Everything You Need to Know to Become a Film-Industry Insider Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a gaffer and a grip? Or what makes the best boy so great? In Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde ,* Dave Knox, a top camera operator and longtime veteran of the film industry, gives you the inside story on the lingo and slang heard on the set. This is an A-to-Z guide to making a movie: the equipment, the crew, and the sometimes hilarious terminology—everything you need to know to sound like a seasoned pro. * Remove the small spotlight from the set and switch off the two-kilowatt quartz light. “What a lively and entertaining guide to movie lingo! I learned a lot of terms I never knew before . . . but then, I’ve never killed a blonde, either.” —Leonard Maltin, film critic and author of the New York Times bestselling Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guides “Now you can sound like you know what you’re talking about—even when you don’t. In other words, you’re ready to work in the movies.” —David Duchovny, actor and director ( X-Files , House of D ) “You too can speak ‘film-ese.’ Thanks to Dave Knox, what was once ‘insider information’ is now available to all who want to speak the lingo of the film industry. It fits nicely on the shelf between my Oxford Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus.” —Jamie Lee Curtis, author and actress ( Freaky Friday , Halloween , True Lies , A Fish Called Wanda ) Dave Knox has twenty years of experience in film production, including work on major motion pictures such as The Silence of the Lambs , Big Daddy , Scent of a Woman , The Age of Innocence , Hitch , and many more. He lives in New York with his wife and children. INTRODUCTION Go get me the two diving boards and the toilet seat for the camera dolly.” This request came from the key grip (head rigging technician) on the set of the new Will Smith movie Hitch (aka The Last First Kiss), which we were filming in New York City, down in SoHo. Of course, I knew what George meant: He was going to affix extra platform space that would travel with the movie camera as I photographed the next shot. But to the layman? By using nicknames, he had identified specific equipment to the film crew and had disguised his meaning from passersby. Even a top-notch film student from New York University would have a hard time decoding his intentions. I began to think of all the confusing slang used every day on the movie set. “Go fetch me a show card!” Fresh from college (where I received the aptly named B.S. in Speech from Northwestern University), on my first day on a real movie set, I didn’t understand what was being asked of me. Well, my first day on a television commercial set, that is. In the past, I had supported myself as a commercial still photographer, and I’d graduated from a premier film program, but this one was new to me. “What is it, your first day?” Actually, yes. How was I to know that a simple two-by-three-foot black-and-white piece of cheap cardboard was one of the primary tools of the professional filmmaker? The director and cameraman of that Crisco commercial, Elbert Budin, strode past the line of cooked chicken pieces, over a thousand in all. “That one, that one there, not that one.” He was auditioning chicken pieces, all precooked and laid out on tabletops for the commercial spot. The assistant cameraperson rigged Elbert’s German-made movie camera for slow-motion filming, and the end of the day found me catching flying chicken pieces with my show card. We simply tossed the individual pieces of chicken into the air, and Elbert filmed them in slow motion on the way down, to demonstrate the idea that chicken cooked in Crisco was . . . lighter than air. I was hooked. From there, it was a matter of gaining the technical skills with the camera equipment that would allow me to graduate from the ranks of chicken wrangler. I spent a year managing a film stage in Lower Manhattan, where I handled everything from painting sets to repairing lighting gear to walking the vicious guard dog. I was enamored of the large complicated movie cameras that came through the stage. Mitchell, Arriflex, Panavision . . . To me, these names meant HOLLYWOOD. Using my passkey on weekends, I was able to sneak back onto the stage and rifle through cases of expensive camera gear. With no one else around except for the trusty dog, El Capitán, I taught myself the technical intricacies of the different motion-picture camera systems. In the 1960s, the great German director Werner Herzog reportedly stole the camera he needed to make his first film, so my extracurricular activities put me in good company. The next year when the time came to take the test for admission to the union as assistant cameraperson, I passed with flying colors. I worked as camera assistant on several films over the next two years, including manning an extra camera on the cult classic The Toxic Avenger , but once again something new and wonderful caught my eye. A scree