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The rock critic as celebrity stalker: an excerpt from "The Last Rock Star Book Or: Liz Phair, a Rant"
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MOVIE CREDITS 101 | PAGE 1, 2
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We're not quite done yet. You may at some point have noticed the name George Spelvin or Georgina Spelvin or G. Spelvin or the like among the acting credits on a film. That's traditionally the alias used by actors who for one reason or another do not want to be credited with their own names. (The original Georgina Spelvin was the star of the famous porn film "The Devil in Miss Jones.") There can be lots of reasons for using the alias, ranging from unhappiness with the way the production turned out to conflicts with the director or producer, or simply as an in-joke. In the same way, directors have sometimes used "Alan Smithee" as their alias when they didn't want to be credited under their real name. In 1997 somebody (screenwriter Joe Eszterhas) even had the bright/stupid idea of making a movie called "An Alan Smithee Film." Not only did it bomb at the box office, but the real director -- Arthur Hiller -- took his name off the credits, so it truly was an "Alan Smithee" film.

Now to the other end. When the movie fades to black, the end credits come up. Sometimes the first credits we see will go to the production crew, the people who worked on the shooting, and sometimes they will be for the cast, often in order of prominence in the film, though sometimes in order of appearance or in alphabetical order. The production crew credits will be where all the funny titles start coming up, and here's what they do. The gaffer is the chief electrician. He or she works for the director of photography, setting up all the lights as they are needed for shooting, directing a crew of other electricians, preparing the basic lighting for the next scenes to be shot, ordering all lighting equipment and supplies and so forth. And guess who his or her top assistant is? Yes, the best boy. Sexist but accurate, at least until more women work their way into top crew positions.

Grips are the crew members who carry and set up equipment around the set or location. On most productions the head grip will be called the key grip, and on very big productions, where two crews will be shooting at the same time, there will be more than one key grip. The camera crew has its own grip, the dolly grip, who sets the camera up and then pushes the camera on its dolly or tracks, and there are grips who specialize in operating the camera crane when that is called for. Other grips will work with the carpenters to get and place the materials needed to assemble the sets. When the gaffer calls for particular lighting equipment, it's the grips who bring it and set it in place for the electricians to light and focus. Sometimes key grips are called best boys too, which can make for confusion. A wrangler handles the animals, as you might expect, but there's no size limit. The film business has room for mouse, marmot and cockroach wranglers as well. (If you've seen a credit for a "baby wrangler" it's the in-joke way of crediting the registered nurse who by law has to be with an infant performer on the set.) The greensman or woman is responsible for preparing and maintaining the live or fake flowers, foliage, trees, cornfields or wastelands that you might see in the film.

Don't mistake odd titles for lack of skill. These are lifelong professionals who do extremely difficult jobs quickly and with very few mistakes; millions of dollars -- and sometimes the safety of actors and other crew members -- ride on how well they work. They apprentice for years before they get to take responsibility for a sizable production.

The director, too, has assistants, starting with, duh, the assistant director. The assistant director reports to the director, but he or she is more like an assistant producer. Assistant directors don't get to do much if any directing; they're more on a track toward production manager or producer. They break down the script, scene by scene, according to location or set or actors' calls (that is, what actors will be needed for shooting the scene). Then they put together a shooting schedule in the most efficient possible way, so as to get the most done in the least possible time with the most efficient use of people and equipment. A good A.D. can save a production hundreds of thousands of dollars just by analyzing the script and finding the best way to schedule how it should be shot. It's an incredibly demanding job, and because it relies so much on good communication between director and assistant, most directors will try to book their favorite assistants as much as possible.

Then there's the second assistant director, who's responsible for crew and cast calls; for keeping track of how many hours the crew has been on call so as to minimize overtime; sometimes for helping to cast extras when they're needed in a scene and then cueing them to move, stand, sit or run as required; and for working with cops and security to keep the shooting location free from disturbances. And if you've noticed, on big productions there are, yes, second second assistant directors, whose job, as you might guess, is to assist the second assistant director. The second second assistant assistant assists the second second assistant, in case you couldn't tell.

When it comes to post-production, the titles proliferate. Most are self-explanatory, but you should know that a Foley artist is the person who -- let me put it this way: In "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," we see King Arthur riding his invisible horse around England. He is followed by his faithful retainer, who canters along behind him on foot, clapping two coconut shells together to make the clip-clop sound of a horse's hooves. The Foley artist is the person in the post-production sound-recording studio who actually clopped the shells in front of a microphone to record that sound onto the film's sound track. He or she also makes the sounds of footsteps, the slide into third, the thud of a body slamming into a wall and the like. The quintessential Foley artist story comes from the Brian DePalma film "The Untouchables," where we see Robert De Niro as Al Capone whack somebody on the head with a baseball bat. So how do you create a sound to match the visual, and make it believable, without actually doing someone bodily harm? After many experiments and many failures, the Foley artist found the right tools: a bowling pin hitting a raw turkey. You could try it yourself.

Almost all end credits, and the order in which they appear, have been settled for years by union contract and general industry convention. When there are massive amounts of special effects, as in the 1997 film "Titanic," the credits can run for what seems like hours. You and I are not expected to stay for them, but people in the business need to claim proper credit for whatever they did on a film, and end credits are the only thing they have to point to as an acknowledgment of their work.

And now we come to the stars' credits, specifically the ones you see in newspaper ads. This is a world so difficult, so overloaded with the sight and sound of certain egos crashing toward oblivion while others ascend to heaven, that for a while in the 1980s it created a whole new cottage industry of movie ad credit designers. Let's start with what we may for the sake of argument call the good old days, which is any time prior to 1970. For much of that time -- certainly until the late 1950s -- most actors were under contract to their studios, and it was the studio that decided who got top billing, who was billed above the title and so on. When the studio system collapsed, it was only natural for actors and their agents to fight for billing on a film by film basis, and by the 1970s most stars were writing into their picture contracts a description of how they were to be billed.

This wasn't a problem as long as only a few stars had the power to control the billing for any particular film. Perhaps your name was the only one with glitter enough to go above the title, though if my name was also a draw it was pretty easy to advertise us as "you and" I (above the title) in (the film's name here). But then, in the 1980s, things got complicated. Stars began to write into their contracts that their name had to be advertised, above the title, in letters no smaller than those of the film's title. Well, OK, that could be handled. But what if each of us had the same clause in our contract? And what if our names had more than, say, two letters, which has been known to happen? What if, say, our names were Harrison Ford, Renée Zellweger and Leonardo DiCaprio? Could they all fit on one line in the ad? And each be the same height as the letters in the film's title? Not unless the film's title was as long as, say, "The Unbearable Lightness of Film Credit Machinations" and the distributor bought six consecutive pages in the paper to advertise it.

So here's where the new designers came in. They found a way to make type faces so skinny, but with letters so tall, that they could fit the very longest names into a space no larger than a studio accountant's heart. Which is why you have such a hard time reading ads that give us more than one or two names above the title. The ad looks like this:

SKINNY STAR A SKINNY STAR B SKINNY STAR C in THE FILM

Some stars require that their names be listed first, no matter who else is in the film. OK, if nobody else is in the film. But what if two stars with equal power (or worse, three or four) are in the same film with the same clause in their contracts? Are you beginning to see where this is going? We're not in gridlock yet, though, because some bright person came up with another solution. Give star A the first billing in the ads, but give star B a higher position. The ad then looks like this:

STAR A in     STAR B
STAR A in THE FILM

There are still more variations on the theme, such as clauses that require both first and highest billing in the ads, but obviously if the actors are serious about working on the film some accommodations will be reached, perhaps with additional money or perks, or even a quid pro quo for the next film. Negotiations over billing can take a while -- in fact, they're one of the few things that can make the average big budget extravaganza's end titles seem short.
SALON | Oct. 9, 1998

Robert Glatzer is a former New York film director now turned film critic and writer in Spokane, Wash. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, "Movies 101: A Guide to Looking at Films."