Get a Grip: Celebrating Those Overworked, Underpaid, Practically Invisible Technicians Who Help Make the Movies

A grip is a jack-of-all-trades: part mover, part roadie, part handyman, part mechanic, and part mechanical engineer. Grips are in charge of lifting, moving, constructing, rigging, pushing, driving, and securing production equipment on film sets. Ever wonder who drove the crane during the elaborate three-minute take that opens Touch of Evil (1958) or who mounted the cameras to the helicopters for the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence in Apocalypse Now (1979) or who got the camera to run ahead of Cary Grant as he fled from a killer crop duster in North by Northwest (1959)? In each case, you can thank the grips.

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Picture this. (It has happened to you before.) It’s the end of the movie. The credits are rolling. The people around you are shuffling toward the exits. While you wait, you let your eyes drift back to the screen. The above-the-line credits – the actors, the director, the screenwriter – have already been eaten by the top of the frame, leaving you to read the names of the crew. Though their specific duties may not be familiar to you, their titles are fairly self-explanatory: camera operator, sound mixer, assistant director, set decorator, costume designer, location scout. Then a job title appears that defies easy interpretation: best boy grip. This is soon followed by others: key grip, dolly grip, rigging grip, and then, simply, grip. If you’ve just seen a big-budget, star-studded movie, there will likely be a lot of these, as many as two dozen. And so you wonder, perhaps not for the first time, what in the world is a grip?

Now imagine that you’re directing a movie. You’ve got your actors. You’ve got your camera. You’ve got your lights and your cables, your dolly tracks and your crane. But who’s going to set it all up for you? Who’s going to build the scaffolding on which to place your camera? Who’s going to arrange the diffusion panels to keep the lights from shining too brightly on the actors’ faces? Who’s going to put those dolly tracks together or drive that crane? Let’s say you’re filming a scene in a moving car. You want a shot of the protagonist in profile as she talks with the passenger, sitting beside her. The question is: how are you going to fasten the camera to the side of the car? You could attach spuds to the door using suction cups, fit gobo heads onto the spuds, connect support rods to the gobos, and then stick a mini ball head on the support rods using a leveling mount fastened to a cheese plate. If you don’t want the camera to shake too much while the car is moving, you’ll need to remember to affix a swivel-link set onto one of the gobo heads so that after you’ve mounted the camera you can stabilize it using a support rod and a Cardellini clamp. Simple enough, right? Keep in mind that the camera costs somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000. Fasten the bolt too tight and you’ll strip the thread out of the camera. Fasten it too loose…well, you don’t even want to think about what’ll happen if you fasten it too loose. In case you’re uncertain how to do any of the above, you may want to think about hiring a grip.

A grip is a jack-of-all-trades: part mover, part roadie, part handyman, part mechanic, and part mechanical engineer. Grips are in charge of lifting, moving, constructing, rigging, pushing, driving, and securing production equipment on film sets. Ever wonder who drove the crane during the elaborate three-minute take that opens Touch of Evil (1958) or who mounted the cameras to the helicopters for the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence in Apocalypse Now (1979) or who got the camera to run ahead of Cary Grant as he fled from a killer crop duster in North by Northwest (1959)? In each case, you can thank the grips. They are the muscle on movie productions, the people who move the lights, build the sets, drive the cranes, push the dollies, and do nearly anything else that requires a strong set of shoulders.

Yet they aren’t just a strong set of shoulders. An inventive grip can save a movie company time – the one commodity, no matter how big the budget, always in short supply – or even, on occasion, make the impossible possible. It was largely thanks to key grip Gaylin Schultz that the famous chase sequence in Bullitt (1968) became famous at all. Before Bullitt, car chases were composed almost entirely of process photography and second-unit shots: process photography to get close-ups of the star at the wheel, “driving” in front of a rear projection, and second-unit shots to show the car tearing through the city. The problem was vibration. Place a camera on a car going more than fifty miles an hour – particularly one rollercoastering up and down the streets of San Francisco – and it would shake so much that the guy behind the wheel would look as if he was sitting on a jackhammer. Steve McQueen, however, didn’t want to pretend to drive. He wanted to drive. And so Gaylin Schultz designed his own custom car mount for the film. Made from speed rail tubes bolted to the frame of the car, and dampened with thick rubber gaskets, it looked like a giant erector set sticking off the side of McQueen’s Mustang. But it worked. The camera was so steady that, in test dailies, the odometer was legible even at a hundred miles an hour. When, in the finished film, McQueen jerks through a hard left turn, you can see how much the chassis is shaking by how much his hands are vibrating on the steering wheel. The camera, though, hardly quivers. Not one process shot ended up in the nine-minute-long scene. “The standing joke among grips,” says Michael G. Uva, career grip and author of The Grip Book, the profession’s unofficial bible, “is ‘We fix other people’s problems.’”1

Grips have two main jobs. The first is camera rigging. This simply means attaching the camera to things. Anytime a camera needs to be placed up high, whether at the top of a mountain, on top of a building, or merely at the top of a ladder, you can be pretty certain that it was a grip who secured it there. Tom Cruise got a lot of press for performing his own stunts on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). Considerably less attention was paid to the grips who made Cruise’s stunts possible in the first place, rigging the camera to the side of a glass and steel tower, 1,700 feet off the ground. The same goes for attaching the camera to objects that move. Planes, trains, cranes, cars, boats, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, helicopters, snowmobiles, horse-drawn carriages, and even skateboards have all, at once time or another, had cameras mounted on them or in them. During the shooting of Junior Bonner (1972), Sam Peckinpah asked Gaylin Schultz to stick a 40mm lens between the horns of a 900-pound rodeo bull. Not about to risk being gored or pulverized, Schultz first found a more docile bull, then secured a lightweight Eimo camera between the horns using clamps and a steel mounting plate. “The poor bull looked ridiculous,” Schultz remembered. “And when I showed it to Peckinpah, he said it was perfect, but didn’t have time for it any longer. That was his idea of a joke.”2

Equally important, grips block light. The expression “lights, camera, action” might lead one to believe that that’s all it takes to film a scene. In fact, between the lights and the action there is often a thicket of scrims, flags, nets, reflectors, and diffusion panels to control the illumination in the scene. In moviemaking, light is rarely just shone; it’s shaped. Think of that first, Caravaggio-like shot of the undertaker in The Godfather (1972), his rodentine face the only thing visible in the coal-black frame. Or think of Rick’s Café in Casablanca (1943), full of white coats and dark corners, shadows adorning the walls like arabesques. Or think of the scene in Ball of Fire (1941) when Gary Cooper mistakenly enters Barbara Stanwyck’s motel room and all we see are the whites of her eyes, like headlights on a dark highway, gazing up at him adoringly from the bed.

None of these shots would be possible were it not for the work of the grips. They are the ones who manipulate the light – narrowing it, softening it, embellishing it – painting those zebra-striped shadows across Jean Louis Trintignant’s body in The Conformist (1970) and veiling Orson Welles’s face in blackness in Citizen Kane (1940) to show that a pall literally hangs over Kane’s thoughts. Mind you, the grips are not the ones who designed these shots. That job is handled by the director of photography, usually in consultation with the director. But they are the ones who, in the most literal sense, built them. “I always think that when a cameraman gets an Oscar, that his crew on the picture should get one [too],” says grip Dennis Fraser. “I don’t care how good a cameraman he is, he is only as good as his crew.”3

An old saw states that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels.4 Few stop to consider that there was an even more underappreciated – and, compared to Astaire and Rogers, underpaid – team of professionals tangoing right alongside them much of the time: the dolly grips. These crewmen might not have been wearing high heels, but then again Ginger Rogers never had to waltz a half-ton Velocilator dolly around the dance floor. Special commendation should go to the grips who operated the crane in the “Never Gonna Dance” number in Swing Time (1936). In a stunning, unbroken two and a half-minute sequence, the camera glides with Astaire and Rogers as they bound about the dance floor, sweeping back when they move back and forward when they move forward. As they each twirl up twin staircases, the crane plunges after them, the arm booming up, over a story in the air, to meet the pair as they join together at the top of the stairs. The shot is so silky smooth, always perfectly in step with the dancers, that one hardly thinks about the equally athletic performance going on behind the camera. In fact, it took nearly fifty takes to complete the shot without a mistake. One take was ruined when an arc light went out; another, at the very end of the routine, when Astaire’s toupee flew off. “Everything that could have gone wrong did,” Rogers remembers. “Finally, we got a good take in the can, and George [Stevens, the director] said we could go home – at 4:00 a.m.”5 Lucky her. Had she been a grip, she would have spent another hour putting away equipment.

The tools that grips use are almost too numerous to count. These include (but are not limited to) scrims, silks, cutters, filters, reflectors, gold boards, dots, gels, grifflons, butterfly kits, polecats, grid clamps, mafer clamps, lowboy stands, high rollers, and C-stands. The C-stands will be the first thing you’ll notice if you ever step on a film set – well, perhaps the second, once you’ve gotten over the fact that Brad Pitt or Meryl Streep is right there, not fifteen feet away from you, eating a sandwich. The C-stands, however, will be a lot more plentiful than the stars. They are the crabgrass of film sets, sprouting up wherever movie units go. What is a C-stand? Picture a deformed stainless-steel hat rack and you’ll have a pretty near likeness in your mind’s eye. Simply put, it is a multi-purpose tripod for holding lights and objects that shape light. The “C” is for “century.”6 Many grips will tell you that that’s because the stands will last a century or because that’s how long it will take you to master one. In fact, Century was the popular name given to the ten-by-ten-inch reflectors used by photographers before the advent of electrical lighting. They have evolved over the years but not much. The staggered height of the legs makes it possible (if done right) to place dozens of stands side-by-side-by-side, crosshatching their limbs, one over the other, like the legs of the dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. The gobo head allows the arm to rotate 360 degrees in any direction, including straight down, when it’s time to pack up. C-stands can be used in rain or snow, placed underwater or on top of a sand dune.

And that’s to say nothing of the tools that grips contrive on the spot. A talented grip learns to improvise, to use black wrap to dampen a light or to fashion an extra flag with some Duvetyne and a few C-47s. A C-47, in case you’re wondering, is a clothespin. Like so many exclusive groups, grips have their own specialized cant, deliberately designed to mystify outsiders. Listening to them banter back and forth on their walkie-talkies isn’t exactly like listening to a foreign tongue, but it does feel as if you’re hearing a conversation in a language you’ve only recently begun to learn. You might, for instance, catch one grip saying to another, “Get me some pancakes. We’ll need them for the martini.” Translation: “Get me some twelve-inch-by-twenty-inch-by-one-inch apple boxes. We’ll need them for the last shot of the day.” Or you might hear one say, “Drop the skirt on that blonde.” Translation: “Lower a Duvetyne cover on that 2000-watt, open-faced light.” That semi-sexual note you detect in the slang is too common not to be deliberate. Other bits of grip jargon include: butt plug, lollypop, U-bangi, spoon, and horse cock. That last term technically belongs to the electrical department, though plenty of grips will be familiar with it, too. It simply refers to a thick electrical cable, such as a 20T or a 40T. Nobody on the set ever feels like grabbing a horse cock first thing in the morning.

One should not be surprised that gripping is a profession dominated by men. This makes it like the rest of the film industry, only more so. According to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, women held roughly 17% of jobs behind the camera in 2016.7 Among grips and gaffers, however, they only held 1%.8 Even in such a male-centric business that’s an incredibly low figure, lower than that found in almost every other sector of the industry, including cinematography (5%), sound design (4%), and composing (2%).9 There are practical reasons for this. Gripping – unlike, say, music composition – requires a fair amount of physical brawn, as anyone who has ever had to carry a Chapman Peewee dolly up a flight of stairs will surely tell you. Yet if a random assortment of grips were put in a lineup, you wouldn’t be likely to mistake them for a team of bodybuilders. Too many flabby bellies for one thing. But also, though gripping requires strength, it doesn’t require that much strength. Instead, it takes what Michael G. Uva calls “intelligent muscle.”10: the “mental strength to outsmart the object you are working on.”11 According to the Pew Research Center, women now make up 14% of U.S. Army personnel and 18% of U.S. naval personnel. Considering the physical nature of most military duty, there’s no reason why women couldn’t, at the very least, put up equivalent numbers in Hollywood grip departments.12 The current gender imbalance only serves to constrict the talent pool in the industry. It also makes work more uncomfortable – and, at times, unsafe – for the women who are on set. “I always struggle with having that many male eyes on me and what that means in terms of my own objectification,” explains actress Zoe Lister-Jones.13 Male actors, too, have complained about the effect that such gender homogeneity has on the mood on movie sets. Take sex scenes, for instance. “No matter how professional the people are, it’s like 99 percent of the time, someone is going to say something wrong, or it’s going to be awkward,” says actor Adam Pally. Being vulnerable, he explains, was much easier on his recent film Band Aid (2017), which was shot by an all-female crew: “When I was the naked one, I definitely didn’t have the same feeling of being judged. [The sex scene] just felt like another one of the scenes.”14

No one can quite agree how the word “grip” made its way into the film industry. The most commonly accepted story is that it began in the early days of silent cinema, when there were few formalized positions on film crews other than the director and the cameraman. Carpenters and construction workers, hired to build sets, often ended up doing all kinds of odd jobs: moving furniture, adjusting lights, digging ditches to lower the camera. These men carried their tools, not in boxes, the way construction workers do today, but in carpetbags, which the workers called “grips.”15 Eventually, the name got applied to the handymen themselves. “Get my grip” (meaning “Get me my bag of tools.”) became “get a grip” (meaning “Get me a guy who knows how to use these tools.”). In other words, the title evolved right along with the job itself. Grips started out as day laborers, moonlighting in the film industry between longer-lasting construction gigs, but ended up, as the job became more and more complex, as essential members of the crew, their job title derived from their expanding bag of tricks.

That we use the term “crew” to refer to the laborers on a film production – grips, gaffers, gophers, and the rest – is less surprising. In addition to attracting plenty of construction workers, silent movies netted a fair number of seafaring folk, as well. The American film industry began, after all, not in sunny, spacious Hollywood, but in the cold, crowded Tri-State area. The very first movie studio, Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, was located in West Orange, New Jersey. D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Studios started out on the roof of the Hackett Carhart Building (now the Roosevelt Building) in Manhattan. When movie companies needed hired help, longshoremen and out-of-work sailors were the easiest kind of hired help to trawl in. Their maritime slang simply became a bycatch. The “best boy” on a ship, for instance, was the most promising crewman in a group of young sailors, the first to be promoted to a position of command. Thus we now have the best boy grip, the grip who manages the other grips. So too the word “gaffer.” A gaff is a long, hook-ended pole used by fishermen to haul in their catch when it’s too heavy for the line. In the early days of filmmaking, when natural light was still the primary source of illumination, gaffers used similar poles to adjust the cloth tents that covered the sets, softening or strengthening the brightness of the sunlight as the daylight waxed and waned. Today, a gaffer is an electrician, the person in charge of all lighting on the film set. Grips work closely with the gaffer, bouncing, blocking, and diffusing the light that the gaffer provides.

It is not easy work. The hours are long, the food is bad, the locations are often unsanitary and unsafe. “You go into condemned buildings that are dirty, that have asbestos and rats,” explains gaffer Kenneth Dodd. “You might be working in Harlem down an alley at three a.m., and I mean the building is abandoned for a reason.”16 The average workweek lasts between sixty and ninety-six hours. That’s twelve to sixteen hours a day; five days a week in the studio, six on location. For the marquee members of the production team – the actors, the director, the producer – the financial rewards can offset many of these hardships. Fame and a percentage of the gross do much to ease the sting of seventy-hour workweeks. For the rest of the crew, however, the spoils are more meager. Today, a best boy grip with a union membership will likely earn somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. A key grip – the grip foreman – if he’s very successful, may earn $100,000 in a year. For non-union grips, though, the pay can be a lot less substantial, especially considering how common it is for salaries on low-budget films to get deferred. Neither increased salary nor increased seniority, however, equates with decreased hours. Everyone has to put up with long days. “What bothers me most is you don’t have time to do anything else,” says assistant director Steve D’Amato, who once worked twenty-seven hours straight on a television shoot. “We’re the only industry that is fighting for a twelve-hour day.”17

Before his death in 2015, cinematographer Haskell Wexler started the nonprofit 12on/12off, which lobbies for limiting workdays to a maximum of twelve hours, with at least twelve hours off between shifts. Wexler was inspired to start the group after the death of a friend, assistant cameraman Brent Lon Hershman, who was killed in a car wreck while driving home from a nineteen-hour day on the set of Pleasantville (1998). The movement, so far, has failed to gain much traction. Overtime for union members kicks in after twelve hours, but because of the high cost of renting equipment and locations, film companies frequently find it’s cheaper to pay the crew overtime and keep shooting. Producers will also point out that access to public spaces – freeways, stadia, office towers – tends to be limited, making it necessary for film crews to take advantage of the hours when they’re available. And then there’s the competition inside the industry itself. Everyone in the business, from the location assistant to the lead actor, knows that they can be replaced. The film industry is never short of new recruits. Keeping your job often means keeping quiet about the tough conditions. “You can reject it,” explains makeup artist Farah Bunch, “but you’ll be looked upon as uncooperative.”18

There is, of course, an obvious solution: split the workday into two twelve-hour shifts. This would save production companies from paying out overtime, make crews happier – and, with more sleep, more productive – and keep the cameras cranking on time-sensitive locations. But this, too, has failed to win acceptance in the industry, largely because of the filmmakers themselves. Many crewmembers want the overtime. “There are two ways to look at it,” explains transportation captain Ali Yeganhe, “there are some in it for the money, and some who work four months of the year and leave once they reach their hours for their medical. A lot of guys are accustomed to making what they make.”19 One must also consider that making films isn’t the same as making houses or cars or office furniture. Film crews take pride in their work and, like actors, writers, and directors, are loath to share the credit for it. Imagine Steven Spielberg’s reaction when you tell him that he’ll be trading twelve-hour shifts with Quentin Tarantino. As a consequence, crewmembers frequently find their personal lives whittled down to almost nothing. “In the first 20 years of my marriage,” explains grip Dennis Fraser, “I was away all the time. I was so busy I would walk in after five months and put my washing down and say, ‘I’m off again tomorrow.’ My wife brought up the children on her own.”20

Why would anyone want such a job? Ambition certainly plays a part but, for grips, only a small one. Nearly everyone on a film set, save the actors and the director, wants to be someone else. The best boy electric wants to be a gaffer. The gaffer wants to be a director of photography. The director of photography wants to be the director. In the case of a grip, the road ahead is fairly narrow. One can move up to become a gaffer, though depending on the grip this may be a lateral move. In a few lucky cases, grips have gone on to become cinematographers. Stefan Czapsky worked for many years as a grip and a gaffer before photographing Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), and Ed Wood (1994) for Tim Burton. Constantine Makris started as a grip, moved up to become a director of photography, and then moved up to become a director. Most grips, though, stay right where they are. Dennis Fraser started his career as a grip on Anastasia in 1956, and ended it, fifty-five years later, on Pearl Harbor (2001), doing the very same job. In between, he worked on dozens of films, including The Hill (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Chariots of Fire (1981), always – excepting one stint as a camera coordinator – as a grip.

Like so many other manual laborers, grips are increasingly finding themselves on the sidelines, watching computers do the work that they used to do. Crowd scenes that at one time might have taken a dozen grips to rig and light are now composed (either partially or, sometimes, fully) in postproduction. This was how the upper tiers of the Roman Coliseum were peopled in Gladiator (2000), how the solar system was created in Gravity (2013), and how the armies of Orcs were birthed in The Hobbit film trilogy (2012, 2013, 2014). “Nowadays grips can get away with murder,” says Dennis Fraser. “If they get it wrong, the computer can put it right. Film is faster, so the cameraman can shoot when it is almost dark and if they don’t get it right, they can send it to the lab and they’ll put it right for them. In the old days, if they didn’t get it right they got the sack!”21

To last as a grip, one must not only love the job itself; one must love it for itself – for the camaraderie and chaos that are such an intrinsic part of the filmmaking process. “No film goes by without some disaster,” explains gaffer Larry Prinz. “You’ve got all your notes and then you get there for the shoot and everything has changed. Or you can’t even find the location, or the flight is terribly delayed. In fact, that is one of the fun things about film: you never know what disasters will happen.”22 It is not a profession designed for those who yearn for quiet predictability. The people who heed its calling tend, by nature, to be restless and peripatetic and easily bored by routine. “No one on the crew is an office-type person,” explains best boy electric Kenneth Dodd. “That’s why you have this job – because you don’t want to be in an office seeing the same people and doing the same thing for twenty years.”23 Nor is it a profession designed for those who crave recognition. There is no Academy Award for being a grip. Instead, grips must make do with the admiration of their peers and with the knowledge that they played a part, however small, in shaping some of cinema’s great masterpieces. During the making of The Man Who Would Be King (1975), director John Huston wanted to film a tracking shot of Peachy (Michael Caine) and Danny (Sean Connery) walking up to the enemy fortress after their victory over the Bashkai. The trouble was the hill. The incline was too steep. No one would ever be able to pull a dolly up it, and if they did and they lost their hold, the dolly would rocket back down the hill, camera, cameraman, and all. That’s when Dennis Fraser spoke up. “I’ll do it,” Fraser said. “Give me an hour and a half.”

I built this big track up the hill [Fraser explains] and put a big dolly on it and I built another one down the hill, and put it on pulleys, so it was like a lift and pulled by itself, and I did it while they were at lunch! That night I went back to the hotel and the unusual thing was that all the crew, the sound people and everybody, all came up and said they had never seen anything like it in all the years they had been in the business.24

Gary Hymns has been gripping for over thirty years, but he still hasn’t lost the taste for it. “Filming the Day of the Dead opening sequence of Spectre (2015) in Mexico City, we were in and out of windows and dropping 60 feet with Daniel [Craig],” Hymns recalls.25 The sequence he’s describing is a four-minute-long tracking shot – actually, three shots seamlessly combined into one – that begins with a high-angle view taken from a crane, looking down on a street filled with hundreds of masked revelers. The camera descends and meets up with James Bond (Craig), dressed in a skeleton costume and mask, as he makes his way into a hotel, through the lobby, up a flight of stairs, into an elevator, up two floors, out of the elevator and into his room, then out the window – he has, by now, discarded his disguise – and along the roof, the camera booming up over his head as he jumps the gap to the building next door, and then down again into his point of view as, raising his sub-machine gun, Bond prepares to shoot a man through the window across the way. It’s a stunning piece of work; a shot that would have made Orson Welles or Max Ophüls or Stanley Kubrick green with envy. It’s the kind of shot that grips live for and that no director could ever dream of filming without them. “I just couldn’t sleep the night before,” Hymns recalls, “wanting to get it right.”26

Sources

Baker, Barbara. Let the Credits Roll: Interviews with Film Crew. London: Aston House Press, 2005.

Lauzen, Martha M., Ph.D. “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2016.” http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2016_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf

Miller, John. “Behind the Camera on Swing Time.” Turner Classic Movies. http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/191521|0/Behind-the-Camera-Swing-Time.html

Parker, Kim, Anthony Cilluffo, and Rennee Stepler. “6 Facts About the U.S. Military and Its Changing Demographics.” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/13/6-facts-about-the-u-s-military-and-its-changing-demographics/

Polone, Gavin. “Polone: The Unglamorous, Punishing Hours of Working on a Hollywood Set.” Vulture. May 23, 2012.

Quirke, Antonia. “From Gaffers to Grips: A Guide to Who Does What in the Film Industry.” Radio Times. June 19, 2017. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-06-19/from-gaffers-to-grips-a-guide-to-who-does-what-in-the-film-industry/

Reel Classics. “Ginger Rogers.” http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Ginger/ginger-article2.htm

Ryzik, Melena. “When the Grip Is a Woman (and the Gaffer and the Camera Operator, Too).” The New York Times. June 1, 2017.

Udel, James C. The Film Crew of Hollywood: Profiles of Grips, Cinematographers, Designers, a Gaffer, a Stuntman and a Makeup Artist. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

Uva, Michael G. The Grip Book: The Studio Grip’s Essential Guide. 5th ed. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2014.