You just put your lips together and blow – captioning sudden tragedy

So I needed to get this post out before it trickles away into the æther. It’s a slightly unusual one, in that I have that familiar impulse to write something down, but without that familiar clarity of knowing quite what I want to say. So I thank you in advance for your indulgence.

Last week brought the news home. It was one of those cases where the tide of news grows unexpectedly personal, with a startling suddenness. I refer, of course, to what was undeniably one of those smallest of tragedies. The death of a human, in its merest, abjectest, tiny grandeur. I’m Twitter junkie enough to have read many times the knowing smugnod to the smallness of this event, by many who fancy themselves developed because they claim to be able to really feel the larger tragedies. The murder of Gazans, the climate-riddled victims of the Philippines, the abused and leaky-boated masses and their many irreducible selves. True problems of true magnitude.

But we knew Robin Williams. And in life, not first in death. I saw him myself, just on his last tour. Lucky to catch the beginning, the Sydney Entertainment Centre was having box office problems but he was delayed, by happy accident or beneficent design. He was all of ours, and victim to something so intimately familiar to us all – our dark places, our compulsions and addictions, and (we would later learn) perhaps another slowly marching fate. But I don’t come to bury or praise, both have been done in abundance. This post will quickly become insufferable if it wants for humility and perspective.

See what I did there?

I don’t know if we’ll all Remember Where We Were when we heard of the death of Robin Williams. But it was only last week, so for now we’re on the same page. Probably a Twitter feed, for most of you. It’s certainly my usual channel. There’s probably a think piece (on a different blog) to be had about the odd cultural moment in which we find ourselves, where we can first have momentous events announced to us through the retweets of a condolence post by some former Backstreet Boy. I don’t know if the story of where I was or what I was doing is important or interesting. But it’s about what I do, so here we are.

I remember something you may not about the death of Robin Williams. News of his death broke, even in this 24-hour-news-cycle world of ours, right at the top of the hour. Like a preordained top story, with no pause for context or examination, even by our society’s storytellers. 

I was due to caption a half-hour live stint of a 24-hour news channel. I’ve talked before about what goes into that, and it was looking pretty routine. Mid-morning Sydney time, still caffeine-fresh and whet-tongued. Top of the hour, so I’d expect headlines, top stories in depth, a couple of feature interviews, the top sport stories, and the weather. My co-pilot would usually have more improvised voice-work, as the second half-hour went into a panel discussion of the newspaper headlines, but my allocation should be pretty scripted. I can edit news rundowns very fast, so I didn’t download mine until about 10 minutes to the hour (in case of late changes). I spent my parsimonious prep time before that checking the previous hour’s news packages were tidied. Gaza, Ukraine, local politics, Iraq, Ebola. Tidy rundown, stand by for new analysis, make sure “Hamas”, “Donetsk,” “Ebola,” “Nouri al-Maliki” and “Irbil” are trained and ready to copy in as a backup (they can be tricky). I was running a little slow, so I would tidy the sport in the first ad break and feel either like a badass motherfucking renegade or a goddamn idiot who should have started prepping sooner. Time would tell, I was live, it was a Tuesday.

In truth, it was still a normal allocation when they opened with “In breaking news…” There isn’t generally that much urgency there. The ears prick up, a few sentences are voiced live, and typically there won’t be enough detail yet to report at any length. One expects to hear 20 brief words or so, beginning with “Vladimir Putin has expressed...” or “Israel has fired…” The story proper will have to wait until their reporter on the ground hotfoots it over there, and for now the normal broadcast can resume.

So the story and the ordinary morning routine broke, for me, only as I saw the rudimentary, cobbled-together graphic. It only really indicated that Robin Williams had made the news somehow, but I was thinking quickly. Before they’d started speaking, before I’d started respeaking, I’d surmised that 1) Robin Williams was in the news. 2) It wouldn’t be breaking news unless he was dead or arrested. 3) It wouldn’t be the top story unless he was dead. 4) Robin Williams is dead. 5) Holy shit. 6) Dragon will know “Robin Williams”, but will it know “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Mrs Doubtfire”? Does “Aladdin” have any homophones? And what did he win the Oscar for? Better train it in when I think of it. 7) Will they toss the rundown completely?

So the graphic broke the story for me, mercifully, as while all this thinking was going on, I was starting to do my job and respeak. “In breaking news…” But as you see, I had a few resources by now. I knew what it was going to be about, I knew the first few words which might present problems, and I had taken a precious second and a half to process it for myself. We have three coveted temporary macro slots to type in tricky vocab which comes up unexpectedly and may recur. While I was speaking, I ditched “Donetsk” and “Hamas”, and in went “Good Morning, Vietnam”, “Dead Poets Society” and “Mrs Doubtfire.” Those movies were picked because they were front-of-mind, it worked well enough at first as they seemed to represent a first impression of his career which corresponded to that of the anchor. I guessed even before hearing it that my Dragon may not know the name of the county where he lived, so as they quoted “the sheriff of Marin County” I pre-emptively made him “the local sheriff”. Geographical precision could happen next hour. Robin’s middle name also showed up in the opening remarks. I left it off instinctively as my multitasking brain (not a brag – my working definition of “multitasking” is “doing a number of things poorly” and when someone says “I’m good at multitasking” I hear “I will both die and misspell while texting and driving”) envisioned a few possible spellings of “McLaurin” and a possibility that, even at this early stage, there would be a super with the name to really rub in my mistake, and as long as we remained off-script, stopping to correct could mean missing something. Perhaps 10 minutes later, one of my more excellent colleagues would email around a word list with all of this, and I would even make a temporary house style which fixed any instance of “Robbie Williams”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For a more nonagenarian celebrity, here’s where they might have cut to a slightly ambiguously worded career-retrospective obituary reel, which (as we all saw in Frontline) they keep periodically updated just in case. They could roll it as is for now, and over the next 20 minutes or so a reporter would be writing and recording the necessary coda to the package. Lauren Bacall would exemplify this perfectly the next day, and Richard Attenborough this week. Both had obit packages which recurred and evolved throughout the night, but the first version was available as soon as the story broke.

I have never been more intimately and fundamentally aware of how to whistle.

Rob Lowe even made fun of being pre-emptively aware of this genre while shooting certain scenes.

Whenever I shoot a scene where I turn around in a doorway, smile and exit, I wonder if it will someday be my "In Memoriam" clip.
— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) October 1, 2012

There’s actually a more elaborately formalised protocol for the death of a monarch – some of our clients keep it saved with their news rundowns for when it’s suddenly needed. Can’t divulge, but interesting reading. For Williams though, they weren’t quite so prepared. So they had to tell rather than show, talking extemporaneously to various correspondents about his work and impact, while playing a neutral visual loop of his work, one which hadn’t really been tailored to the purpose so wasn’t big on sentimental impact. Not terrible to voice caption because it’s a little slower than ordinary news prose. Speakers stop and think and breathe, nothing is intercut with grabs from movies, and none of the graphics guys have loaded up the tweets yet so you just caption everything. The litany of great roles people would rattle off didn’t get any easier though. I started to triage, never letting “Mork and Mindy” or “Good Will Hunting” out of my sight. The former because it was an early breakout success and a deliberately whimsical (therefore improbable, therefore Dragon-unfriendly) series of syllables, and the latter because it answered my earlier question about what role won him the Oscar.

24-hour news networks take on a slightly different relationship to their audience when a big story breaks. Normally people switch on to find out “the news” more generally, but in these cases viewers will hear the headline on Twitter or somewhere and then switch on expecting to immediately learn more about that specific story as it unfolds. So where the everyday imperative is to trundle on and cover the news broadly and methodically, the impulse here became to stick with it – to be immediately covering the story whenever anyone should happen to switch on. So that news I prepared (and sport I didn’t) never did appear. Even the scheduled ad breaks were unforthcoming. 

Alas, thrusts remained unsquatted.

By the second 15 minutes then, they’d started to cut in a few rough, un-montaged grabs from Robin Williams’ career. As they gradually accumulated, and I respoke them, something a bit surprising happened – I started to find it very moving. 

Robin Williams is Robin Williams’ voice. His most iconic roles have been vococentric. An animated genie, a wartime radio announcer, a fatherly therapist, a poetry teacher, an out-of-work-voice-actor-turned-nanny. So much of what he is, and was, is encapsulated in his voice. I can’t easily trace the provenance of it, but from the very first tributes he was often “a man of a thousand voices”. That multiplicity was certainly contained within President Obama’s tribute. Mladen Dolar writes in A Voice and Nothing More about the implicit power that can accompany any disruption of the unity of body and voice. Of one body and one voice. A voice from an unseen source, a resolutely silent stranger, a ventriloquist’s dummy, all carry an uncanny agency (Dolar calls it “acousmatic”). So a perfect mimic, a verbal gymnast of many voices, disrupts expected limits. Robin Williams’ voice, that day, was larger than life in an uncomfortably literal sense. And my job, for that allocation and much of the next seven hours, was to ventriloquise it. It was uncanny too for the proliferation of remembered dialogue. Movies I’d watched incessantly as a child, family car trips with the Good Morning, Vietnam soundtrack (I think I was the only one among my colleagues to nail “Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ” verbatim on the first try), and even things remembered from the zeitgeist as winks and parodies – I literally had to repeat “It’s not your fault full stop” several dozen times that day.

So it became my own tribute. Respeaking a great artist of the voice gives you an appreciation of their craft – what we do is a kind of derivative peripheral incarnation of the voice professions. A man in a booth with a microphone. It was technically demanding, as he spoke quickly (his auctioneering award speech was its own special challenge) but there was a wit and precision, a groove you could follow and a familiar rhythm in terms of punchline placement if you needed to paraphrase. As with captioning Mass, the repetition gave it a ritual quality. I wonder if anyone else mourned Robin Williams in quite the way I and my co-workers did – with a sacramental recitation? Maybe this tribute from the actor tasked with playing the Genie that night on Broadway is in the ballpark.

And then it was over. I went off the air, saved my caption logs and started prepping for the tennis.