THE USUAL BLAND GENERALITIES

A SHORT BIO OR: The Usual Bland Generalities

Here's the "official" bio summary from the LMU School of Film & Television page:

Rodger Pardee received his M.A. in Film Production from the University of Southern California in 1981. Since then he has worked in the area of film sound in a number of capacities: production sound, re-recording mixing, and sound editing. Since 1986 he has specialized in sound effects editing and design for feature films. In 1988 he was invited to teach film sound as an adjunct at USC and did so on and off, schedule permitting, until 1997. In 1999 he became a visiting assistant professor in Recording Arts at LMU. He is a member of the Motion Picture Sound Editors and among his M.P.S.E. Golden Reel nominations are those for special sound effects recording for "To Live and Die in L.A.," "Waterworld" and "Men in Black," and sound effects editing for "X Files" and "Geronimo: An American Legend."

If you're the type of person who stays for a film's end credits, you may have glimpsed his name going by, "somewhere between the animal trainer and the Dolby consultant."

Naturally this leaves out anything truly interesting, and I'm not about to fill in the details for anyone who happens to be wandering through the world wide web.

But I can add this much:

I grew up in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, where there was a decent ratio of trees to people. In those days my neighborhood was on the outskirts of town; you'd get in the car and drive five minutes and you were out alongside cornfields. (Try that today and you'd be looking at more suburbs and shopping centers.) Looking back, I'm fantastically grateful that I grew up in a place where there was a nearby creek I could fall into, a huge ropeswing from which I could make a Tarzan leap and break my leg, winter streets icy and deserted enough that I could sled down them at high speeds, and woods extensive enough that I could stagger through them and at least pretend to be lost. All that was wonderful, but what I really needed was a convenient ocean to indulge a growing fascination with scuba diving, and the nearest seawater was over a thousand miles away. But then, while I was in grade school, my family began to take Christmas vacations in Florida -- so for at least two weeks a year I could snorkel around a reef, crack open fallen coconuts, and try out awkward repartee with sunbathing girls.

This idyllic youth should have produced a well-adjusted responsible adult. Instead I ended up working in the movie business.

I suppose you could blame it on fiction, especially science fiction, specifically H.G. Wells. As a kid I read a lot, and I found the world of the imagination to be more interesting than my immediate surroundings. There's probably a good term for this condition, along with a list of symptoms to look for, and I should ask one of the professors over in the Psych Department about it sometime, but back then it simply meant that you were a daydreamer.

My childhood daydreams were given a powerful spin by a movie -- the 1960 version of H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine." In this film Rod Taylor plays a 19th century scientist alienated from his own time who zips into a future which at first appears to be a utopian paradise populated by blond, bland, dimwitted, but beautiful people -- a kind of 60's caricature of Southern California. The only one who seems to have a spark of curiosity about the Time Traveler is Weena, played by the lovely Yvette Mimieux. Eventually our protagonist learns that there is a dark underside to this seeming paradise and he manages to ignite a spark of rebellion in these passive and complacent people of the future.

This film made quite an impression on me at the age of six. I used to sit on the end of a swingset slide with a trash can lid propped behind me. That was the spinning disk on the Time Machine. I would have a brick in my lap, the kind with three holes in it. There would be twigs in those holes, and they were the levers of the machine.

I used to take all kinds of trips in that Time Machine. Most of them were more interesting than the idiot ways I have to kill time today.

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