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By Root 2702 0

scrim is a type of light diffuser. Such sophisticated equipment brought with it strange and intriguing job titles: focus pullers, juicers, Foley artists, gaffers, best boys, supervising drapes, inbetweeners, wranglers, post-punch supervisors, swing-gangs and so on. Gaffer (a corruption of godfather, originally a sarcastic term for an old person) is the head electrician. Best boy is the chief electrician’s chief assistant. Juicers are those who move electrical equipment around. The Foley artist is in charge of sound effects; he’s the one who adds the ‘toosh!’ to punches and the ‘gerdoings!’ to ricocheting bullets. It is named for Jack Foley, one of the great sound recordists. Supervising drape is the person in charge of drapes, rugs and other such inanimate objects. An inbetweener is an animator’s assistant – one who draws the frames between the main action frames. Swing-gangs are those who build or rebuild sets overnight. Wranglers handle the animals, or indeed any living creatures. ‘Cockroach wrangler’ has been recorded in the credits of at least one film. As you will have gathered, often the title is more impressive than the job, and nowhere perhaps more so than with the post punch supervisor, whose responsibility essentially is to look after the photocopying.

With so many exotic professions involved it is little wonder that the credits nowadays seem to roll on for ever. The longest credits yet, for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, actually go on for just six and a half minutes. Even so, they managed to salute 763 creative artists, technicians and other contributors – and that was without mentioning Kathleen Turner, the voice of Jessica Rabbit, who opted not to be credited.

Huge amounts of effort and emotion go into deciding the order of billing for movie stars – whether the name goes above the title, whether it is larger than the title and by what percentage and so on. When Paul Newman and Steve McQueen starred in The Towering Inferno, the problem of which of these superstars was to enjoy top billing led to protracted negotiations between agents and producers. Eventually it was decided that Newman’s name would take the left-hand, pole position, but would be positioned fractionally lower than McQueen’s, a practice that has been followed and elaborated on to the point of tedium in movie posters and advertising materials ever since. In 1956, Otto Preminger appalled the Hollywood community by announcing The Man With the Golden Arm as ‘A Film by Otto Preminger’. No one had ever displayed such audacity before, and few have failed to engage in it since. Occasionally a director is so miffed with the handling of a film in post-production that he demands to have his name removed. The Directors Guild hit on the convention of crediting such disowned movies to the fabled and wholly fictional Allen Smithee, who is thus responsible for such classics as Ghost Fever, Student Bodies, Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, City in Fear, a Whitney Huston video and some two dozen other efforts.14 The ultimate in screen credits, though, was almost certainly the 1929 production of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, which contained the memorable line: ‘By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.’15 Possibly the most choleric credit line appeared on the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham 123, which concerned the hijacking of a New York subway train and finished with the closing line: ‘Made without any help whatsoever from the New York Transport Authority.’

No discussion of the lexicon of Hollywood would be complete without at least a passing mention of the Oscars and how these golden statuettes got their name. Few terms in any creative field have engendered more varied explanations of an etymology. The most plausible story perhaps is that the figure was named by Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who said upon seeing the prototype, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my Uncle Oscar’ (whose surname, for the record, was Pierce).16 But it must be said there are many other