SILENT RESPONSIBILITY.(best boy Steve Comesky)(Interview)

Best boy. You see the credit scrolling up the screen (other people in your row are shuffling their feet impatiently) and, just for a moment, you let yourself wonder about the designation. What comes to mind will probably be wrong. The best boy is not a beardless youth with a saintly countenance, like Billy Budd. He is not the smirking winner of an on-set popularity contest. He does not have an assistant best boy and there is no such thing as a second-best boy, although the credits for the comedy "Airplane II: The Sequel" do include a "worst boy": Adolf Hitler. Even when the best boy is a woman, the title does not change. As for its origins, they're unclear. In Victorian England, many assistants were called boys, as in "Get me another tankard of ale, boy." One theory posits that the name stuck when an English foreman was hiring theatrical laborers and said, "Give me your best boy!"

Steve Comesky, who is the best boy on a remake of "The Stepford Wives," which is now shooting in Connecticut and New York, seems a little uneasy with a title that is at once immodest (best) and somehow denigrating (boy). When people ask him what he does for a living, he says, "I tell them I'm an electrician." Comesky, a tall guy in his mid-thirties with a buzz cut and the shoulders of a wide receiver, says that his job is pretty straightforward: "I do what my boss tells me to do, pal." He works as the chief assistant to the gaffer, otherwise ...