DID YOU KNOW ONE OF OUR NCI ORIGINAL TEAM MEMBERS IS SCIENCE FICTION LEGEND MARC OKRAND, MOST NOTABLY KNOWN AS THE CREATOR OF THE “STAR TREK” KLINGON LANGUAGE?!
Marc worked for NCI from the day it opened in 1979 until around 2013. He held various managing positions in the live captioning department and contributed greatly to the evolution of NCI. He oversaw the captioning of several daily soap operas, special broadcasts including the Academy Awards, and the State of the Union addresses. Marc holds an honored place in both “Star Trek” and NCI history. Enjoy this link to a brief interview with the man himself!
Allow us to take you back to March of 1982. It was the first time NCI provided real-time closed captioning for the Academy Awards. The 1982 Oscars were the official debut of real-time captioning. Most of the program would be scripted and punched back (or live displayed, as it was called back then), but the real-time captioner would jump in and caption the acceptance speeches and any deviations from the script. NCI’s live display editors had a special live display system set up to display the winners.
Marc Okrand, whom some of you will remember, was the supervisor of Live Captioning for NCI back then. He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics.
Obviously, there was no internet or email at the time. NCI had not started using fax machines yet, and besides, the script was too voluminous to be faxed. Marc hopped on a plane to L.A. to coordinate the entry of the script onto disks to be used for live displaying the captions.
The script would change every day (sometimes more than once) during the days leading up to the show, and NCI needed to keep track of the changes to make sure everything was up-to-date. Because the program was produced in L.A., Marc had to go to the site of the Oscars to get the script and the revisions. It was more efficient to do the caption entry in NCI’s L.A. office, which was then in Hollywood. Captions were entered on the same captioning consoles used for offline captioning at the time -- on 8-inch floppy disks!
When Marc arrived, his contact at the Oscars told him that the script was not ready yet, so he unexpectedly found himself with a few days of free time. Marc called a few friends in L.A. to see if they wanted to get together. Marc met one of his friends for lunch at Paramount, where she was the assistant to the executive producer of the movie, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” which was in post-production at the time. During lunch, the friend mentioned that they had been talking with a linguist at UCLA about helping out with the film, and they described what this linguist was supposed to do: make up a bit of Vulcan language that didn’t sound like English but that matched the lip-movements of the English lines already filmed, and then the actors would dub it in. They said the linguist they had in mind became unavailable. Upon hearing this, Marc volunteered his services!
Marc created the Vulcan lines and then coached the actors, working with Kirstie Alley on one day and with Leonard Nimoy a few days later. Afterwards, Marc recalls driving to the Oscars to pick up the next set of revisions and thinking to himself, "I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan!"
With 8-inch floppy disks in hand, Marc took the red-eye home the night before the Oscars. Very last-minute changes were phoned into NCI’s Virginia office by an NCI staff member who worked in the L.A. office, but who had a desk and phone onsite at the Oscars, provided by ABC.
Later, Paramount contacted Marc and asked if he could create a Klingon language that would be used in the next movie, "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”
He did... and the rest is history, including "The Klingon Dictionary," a Klingon opera, live productions of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and Shakespeare, and Klingon translations of “The Little Prince,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Alice in Wonderland,” among others!
Marc was one of the very first employees of NCI in 1979. He likes to say he was at NCI a few days before they opened the doors. He retired in 2013. In addition to enjoying retirement, he occasionally contributes to Star Trek TV shows and films and appears at various conventions.
So you can tell people that if it hadn't been for NCI captioning the 1982 Academy Awards, we wouldn't have the Klingon language today as we know it! *
* Many thanks to Darlene Parker (and Marc Okrand himself!) for this article.
