Gaffers, Grips and Little White Gloves : WORKING IN HOLLYWOOD <i> by Alexandra Brouwer and Thomas Lee Wright (Crown: $24.95; 560 pp.) </i>

One difference between seeing a movie around Los Angeles and almost anywhere else takes place afterwards. When the audience starts its exodus, a substantial remnant stays behind in the theater, until the very last name on the final credits has faded. Credits are important in an industry town, even when they roll past faster than Niagara Falls, or in such fine print that they register on your VCR as snow.

“Working in Hollywood” is about all the “little people” in those credits: the key grip and the matte painter, the color timer and the scoring mixer, the gaffer and the wrangler, the boom operator and the lead man, who is not an actor but someone assisting the set decorator. Rather pointedly, actor is the only category excluded from this book about how films get made.

Still, more than 60 such job designations are discussed, beginning with the studio head, who launches the process, and ending with the owner of the theater, who will show the product to paying customers. Alexandra Brouwer and Thomas Lee Wright picked one standard-bearer from each of these occupations. Most have names you are not likely to know unless you work in pictures, but there they are well respected, and a dozen have won Academy Awards or nominations.

The authors, who began as outsiders and ended up with extensive experience in the movie business, give a brief introduction to each category and tell us about the person they selected. The rest is first-person narrative.

“Matte painting is an interesting craft,” says Albert Whitlock, a veteran who had worked with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, “but it’s a craft, not an ‘art’; to use mathematicians’ language, it’s a beautiful equation. The fact that you can get a little bit of paint, and, with film, create an incredible scene--don’t you think that’s quite a beautiful equation?”

“Shooting is like having so many strings in your hand,” declares Laszlo Kovacs, the well-known cinematographer. “You know where all the strings are going, and if you need something, you follow that string and garner someone’s help or contribution.”

“Editing is very physical, very dirty,” warns Cecelia Hall, the first woman to become president of the Society of Motion Picture Sound Editors; “that’s why editors walk around with those little white gloves on: They are absolutely black by two o’clock in the afternoon.”

Rich in such detail, the interviews yield deeper insights as well. Hall, for example, notes that the sound tracks of “quiet films are much harder to do than noisy films.” Or Alvin Sargent: “Think of a screenplay in two ways. It takes the form of a joke or a dream.” Make of these observations what you will; they could not have been made without the experience.

Some package their experience into amusing anecdotes. Emily Ferry, property master, recounts how she got fortune cookies stuffed with $5 bills for a pay-off scheme in “True Confessions.” She takes a wad of crisp notes to a cookie-maker in Chinatown who tells her to come back the next day. “Wait a minute, Ferry asks, “when I get those cookies, how do I know the money’s in there?” “You’ll just have to trust me,” says the man who has suddenly gone Hollywood.

Famed dialect coach Robert Easton has stories about trying to get Arnold Schwarzenegger to distinguish between his b and his p . “We are going into de willich,” roars Conan the Barbarian, “looting and blundering.” And in a scene cut from “Red Heat,” the Austrian muscleman tests the pulse of a man who had been shot: “He has no balls!” he exclaims, after examining the victim’s wrist.

The book presents a prism of Hollywood film making at the end of the 1980s. It is in a long tradition, harking back at least to Leo Rosten’s statistical picture of the industry in 1941. The interview format also has been popular, because with few exceptions, Hollywood people find talking easier than writing.

And talk they will, because Brouwer and Wright seem to believe that they all must have valuable advice to impart to the hordes waiting to become a negative cutter, transportation coordinator or animal trainer. So they first explain how they got into the business--through the proverbial mail room at the William Morris Agency and the amazing coincidence of having had a grandfather as head of MGM--and then they instruct us earnestly on the virtues of hard work, and getting a degree in fine arts.

Alvin Sargent urges people to write at least “an hour alone a day. . . . Write in the dark. . . . Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter, take your clothes off and go!” Jeremy Zimmer, the representative Hollywood agent, tells us: “Packaging is like laying down carpet. The carpet comes to you from the store all rolled up and you have to hold down all four corners at the same time. If you can do that, you can package a movie.”

Advice abounds on every page, and much that is less coherent. “There’s a high time-versus-revenue coefficient that operates in an agent’s life,” Zimmer reveals. And this thought--verbatim--from a “nearly legendary” distribution executive: “If one has a film and turns it over to a distributor, producer/distributor, major studio, whatever the nomenclature, you know that picture is going to be played. And you know that you have a powerful company behind to distribute it, as opposed to your having your own little distribution company or that you’re an independent distributor, so you may not be that fortunate. So now it’s which way do you want to go?” Nowhere, with such prose.

Faithful transcription of the sloppy way people speak is the wrong way to show them respect. Had the authors properly edited and transferred their interviews to the conventions of print, they could have covered the same distance in half the pages. They also would have a readable book, rather than a long documentary. However, Brouwer and Wright do provide good value for those seeking specific advice, who often end up paying hundreds of dollars at industry workshops and panels sponsored by the guilds or extension courses.

Because movie making is a closed world, any book by insiders will fascinate, especially other insiders. I am not so sure that the rest of us want to know all the secrets of the trade. Movie fans may prefer the mystery and illusion.

Judith Crist never forgave Mervyn Le Roy for revealing that the tornado in “The Wizard of Oz” was created by swirling a silk stocking in front of the camera. “When I watch “The Wizard of Oz,” the devastated critic said once, “I know that it’s not a silk stocking.”