Apple box, full apple, half apple, and pancake are all moviemaking terms that refer to height gradations of boxes used for actors to stand on to appear taller. These bits of Hollywood jargon and much more are compiled in Richard Kroon’s A/V a to Z: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Media, Entertainment and Other Audiovisual Terms. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Apple Box and Other Movie-Making Terms”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We asked for your workplace jargon, and we got some from Aaron Failing.
He lives in Savannah, Georgia.
And he sent us these bits of jargon from his industry.
Apple box, full apple, half apple, quarter apple, and pancake.
But he doesn’t work in apple picking, I bet.
No, he doesn’t.
Not in the food industry.
Not in the food industry at all.
Some kind of, but he’s measuring things out.
Yep, yep.
Different gradations.
Different gradations.
Is it agriculture at all?
No.
No.
Is it some kind of metalworking?
No.
A construction business?
No.
A film business?
How did you, wait, how did you get from agriculture and construction to film?
Because I knew there’s something in the Apple box that gave it away, but I don’t remember exactly what it is.
Yeah.
I have a couple dictionaries of moviemaking terms.
Oh, that’s exactly where they were.
I’ve browsed them.
Oh, there you go.
I should have known.
I couldn’t bring you.
And I have friends in the moviemaking business.
Oh, well, yeah, and now you know Aaron in Savannah.
He’s a special effects technician.
And an Apple box is a strong wooden box that’s enclosed on all sides, and it’s got holes on opposite ends.
So you can’t put anything in it, but you can use it to let people stand on if they’re too short to be in the shot.
And they’re different, you know, different things can be propped up there.
So when your male lead is shorter than your female lead, you can make him look taller.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, they’re sometimes known as a man maker.
And a full set of those boxes, the apple box and the full apple, is known as an orchard.
Isn’t that picturesque?
How about that?
Yeah.
What was the other term, the last term?
Pancake. What’s the pancake? Is this like a kookalurus? No, I think it’s a really flat one.
Oh, really flat one. So you get a couple inches, but not much more.
Yeah. I got all excited about these terms and I did some browsing myself in a wonderful book called AVA to Z, an encyclopedic dictionary of media, entertainment, and other audiovisual terms by Richard Kroon.
You may own this.
I might. There might be one of them. It’s super. I had so much fun digging down.
Yeah, so we’re talking more than 100 years of movie-making jargon and slang just piled on.
And it’s characteristic.
It’s got a lot of color and flavor, right?
A lot of color and flavor.
It’s not boring, this stuff.
And some of it is mysterious and nobody knows where it came from.
Exactly.
Exactly.
In fact, I’m going to talk about another one of those later in the show.
Exciting.
You know, we’d still like to hear the cool, colorful language from inside your business, your hobbies, or the things that you love to do.
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