This might have a familiar Ring: Movie credits reach epic proportions

By Randy Kennedy
The New York Times

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NEW YORK — They are known as closing credits, but the other day at a movie theater in Times Square, after 3½ epic hours of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the credits did not seem to want to close.

It took five minutes for the names of all the actors, producers, editors, gaffers, grips, best boys, dialect coaches, wig makers and steelworkers to crawl by. Next came the less-familiar show-business occupations such as stable foreman, horse makeup artist, horseshoer and the two guys in charge of the chain mail.

At eight minutes, moviegoers still present were watching a scroll of completely inscrutable titles such as "wrangler manager" and "compositing inferno artist." Of course, the caterer had to be immortalized, too.

Finally, 9 minutes and 33 seconds after they began, the closing credits came to a close.

John Rodriguez, a subway-track worker, was the only person left. (The cleaning crew had come and gone.) He shrugged.

"I like to get my $10 worth," he said. "I didn't really notice how long they were."

But plenty of people have. Movie credits, which used to last an average of three to four minutes, have joined the list of other things in Hollywood — like egos and salaries — suffering from inflation. Moviemakers once considered anything longer than seven minutes — the credits for "Titanic" and "Waterworld" were in that range — to be pushing the bounds of propriety and audience patience.

Let the credits roll: Then and now TIME TAKEN TO LIST NAMES "Nosferatu," 1922 1 minute, 35 seconds "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," 2003 9 minutes, 33 seconds NUMBER OF NAMES LISTED "Star Wars," 1977 143 names "The Matrix: Revolutions," 2003 701 names

But with the growth of computer animation, union rules, copyright laws and lots of good old-fashioned favoritism, several credit sequences have blown past that old limit.

Companies that make titles say the average, even for regular dialogue-driven movies, has increased to as long as five minutes.

"It just seems to me that there are a lot more menial guys who get credit now who didn't several years ago," said Rick Sparr, a vice president at Pacific Title and Art Studio, one of the oldest title-makers.

"I mean, the guy who unfolds the craft table gets credit now," he said. "It's really out of control."

Not that he is complaining. It is good for business. But he and others in the business have joined many moviegoers in wondering where it will end.

Does the set masseuse really need to be credited? (One was at the end of "The Matrix.")

Does the helicopter pilot? (Most big-budget productions nowadays seem to have one, and the pilot invariably is named, alongside accountants and publicity agents.)

What about the Romanian army liaison aide and the person described as the food stylist? (Both were named at the end of "Cold Mountain.")

In fact, while questions are being asked, here are two more. Is there a difference between the second second assistant director and the third assistant director, and do all these assistants really have to be named? (The answers to those questions, producers say, are "not much" and "yes.")

"I think it's monstrous," said David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. "It's one of those signs of the decadence in our film business altogether."

Thomson said he still kept his seat until the bitter end, "but only for professional reasons."

"I find it a horrible bore," he said. "Honestly, if you train the horses, you don't need your name up there."

In the early history of motion pictures, credits nearly always were at the beginning of movies and were handed out so sparingly that they rarely took more than two minutes.

The 1922 vampire classic "Nosferatu," a kind of special-effects vehicle of its day, credited 11 cast members and five others, including the director and cinematographer, and the credits lasted 1 minute, 35 seconds.

By the late 1960s and early '70s, credits had grown so long that filmmakers began to shift most of them to the end of movies, giving them the freedom to grow even longer, especially with the rise of blockbuster movies with special effects and computer-generated imagery.

According to Baseline, which compiles information about movies, the original "Star Wars" in 1977 listed 143 people in its credits. In 1999, "The Matrix" listed 551, including Longy Nguyin, a sports masseuse. "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" listed 559 names, "Finding Nemo" listed 642, and the third installment of the "Matrix" series had 701.

But "credit creep," as some have called it, is happening even in movies without multinational teams of computer programmers. In independent shorts, for example, where many people work without being paid and a screen credit is their only form of compensation, credits can last one-fourth as long as the short itself.

In movies with limited budgets, travel agencies and other companies sometimes are given credit — in essence free advertising in a prestigious format — if they agree to work for less.

And in big-budget movies with powerful stars, the stars often succeed in winning screen credit for anyone who has anything to do with the star's performance. In "Master and Commander," the list of attendants to Russell Crowe alone reads like the staff list at a small company: his costumer, two hairstylists, a makeup artist, two special makeup artists, a stunt double, a stand-in, a trainer, a dialect coach, a swordmaster, three violin coaches, two assistants and the name of the company that provided his personal security.

Sparr said that in the end he thought inflation of closing credits would be checked only by purely physical limits.

"I really don't think it's going to go past 10 minutes," he said. "But I've been wrong before."

Since he has been in the business for so long, a last question was asked of him. Does he know what a second second assistant director does?

"It really doesn't matter to us," Sparr said. "If it comes from legal and it's the way they want it, that's all we care about. We don't care what it means."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company