"I used to sit through the credits, all of them, when I went to the movies. It
was a practice that worked against intuition and common sense. I was in my
early twenties, unaffiliated in every respect, and I never left my seat until the
full run of names and titles was completed. The titles were a language out of
some ancient war. Clapper, armorer, boom operator, crowd costumes. I felt
compelled to sit and read. There was a sense that I was capitulating to some
moral failing. The starkest case of this occurred after the final shot of a major
Hollywood production when the credits began to roll, a process that lasted
five, ten, fifteen minutes and included hundreds of names, a thousand names.
It was the decline and fall, a spectacle of excess nearly equal to the movie
itself, but I didn’t want it to end."