But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  Hal left school after the eighth grade and worked as a bowling pin setter and later as a tree topper, whose job it was to use iron hooks to climb tall pines, chopping off branches on the way up. One day he cut too low and fell seventy feet. Luckily he landed on a pile of leaves and branches and walked away with just a few cuts and bruises. (His first stunt!)

  Hal joined the 82nd Airborne in 1951. He tested parachutes and earned extra money on weekends doing jumps at air shows. During one performance his chute failed to open and he fell thousands of feet before he could work his reserve chute free, only a few seconds before hitting the ground. (His second stunt!)

  After the army Hal knew he wasn’t qualified for any high-paying profession, but he was ambitious and figured he’d have to do something dangerous to make good money. He went to California and got into the stunt business through a TV show called You Asked for It, hosted by Art Baker.

  People would write in and say, “I’d like to see somebody eat a pigeon,” and they’d arrange to have it done on the air. Hal wrote his own letter that said, “I want to see somebody jump from an airplane and bulldog a man off a galloping horse.” He went down to the studio a few days later and said, “Hi. I jump off airplanes and bulldog people off horses. Any call for that?”

  “That’s odd,” they said. “Why, just the other day . . .”

  Hal went to Chuck Roberson, who was Duke Wayne’s stuntman, and said, “Chuck, I’ve got a job for us. I’m gonna bulldog you off a horse.”

  “How much money?” Chuck said.

  “A thousand dollars,” Hal said.

  “I’ll do it,” Chuck said. “What’ll you be riding?”

  “Cessna 150.”

  “Cessna 150?”

  “Cessna 150.”

  “Well, how fast will you be going?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never been done before.”

  It’s an amazing piece of film. The plane had to be going at least fifty miles an hour to avoid a stall. Hal jumps from the wheel of the plane and brushes Chuck off the horse. Chuck slams into the ground, and then Hal hits even harder.

  It was a tough way to earn a thousand bucks, but it got Hal work in Western movies, doing fights and saddle falls, stirrup drags and wagon wrecks. When Westerns dried up, Hal switched to car stunts and high falls. He did parachute and wing-walking gags in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) and then landed on TV as an extra on Richard Boone’s Have Gun—Will Travel.

  In one episode a stunt guy was supposed to climb a tall tree, get shot, and fall into the water, but he wasn’t going high enough and it looked lousy. Hal said, “Fuck it, let me do it.” He went up the tree like a monkey (or a tree topper), got as high as he could, did a half flip, and hit the water. He walked out and said, “How was that, Mr. Boone?”

  “You’re my man!” Boone said.

  From then on, Boone wouldn’t make a move without Hal, who choreographed all the stunts and fight scenes on the show. Boone saw that Hal had the charisma to be an actor, so he started giving him small parts. By the end of the show’s five-year run, Hal had acted in dozens of episodes.

  —

  EVERYBODY WHO MADE action films loved Hal, including Duke Wayne. Hal worked on probably a dozen movies with Duke and loved to tell the story of how he taught him to throw a punch. On the set of The Undefeated (1969), with the camera behind him, Duke was having trouble delivering a punch that looked real. He was throwing a straight jab that was missing the side of the guy’s face by a mile. Hal had the guts to step forward and correct Duke in front of everyone, suggesting he throw a roundhouse instead. Hal said there were a few anxious moments when he wondered if he’d ever work again, but Duke finally thanked him and demanded him on all his pictures from then on.

  Hal graduated to second unit director and stunt coordinator. Second unit directors shoot the action sequences, inserts, and other scenes that don’t involve the principals. Stunt coordinators look at the script and figure out how to make the action scenes more exciting. They hire and supervise stuntmen and decide which stunts an actor can do and which ones require a professional stunt person. They design and choreograph stunts and rehearse them for days and sometimes weeks to make sure they’re executed safely. Stunt people know that lack of preparation is not only dangerous but also sloppy. They have an expression: “Bullshit doesn’t photograph.”

  Despite what I jokingly said many times, Hal wasn’t crazy. He planned and rehearsed every move he made to eliminate as much risk as possible, and he never did a stunt until he thought he was ready. But you can’t have a great stunt without danger, and Hal told me that he was scared sometimes, but the confidence he got from calculating the stunt overcame the fear.

  And he was reliable. He was known in the business as a guy who got the job done, and he was proud of the fact that he never turned down a stunt in his life. Though he charged more than other stunt people, he was cheaper in the long run because he almost always did it on the first try.

  Glenn Wilder is another one of the greatest stuntmen of all time and one of my favorite people in the world. He’s more fun than anybody, and one of the best-liked guys in the business. I was staying with him on his ranch near L.A. during the 1971 Sylmar quake, a 6.7 on the Richter scale. Hurricanes don’t bother me, but earthquakes scare me to death. You just don’t know what to do. Glenn had about seven horses and they all went crazy and ran not over the fences but through them. People were running around screaming, but Glenn laughed the whole thing off. He thought it was all wonderful.

  Ronnie Rondell is another world-class stuntman and a terrific guy. There was nothing he couldn’t do. And he’s so good-looking I always wondered why he wasn’t an actor.

  Hal, Glenn, and Ronnie didn’t like that the old-timers in the Stuntmen’s Association wouldn’t admit women or minorities, so they broke away and formed Stunts Unlimited. The two groups didn’t like each other and it got to be stupid. I paid no attention to it and hired guys from both because I had friends in both. Hal would get pissed off at me, but I told him, “Look, I can’t dislike someone because you dislike them.” It was the only time we ever argued, but it didn’t hurt our friendship.

  Hal was the real deal. If you went into a badass bar with him, you felt safe. One time on location in Arkansas we were having a beer in some dive when a guy came over and started giving him shit.

  “Look,” Hal said, “I don’t want to get into a fight. I have a date and I don’t want to get all sweaty.”

  “What makes you think you’re gonna get sweaty?” the guy asked. “It may not last that long.”

  That’s when Hal nailed him. The guy was out before he hit the floor. Hal turned to me and said, “He was right. I didn’t get sweaty.”

  Hal loved to fight. It was one of the highlights of his evening. “What a great night we had!” he’d say. He was totally fearless of pain or injury. If anybody came over and said something stupid like “You’re supposed to be the toughest guy in the world,” you knew it was coming. But Hal would just smile. He thought it was wonderful. And it was never personal. They wanted to be able to brag that they’d been in a fight with the great stuntman Hal Needham, and Hal was happy to oblige.

  —

  HAL AND I made a movie called White Lightning (1973) in Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the gags was a car-jump onto a barge.

  “I can do this, Hal,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but let’s have the barge pulling away.”

  “That’s nuts,” I said. “They won’t even know it’s moving. And what if it moves too far? I’ll wind up in the drink.”

  “Then let me do it.”

  Hal told the barge captain exactly how fast to go. He got in the car and sped down the ramp doing about eighty. He didn’t know that for some reason the captain firewalled the throttle, so the barge was farther out than planned. The car slammed into the barge nose first and the back wheels land
ed in the water. If the front wheels slid off the barge, Hal would have been swept away by the current and would have probably drowned. Fortunately the car stayed put. We all thought he’d wrecked not only the car but himself, too. He opened the door, stumbled out, and passed out.

  We sent Hal to the hospital and went on with the day’s work. I had somebody lined up and ready to go for the next stunt, but guess who came back?

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said when Hal walked in. “You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”

  “Nah, I’m fine,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Well, I’ve got a little headache, but they gave me some Percodeens.”

  Hal did the stunt on the first take.

  He always had “Percodeens.” In fact Percodans were in every stuntman’s bag. In those days we took a pill without a second thought and got back in the game. We weren’t taking them to get high, we were taking them so we could work. We didn’t know about any long-term effects. When I had to do a fight scene or a rough stunt, I’d pop a couple of Percodans first. I never missed a beat, never hit anybody, never did anything that people supposedly do when they’re hooked on painkillers. And I never saw Hal visibly impaired in any way, either.

  Hal was so good on vehicle stunts they called him “the master of suspension.” He was one of the first to use rockets, and in a demo for General Motors, he sailed a rocket-powered pickup truck across a 112-foot-wide canal. He made it with room to spare, but with only a seat belt and harness and no roll cage, he broke his back on the landing.

  Hal was one of the first humans to crash-test automobile airbags. Wearing just a lap-style seat belt, he ran head-on into a brick wall at 20 miles per hour and testified before Congress about it.

  Hal decided he wanted to be the first to cross the sound barrier in a land vehicle and made a deal with Budweiser and CBS to build a rocket car. When he got in that thing, I knew he’d either get the record or blow it up. He got the record: 733.666 miles per hour. Today the car is in the Smithsonian.

  Then he decided to get into stock car racing. He put a NASCAR deal together and asked if I’d be interested in being his partner. “It’s a lot of money,” I said. “Let’s do it!” Hal built the team from the ground up and revolutionized the sport. We named the car the Skoal Bandit for Smokey and the Bandit. No race car had ever had its own name before. Hal was the first to use telemetry and the first to take charge of the pit crew and improve their performance. He drilled those guys as if they were rehearsing stunts. He was the first to dress them in fire suits covered with logos just like the drivers. He had a great commercial mind about things like that. He came up with stuff that made you think, That was obvious, but it wasn’t obvious until he did it.

  —

  HAL WAS A GREAT INNOVATOR. He invented things that made stunt work safer and more spectacular, like a giant airbag for high falls, a car-flipping cannon, and the Shotmaker, a crane that allows the camera to swoop around a moving car and shoot from any angle. All of them are still in use.

  Before Hal, stunt people used wooden sawhorses with mattresses and cardboard boxes on top of one-by-twelves for falls. The boards would bend before they snapped, absorbing some of the force, but they could handle a fall from only forty or fifty feet. Hal got the idea from the giant air-filled bag used by pole-vaulters. He filled a much bigger bag with helium, which allowed much higher and safer falls.

  He also revolutionized explosions. In the old days they’d put a charge into a hole in the ground and detonate it just as the stuntman tried to fling himself as far away as he could. Hal invented a hydraulic launch pad that throws the stuntman much farther without his having to come near the explosion. It looks like he’s really getting blown up. And Hal came up with a trunk-mounted cannon that can flip a speeding car without a ramp. In the first test, it snapped the car in half and sent Hal to the hospital with a broken back (again).

  Over the years he had all sorts of injuries. He broke dozens of bones, had a shoulder replaced, punctured a lung, and lost a bunch of teeth. He always said that broken bones don’t count, and that you’re not hurt unless you have to go to the hospital. That’s typical of not just Hal, but of all the great stuntmen. When Glenn Wilder’s son, Scott, a top stunt guy himself, broke his pelvis doing a stair fall, somebody made the mistake of calling it a “serious injury.”

  “That’s not serious,” Scott said. “Serious is when you’re dead.”

  I’ve never known anybody with Hal’s pain threshold. When he broke his back the second time, I went to the hospital with him.

  Hal walked in and said, “My back is broken.”

  I’ll never forget the doctor . . . he didn’t even shave yet. He said, “If your back was broken, you wouldn’t be able to walk in here.”

  “Do I have to whip ya to convince you my back is broken?” Hal said.

  The technician x-rayed him, and sure enough, he had two crushed vertebrae and fluid in one lung. Meanwhile, Hal was busy flirting with the nurse.

  The doctor brought out the longest needle I’ve ever seen and said, “Mr. Needham, I have to drain that lung and it’s going to hurt like hell, so I suggest you stand up and put your hands on the wall to brace yourself.”

  By this time they had him in one of those hospital gowns with the open back, and the doctor told the nurse, “You’d better support him because he’ll probably faint.”

  She knelt down and grabbed hold of his legs.

  “That’s very kind of you, honey,” Hal said, still pitching.

  The doctor clearly didn’t like Hal. Maybe he was dating the nurse. He came up behind Hal with that needle and WHAM, he plunged it into Hal’s back and slowly began to withdraw the fluid from his lung.

  I watched Hal for a reaction. Nothing. Not a blink, not even a bead of sweat.

  But his bowels emptied all over himself and the nurse.

  Without missing a beat, Hal looked down and said, “Does this mean I won’t be getting your number, honey?”

  Smokey

  When Hal got his divorce, he said, “Do you think I could stay with you a couple of nights?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You can stay in the pool house.”

  Twelve years later he was still there. But we didn’t see each other much because I never went down to the pool house. I was afraid I’d find a bunch of waitresses. And at least one of us was always away on location. But one day when we were both in town, Hal came up to the house and said, “Roomie, I’ve written a movie.”

  The “script” was handwritten on yellow pads.

  I read it and said, “Hal, if you can get somebody to give you the money, I’ll star in it and you can direct it.”

  My agent advised me to do more films like Deliverance, not a screwball comedy written and directed by a stuntman who’d never done either before. My friends got down on their knees with tears in their eyes and begged me not do it.

  A year later those same people said, “I’m sure glad I convinced you to make that picture.”

  —

  IN THE 1970S, you couldn’t buy Coors beer east of the Mississippi. It didn’t have preservatives, so it had to be kept cold all the way from the brewery to the customer. It cost too much to ship it refrigerated across the continent, so the company sold it only in the West, and people were smuggling it in their suitcases, which was technically bootlegging.

  When Hal and I were getting ready to shoot Gator (1976) in Georgia, the traffic captain put a bunch of Coors on the truck in L.A. and took it down there. He gave Hal a couple of cases for his condo. Hal put a few bottles in the refrigerator, but the next time he looked, they were gone. He put a few more in and they disappeared, too. He figured it was an inside job and he was right. It was the maid. He caught her red-handed with two bottles in her cart. He asked her why she was stealing Coors beer and she said, “You can’t get it around here and my husband l
oves it.”

  In Hal’s mind, smuggling Coors became the MacGuffin for a movie, the thread that would tie the action together. He loved that it wasn’t about killing or hurting people, but that it was still illegal. The story he came up with is simple: a truck driver, Snowman, tries to bootleg a load of Coors from Texarkana, Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia. His buddy, Bo “Bandit” Darville, acts as a decoy to allow Snowman to slip past his nemesis, Sheriff Buford T. Justice, aka Smokey.

  Hal and I took the script to Universal. They wanted to make a movie with us, but not Smokey. They wanted us to do Convoy instead. We stood our ground and said Smokey or nothing, and they finally gave in. (Convoy was eventually made with Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw, directed by Sam Peckinpah.)

  The studio wanted Richard Boone to play the sheriff. He was a wonderful actor and might have been good, but I wanted someone a little crazier, a little more dangerous, and a lot funnier. “How about Jackie Gleason?” I said.

  Orson Welles dubbed Jackie “the Great One,” and it stuck. (When Orson dubbed you anything, it stuck.) Jackie was a huge TV star in the 1950s, first with a variety show and then on The Honeymooners (1955–1956). He did interesting work in the movies in the 1960s: The Hustler, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Soldier in the Rain, but by the time we were casting Smokey, he hadn’t made a movie in seven years and all the Universal execs were wary except the boss, Lew Wasserman, who loved the idea. His marketing brain kicked in right away. “I see eight million Jackie Gleason sheriff dolls!” he said.

  I went to see Jackie and told him about the part. I think he was intrigued by the chance to build a character from the ground up. I told Jackie that my father was a police chief, and Jackie wanted to know all about him.

  “My dad is so cop, he bleeds cop,” I said. “All my life he’d say ‘sumbitch!’ instead of ‘son of a bitch.’”

  “Sumbitch?” Jackie said. I could see his eyes light up.