AllMovie

Paul Trinka only ever had one official big-screen performance to his credit, as Kirk, the "normal" son in Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. The film hardly served as an environment in which he was likely to stand out, next to Tura Satana's busty martial arts expert or Stuart Lancaster's dirty old man, although as the movie acquired the respect of scholars, Trinka did get noticed in it two and three decades after it was made. But for four years on network television, from 1964 to 1968, he was seen weekly in the series Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, playing crewman Patterson, one of two members of the submarine Seaview's crew (the other being Del Monroe's Kowalski) who were seen regularly by viewers. Often, Trinka didn't have much to do beyond say "Yes sir" or "No sir" to David Hedison or Richard Basehart, but there were occasional episodes in the series' third and fourth seasons in which he got to do a little more -- in one ("The Thing From Inner Space"), Patterson's cameraman father is killed while working for a scientist engaged in a very dangerous project; in another, an alien presence aboard the ship results in his getting a lethal dose of radiation. Trinka was a part-time actor whose other job was as maitre d' of The Aware Inn, a Hollywood restaurant, and he used his time away from shooting the series to travel the South Pacific. He also made appearances in episodes of Gomer Pyle, USMC, The Big Valley, the Irwin Allen series Land of the Giants, and the Rod Serling program Night Gallery.