Wednesday, April 17, 2019
What Is a Grip? The Few Women Doing the Job in Hollywood Explain
The New York Times: A recent report hardly painted a rosy picture of the gender balance in Hollywood: Just 4 percent of the top 1,200 movies from the last 12 years had been directed by women. Deep in the report, another jarring figure leapt out at me. Looking at the most lucrative films from 2016 to 2018, researchers found that just four of the 276 key grips working on those films were women.
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This article was inspiring to me. I believe it is important to highlight physically tasking jobs like those of grips, to bring awareness of their existence, as well as let people who don’t often get to share their story speak. What I found the most inspiring, was that amongst these talented individuals, they did not study rigging of sorts in college. I find that hearing stories of people who do many different things after their degree, remind me more that the world is not affixed, and that I have freedom to use my skills, instead of being tied to where they came from. I believe this is so important especially when daily we are amongst people talking about how they will use their time when they are done, and have much planned out. There is no requirement or commitment in life when learning, and taking ownership of our own skill sets is something I train my mind to do. Being a grip, as exhausting of a career as it is, has an appeal to me in it’s constant testing of ones multifaciticity. Whatever I do, I hope to also be constantly be pushed to different objectives which require more and more.
This is my FAVORITE article of the week. Especially with how disappointing the gender disparity is in film currently, it was refreshing to read an article about the few females with this enormously male dominated industry. I also love the irony that key grips are called “best boy grips.” I did not know what a key grips job was before reading this article. It’s nice to know that it’s not just all about brute force lifting and physical coordination. The fact that these women have cracked kneecaps in their job however, shows that this job is not made for the weak of heart. It’s also interesting that this profession seems to my handed down in a familial nature. My favorite of the women that were interviewed for this article was Tana Dubbe. The fact that she started out in gripping within the world of photography and then found herself within the film industry is really cool. It’s hard to read these stories about these women and the push back they experience within their professions. However, their perseverance is inspiring.
I am interested in this article in two regards. First, the responses of Tana Dubbe give a very different impression than I had previously held of grips. In my mind, they roll in a scheme of long-held practices and unrated hardware. Dubbe explains a more detailed, systematic approach to the little engineering problems she encounters, and I feel a little ashamed of my uneasiness about grip work. Second, it is interesting to observe the language that these women use to refer to workers. I see it reflected in a very similar, though somewhat lesser, way in stagehands for live events, where there are more women. A stagehand is almost always referred to as a “guy,” regardless of their gender--”I need a few guys to help me…” Even these women, painfully aware of their isolation, use gendered language to refer to their colleagues. I think that in order to open up the field to people besides men, it is important to change the language that is used to refer to workers.
A couple months ago I looked up what a key grip and best boy were after seeing it in the credits of a movie and wanting to define the terms. I then added these positions to the long list of jobs I would do. When I think about what kind of jobs I want to eventually do in the realm of entertainment production, one of the ways I tend to categorize them by is by how safe I would be, from a harassment standpoint, in that sort of position, which I now realize is pretty morbid, but it is a serious fear I have about choosing to do the kind of work that I love to do. It is so encouraging to hear testimonials from females that are doing the job, and will continue to do the job. I know that harassment is inevitable in the career I have chosen, but it is god to know that there are people in the workplace that will fire stagehands on the spot or unions that will try to find better working environments. I will add these for females to my list of inspirational entertainment production females.
My uncle used to be a director of photography in Hollywood and specifically the television industry. Grips are the equivalent of stagehands in the theatre industry. They set up platforms and key lights. This is one of the reasons that Hollywood flats are built the way they are, their supports are built two feet on center so that gaffers and grips can safely climb them, as well as climb them more easily. Grips are essential to the movie and television industry, and a movie set would not be able to operate without them. With the movie and television industry becoming more and more prevalent in Atlanta, as well as Georgia, I have been seeing more and more appearance of Hollywood in my daily life. It is upsetting that so much of Hollywood is still not equal in its gender breakdown, or even close to it, much like theatre stagehands, there are significantly fewer women than men.
The work that grips do is incredibly interesting, and I remember seeing it from a young age when I was on sets. It is a job that definitely requires you to be proactive, quick, and think on your feet, in the middle of the chaos that can be a film set. I think there is a lot of irony in the fact that one of the titles of a grip position is actually a best boy grip, but I guess it emphasizes the male role in that industry. I am both surprised and not at all surprised to see the amount of harassment and verbal abuse these four female grips have received over the course of their careers. It is also interesting that they all really are able to only identify themselves as the only grip that they know who is female, and I hope that after this article was published Melissa Beaupre, Vanessa Alexis, Melanie A. Ragone, and Tana Dubbe all had the opportunity to connect, and know they are not alone in making changes in their field.
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