An award-winning account of life in the film industry. A key grip, as Smith explains in this extraordinary memoir, is the person on a film set who supervises rigging of lights, set wall construction, dolly shots, stunt preparation, and more. Smith worked in the film industry throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s For him, fame by association with the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Susan Sarandon, and Robert DeNiro was just one of the seductive drugs that fueled his days on the set. The intertwined stories in Key Grip resurrect memories of how his father’s impossibly ordered life became a goad for Smith’s own reckless ascent into manhood. His journey included a stint as a pioneering sport-parachuting instructor in the late ’50s, a young man’s dream job that taught the author all he needed to know about hiding fear behind bravado. Much later, as a committed writer and unredeemed seeker in his fifties, Smith lights out across the country in a brave, existentially failed, and very funny attempt at a Lakota vision quest. Beautifully told, reminiscent of both Robert Bly and Ian Frazier, Key Grip is a fascinating record of the fault lines of one man’s life.

Dustin Beall Smith’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, BackStage, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, the Louisville Review, the New York Times Magazine, Quarto, River Teeth, The Sun, Writing on the Edge, and elsewhere.

His honors include the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction for his book, Key Grip. A Memoir of Endless Consequences; fellowships in 1995 and 1996 at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and first-place Labor Press Council Awards for 1982, 1983, and 1984.

In the late fifties and early sixties, Smith helped pioneer sport parachuting in the United States. He later worked as an advance man for Robert Kennedy’s senatorial campaign and for the Norman Mailer–Jimmy Breslin mayoral campaign. He worked as a key grip in the film industry for twenty-seven years, leaving movie-making to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University. He currently teaches writing at Gettysburg College, where he is also coordinator of the Peer Learning Center.