Film and television script supervisor Robert Gary died 3 May 2010 of natural causes. Born in 1920 in Illinois, he started his Hollywood career as an actor, but, according to Variety, “during the days of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and ’50s decided to take a less high-profile job.”
In a 2003 interview in Below the Line magazine, he explained what he did: “The director’s point of view is how the scene plays, what the audience should be thinking. The script supervisor has the task of seeing that the dialogue is right and all the technical elements match. We never tell anyone what to do, but we are quietly involved in everybody else’s job: crew, wardrobe, actors, makeup, props. We’re an extra pair of eyes.”
Gary will be best remembered for working as a script supervisor on the first four Star Trek television series: Star Trek (1966-69), The Next Generation (1987-94), Deep Space Nine (1993-99), and Voyager (1995-2001).
Other genre productions he worked on include: Highway to Heaven (1986), The Outer Limits (1964), The Strangler (1964), The Magic Sword (1962), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
He taught a course on script supervision at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and TV for two decades. He stopped working after a stroke a few years ago.