I had already anticipated this, so I just had to walk up to the mixer and say, 'Close these, open these. And Gene just looked at me, because I knew." When asked by Roddenberry to work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Grindstaff turned it down. "Not long before that, I had gone to see Star Wars, and I flipped out," he says. "I said to myself, 'Man, we blew it; we should have made a Star Trek movie a lot sooner.'" He had no idea that Star Trek would become a cultural landmark. "If I had only known, I would have kept stuff like you wouldn't believe," Grindstaff said to Audible in 2016. "But I didn't realize it. No one did." In the same interview, he made a confession, "I never tell anyone on the show how I made a sound, not even Roddenberry. Once they know, the magic is lost." Grindstaff died peacefully in Peoria, Arizona, on July 23, 2018, at the age of 87. https://cinemontage.org/sound- effects-original-star-trek/ https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/03/obituaries/ douglas-grindstaff-star-trek- sound-whiz-dies-at-87.html https://www.startrek.com/ article/remembering-douglas- grindstaff-1931-2018