Chapter One

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 ta