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We've wondered about best boys too, as well as key grips and gaffers. We considered two different plans of attack for finding your answer. First we played with advanced search expressions on Alta Vista: we enclosed "best boy" in double quotes to indicate that both words should appear together, and added the terms gaffer and grip to the search string like this: +gaffer +"best boy" +grip The same three terms in a different order produced zero results, but the above sequence returned a winner -- Robert Glatzer's entertaining Salon Magazine article titled "Movie credits 101." This detailed anatomy of moviemaking explained that the gaffer is chief electrician or lighting technician on a production
set and that the best boy is the gaffer's first mate. Both work for the director of photography, setting up lights and equipment, orchestrating the shoot. Grips are crewmembers who move the equipment and assemble it on the set or on location. The chief of this crew is known as the key grip. As you might expect, the bigger the production the more exotic credits like dolly grip, wrangler, greensman and Foley artist. Our ace in the hole was the Internet Movie Database -- we had a hunch we'd find the right resource there. So we checked in at IMDb to confirm our findings. After a bit of clicking around we located the Movie Terminology Glossary, and verified what we'd already learned. Recently, we spotted
a "Best Girl" in the credits of a video rental. Can't remember what the film was... but it proves that even job titles borrowed from the nautical days of whaling and sailing have to change with the times.
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