JERZY GWIAZDOWSKI: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PUNNER Jerzy Gwiazdowski is an actor, just not a famous
one. He’s appeared in Across the Universe, Nurse Jackie, Ray Donovan, Girls, and more, but if you know him, it’s
probably not for that. “I get recognized for acting stuff, but I’m not in the same stratosphere as I am in the boutique
world of punning,” Gwiazdowski says. “The puns have definitely eclipsed that.” At this writing, Gwiazdowski is
the winningest competitor in Brooklyn’s monthly “Punderdome.” “There will be someone who will compete for
the first time and they’ll say, like, ‘You’re my inspiration,’ ” he says. “Or sometimes I’ll be getting a beer and some
twenty-three-year-old dude will work up the courage to say, ‘I really want to follow in your punning footsteps.’ ”
Gwiazdowski has won the annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships competition in Austin eight times since
he started competing in 2012. Gwiazdowski competes with punny pseudonyms, so when he’s recognized, fans will
call out, “Hey, are you Lingo Star?” [Insert pause for groans.] —KATE STOREYRANDALL POSTER: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS MUSIC SUPERVISOR You’d be hard-pressed to find a longer
IMDb page floating through the Hollywood Hills than that of music supervisor Randall Poster. “The best work
I do is invisible,” he explains, “where it’s so inherently part of the film’s fabric that you don’t step away from
the narrative—that you just feel like you’re embedded in it.” His work is, yes, literally invisible; he’s responsible
for helming soundtracks for some of the most lauded
names in Tinseltown. Since serving as music supervisor
on Larry Clark’s seminal, shocking 1995 film Kids, he’s
worked on 150-plus movies and TV series. The sound of
indie stalwarts like Boyhood, Boys Don’t Cry, and Velvet
Goldmine? That was him. Glossy, big-budget affairs like
The Aviator, Skyfall, The Wolf of Wall Street? Him too. A
Martin Scorsese acolyte, he has also worked with Wes Anderson on every film in the director’s canon.
Poster earned one of his two Grammy Awards for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel, and in 2019 alone
he led music departments for The Irishman, Ad Astra, Waves, and Joker. Poster, of course, speaks about his
career in humble terms; while he’ll allow that within the film community he and the music-supervision
company he heads, Search Party, are “known, and hopefully respected,” a following is hardly what he
craves. “Something that Wes and I always talk about is making the effort to create stories and movies that
the lonely soul who’s sitting in a movie theater is inspired by, and feels less alone by—something that makes
them feel connected to the larger world, because that person was us.” —MADISON VAINALEX MULLEN: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS “MEMORY CHAMPION” The World Memory Championships
are like the Olympics, if they were held in a business conference center. There are no snowy ski hills or
giant camera crews; the “athletes” study numbers, playing cards, lists of words, or abstract images before
the clock runs out and they have to write them down from memory. Alex Mullen, a twenty-seven-year-
old doctor from Mississippi, was once their star, but he is adamant that this was not a glamorous type of
fame. (“I hesitate to even associate the words glamour
and memory competition together. Most people would
roll their eyes, me included.”) Mullen is the world’s
top-ranked memory athlete, the first person to mem-
orize the order of a deck of cards in less than twenty
seconds, as well as the first to memorize more than three
thousand decimal digits in an hour. At the height of his
memory-sports career, Mullen’s fans—lesser-known,
lower-ranking memory athletes than he—would bashfully
approach him for photos, but now he sees himself on
something of a career downswing. “I think there’s been
maybe two times that I can count where someone has
actually recognized me, just, like, on the street,” he says.
Although he hasn’t competed in two years, he does set
aside a bit of time each day to respond to fan messages
on Facebook, which come from panicked students
cramming for exams and the odd dancer trying to
memorize a ballroom routine. —LAUREN KRANCFame-ish
They’re bona fide stars,
but in obscure fields.
They deserve a moment
in the spotlight, too.116
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