SOURCE: Dunne, John Gregory. “Guys Who Worked on the Movie.” Harper's 306, no. 1833 (February 2003): 69-75.

In the following excerpt, Dunne examines Ondaatje's discussions with Walter Murch in The Conversations, detailing the contributions of Murch and other film and sound editors to the movie industry.

What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “private grammar” of film is so private and so little understood that it might just as well be written in Urdu. At the end of every movie there is an endless crawl of credits that sometimes seems longer (and more interesting) than the picture just seen—often 200-plus names. Outside the business, no one really knows what most of these people do; after more than three decades of writing scripts, I am still not certain whether the best boy works for the gaffer or the grip. Critics talk a good game about film as a collaborative art, but generally...