Ancient stories, honeymooning, and the Greeks

I’ve been thinking about the origins of storytelling these days.  It involves piles of rocks and a multi-platinum, New Age musician.  Go figure.

My wife and I, married this past May, recently returned from our official honeymoon.  We visited my brother and sister-in-law for a week in Qatar (a great story in and of itself), then spent the next week in Greece.

You know the New Age musician Yanni?  He wrote a song called “Santorini”,  the island where we stayed.  Ever seen a postcard of Greece featuring blazing white villas with cobalt blue doors perched on craggy cliffs above a cerulean sea?  That’s Santorini.  (I’m not usually given to flowery adjectives, but believe me, the place is amazing.) More on Yanni in a bit.

One of the places we went in Santorini found us driving up an insanely narrow, winding road – more like wide sidewalk – to the mountain top ruins of the ancient city of Thira.  Since very few visitors come to Santorini in the winter, we had the place almost completely to ourselves.  We walked through the agora, public baths, and individual residences occupied by normal, island-dwelling men and women – three thousand years ago.

You’d think that walking ancient streets would prompt visions of centuries of toga-clad characters living, marrying, building, worshiping, fighting, and dying.  Some of that happened for me, but frankly… not all that much. (Probably why I’m an editor, not a screenwriter.)  The thing that would really blow my mind was still to come.

Dreams of an Olympic editor

A couple nights ago I watched the Olympics on my big HDTV at home.  After my initial gawking at all the makeup caked on the figure skaters, I started thinking about goals and how they shift.  See, there was a time when the one thing I wanted to do most was… edit for the Olympics.  Now I’ve never been athletic – to this very day I become insecure the instant I set foot on a basketball court, pick up a baseball bat, or swing a golf club.  I figured that even though I have no desire to put in the work necessary to be an Olympic athlete, I would achieve the next best thing by being one of the people who bring their stories to the world.

In 2003, NBC was crewing up for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.  I was cutting for a daily entertainment news show on FOX, and I started asking everyone I knew about who I should contact to get on board with NBC.  Well whaddya know, I started getting leads.  A fellow editor from my previous job, also at FOX, had a friend who ran a post house in New York City who had also cut on location for multiple rounds of Olympics.  I called the contact in New York, and he gave me the info for the Director of Olympic Operations at NBC.  I kept asking around in Los Angeles for leads to the Olympics, and they pointed me to the same guy, who I emailed inquiring about how a young, fast, motivated editor could end up editing for the Olympics in Athens.