WARREN BINDER

Some of you might have known Warren from school, from work or from a writer’s group. You might have bought records from him or went to a show together. He was easy to be friends with, and asked little from the people around him. The things he cared about mattered to him deeply, and he’d share that wealth of knowledge – whether it was teaching someone how to play guitar or elaborating on the rules of football. He had many circles of friends, few of which overlapped. But no matter which silo of his life you shared, some things were constant: He was funny. He was loyal. He was kind. And his music taste was definitely better than yours.

Warren grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts and moved cross-country to Tustin when he was 13 after his father was hired to teach at Chapman University’s School of Law.

Warren went to Chapman for undergrad mainly because of the free ride (a perk of his dad’s employment), but the fact that they had a decent writing program helped. He was the Arts & Entertainment editor for Chapman’s Panther newspaper, where he skewered popular movies and fought to write reviews of bands none but a blessed few had ever heard of. He made lifelong friends there who he would continue to speak to on a near-daily basis.

He moved into an apartment off Taft in Orange with three friends from Chapman, and worked at Hollywood Video, securing him access to an almost infinite supply of movies.

A few years after getting his BA in Film and Literature, he was accepted into USC’s now shuttered Masters of Professional Writing (MPW) program and moved to Hollywood into a 1920s townhouse on Bronson Ave that Charlie Chaplin had built “for his artisans.” There Warren wrote an unpublished spy fiction novel very tentatively called The Donner File – a working title that he “hated even more than you do.”

London, 1965. Stephen Willoughby, file clerk for MI-8, arrives – late – for another day of work to find that MI-8’s last field operative has been injured while on a mission, and the short-staffed intelligence agency has no replacement. Stephen, not one to normally place himself in the same zip code as danger, sees this as a chance to finally move up in the organization. Before Stephen knows it, he’s on his way to Berlin, with a name, a goal and little else. His mission is to find eccentric German rocket scientist Dr. Klaus Donner and steal his spaceflight research – research that will help Britain in the burgeoning Space Race. 

After USC, he took a job logging footage, mainly for reality shows. Most of his early work landed him on night shifts, resulting in plenty of time to surf the internet. He’d send his favorite gems to friends with a “I’ll just leave this here” note so they’d find them the next morning when they went online. While in the Bronson house, he joined multiple flippant bands with his roommates and had weekly Beer Bones recording sessions where they used episodes of Bones as inspiration for punk songs (you can hear them here).

He moved to Pasadena to an apartment off Lake Ave, which had the disadvantage of being further away from every single Hollywood job, but was significantly larger than the Bronson bungalow – “my bathroom is the size of my old bedroom” he had said, and more importantly, “our centralized air conditioner rules. I would marry it if it wasn’t probably illegal.” His roommates set up a projector in the living room and friends would often come over for movie or game nights.

He logged seven seasons on Survivor, including the infamous Heroes vs. Villains season, which had Boston Rob, Pavart Shallow, Coach Wade and Russell Hantz amongst others. Years later he would end up in a courthouse sitting next to Pavarti when they both got called to jury duty, and they were able to chat about their shared Survivor experiences. “We got assigned seats next to one another and it turns out she just did Deal or No Deal, which has the extremely inappropriate (in a good way) executive producer from America Says. She gave her occupation as ‘reality show personality’ – I don’t think too many other former cast members were able to parlay it that well outside of maybe Boston Rob.”

In 2011 he moved to a one bedroom in Culver City near the 405. It was his first time ever having a place of his own. When asked how it felt he said, “It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I think it’ll really sink in once the utility bills start showing up.” With the help of floor-to-ceiling shelving, Warren finally had space for his ever-growing record collection.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and an almost single-minded focus on learning / hearing / finding / owning more. His vinyl collection boasted thousands of records – mainly metal with some surf music thrown in for good measure. (The joke being that death metal sounds like surf music if you remove the distortion.) He would travel and meet up with friends to see shows everywhere from Baltimore to Long Beach. Most of these trips were short with little sightseeing outside the show. He and a friend from college once did a 24-hour trek to San Francisco and back to see Sleep play at one of their early reunions. All his international travel was music related, and he learned to pack an extra suitcase just for records after that one time when “a decent amount of clothes didn’t make the return trip.” He went regularly to the “Keep it True” festival in the picturesque town of Lauda-Königshofen, Germany and you can find photos from his first trip here.

He soon graduated from logging footage to working as an Assistant Editor on a wide and eclectic selection of reality TV shows (you can see them all here) followed by editing projects for the Game Show Network. In between gigs he would occasionally moonlight – the last show he was working on was a two-week stint on the Bachelorette. 

He passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from natural causes at his home in Culver City. He is survived by his parents, Denis and Kathie, younger brother Evan, and a wide circle of friends.

He would be both touched and deeply bemused by the amount of tears that have been shed for him, and he leaves behind a hole that will never be filled.