Stuntmen commonly worked together like a band of brothers, doubling the lead and the other male characters, playing villains, dads, soldiers, cops, lawyers, and pals. This allowed them to assess who was good, who wasn’t, and who could be trusted. In contrast, stuntwomen were often isolated. Before the 1970s, having more than one or two stuntwomen on set was rare. But as Rita Egleston observed, “The only way to be able to judge yourself as a stunt person is in comparison to others, by watching them work.” For stuntwomen, this period offered them the opportunity to work together.
In the spirit and practice of the times, Donna Garrett and Regina Parton doubled the actresses and did other stunts on Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, Police Woman, and The Rockford Files; on Wonder Woman, Jeannie Epper might do Lynda Carter’s car scenes one day, and Regina Parton might drive the next day.14 But “when a script called for a motorcycle stunt,” Jeannie said, “they brought in the best woman cycle rider in the world, Debbie Evans, because Wonder Woman should ride a motorcycle as well as she does everything else.”
Motorcycle champ Debbie Evans explained why doubles are needed: “A lot of the jobs we do are just things the actress shouldn’t be doing, or she’ll get hurt—but they’re easy for us. I also feel if a woman is doing the acting, a woman should do the stunts.” On Deathsport (1978), while doubling for lead actress Claudia Jennings, Debbie jumped her motorcycle across a ravine that was about thirty feet deep and ten feet wide. Another scene required a close-up shot of Jennings, but the actress had no experience on a motorcycle. She was supposed to be going only about five miles an hour as she rode past the camera, which had been placed “really high on a tripod,” Debbie recalled. “The director said, ‘Now Claudia, whatever you do, don’t hit the camera.’ Claudia’s all nervous, pops the clutch, and heads straight for that camera. . . . The bike knocked out one of the legs, the camera and cameraman came flying down, Claudia crashed, and someone had to catch the camera. . . . There’s no way an actress can do what we do.”15
Debbie’s skills made her a preeminent stuntwoman, but she was a champion long before that. “They used to call me Motorcycle Arms in high school,” she said. “You got teased a lot if you even liked sports. I was always on my bicycle, skateboard, unicycle, playing football, baseball, basketball, surfing, water-skiing, and I loved climbing trees! But I was ridiculed for the muscles on my arms. ‘You think you’re a boy?’ Getting teased frustrated me, but looking back, it’s funny because now biceps are in.” While still in high school, Debbie was a factory-sponsored rider for Yamaha and performed in shows before the championship races at the Houston Astrodome, the Silver Dome, Texas Stadium, and Anaheim Stadium, as well as at Super Cross races and the AMA Camel Pro Series races. “I’d do wheelies, ride over some obstacles, and [do] my balancing act—I’d stand on my head on the motorcycle. It wasn’t moving, but no kickstand or anything held it up. It was done just by balance. You turn the handlebars and lock the front wheel with the brake. I’ve done balancing since I was about eleven—standing on the bike seat and do[ing] a 360 balance, swing[ing] my legs around the side to the back, then to the other side, and com[ing] back to the front.”
Later, when Yamaha wanted her to ride in the national championships, she didn’t expect any flak because she’d grown up competing against boys, and they seemed to accept her as that girl from Southern California who rode motorcycles. But “the national organization guys from Michigan or Ohio wouldn’t let me ride,” she said. “It was 1976. They could not fathom how a girl could do it. Finally, they let me in and they put in their best girl rider, because it was kind of an East-versus-West contest. She didn’t finish, but I was right up there with the men. That’s the way I pictured it. I don’t set boundaries for myself. I don’t say ‘only guys can do that.’ My dad helped me to see beyond boundaries. When I was six, he taught me how to ride a motorcycle, how to throw a baseball, and how to throw a punch—not like a girl. He wanted me to be able to protect myself, do some damage. He taught me a lot.”
In 1977, on an episode of CHiPs, Debbie was part of a group of bikers that was supposed to go around the track at Indian Dunes. “I’m on my trials bike,” she recalled. “I was going to do a wheelie and I asked the transportation guy if I could use the air on his truck to do my tire pressure. He was acting like I didn’t know anything because I was a girl, so I got out my gauge, started to let air out, but he’s trying to push me away. I said, ‘It’s okay, I know what I need.’ He goes, ‘How much air you gonna put in there?’ I said, ‘Eight pounds.’ ‘But it says thirty on the side of the tire. You need to put in thirty pounds!’ He was all huffy and puffy about it.” So, Debbie continued, “I get the air down, start the bike up, took off, went about six feet, pulled it up in a wheelie and wheelied all the way down the road. I looked back at him, and he’s standing there, mouth wide open, and I went—Yesssss!” Small or large—a triumph is undeniable.
Stunt players know that routine is not their strong suit, and they know their work is outside the norm. And even if they’ve done hundreds of falls, they know that every stunt is different. Christine Anne Baur came to know that well.16 In the 1970s the athletic, humorous, outspoken, five-foot-four-inch blonde surfed, skateboarded, and rode horses. She was no stranger to movie sets: her grandfather, George Marshall, had directed many Hollywood hits, including Destry Rides Again (1939), and her father, director Frank Baur, was a production manager on Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976). Her dad had no idea he was helping to launch her career when she threw herself into her first stunt, doubling for Bernadette Peters. “I had to swing back and forth across a stage in my lingerie,” she recalled. Until that moment, Chris had planned a career in stable management—show horses, hunters, and jumpers. “That stunt changed my life, because in those days I felt I could do anything athletic. Second, I’d grown up on movie sets, and as I swung across that stage, I realized how perfect I felt doing something physical in a film. For years I’d heard about how movies were made, I understood artistically what was being created, I was on familiar territory—a movie set—and it all came together for me. I’d found the best work I could do.” But her father had principles. “Nepotism was a dirty word,” Chris said, “and he didn’t want anyone to think I got special favors. He opened a door for me, but I had to walk through it.”
Debbie Evans wheeling away! (Courtesy of Debbie Evans)
Her dad referred her to a woman in the wardrobe department, the wife of Paul Baxley. After surviving Iwo Jima, Baxley got into stunt work in 1947 and became a stunt coordinator in the 1970s. He regularly hired stuntmen he knew and trusted, and they became known as the Baxley Bunch—a band of about eight stuntmen “and one girl, Beth Nufer, a terrific circus acrobat.”17 Christine became the second girl in the Baxley Bunch. Since his shows involved much more car work than horse work, Chris learned stunt driving from fellow stunt performer Jerry Summers. “Paul Baxley was very, very old school,” she said. “He believed girls in stunts were nice-looking, maybe can do a few things, [but] it was still a man’s world.”
When Baxley signed on for a new TV series produced by Warner Bros., he didn’t think it would last six episodes. “It was so schlocky!” Chris laughed. The show was The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran from 1979 to 1985. The first year of the series, Chris drove cars and even doubled some of the actors—small men and boys. “We worked as a company, and that was fun. The girls didn’t get to do the big jumps—they’d wig Jerry Summers—but at times I was wigged up to double a guy.” Then there was some trouble. “After I’d had a great time driving a car,” Chris recalled, “one of the guys accused me of penis envy, like I was showing up the boys. And he was a friend! I’d been working hard, hanging it out there, and I was shot down for it. Alan Wyatt, Jerry Summers, and Henry Kingi weren’t like that. After the penis-envy thing, we were on location to finish a race sequence, and some Warner Bros. people were there. I didn’t know Paul had told them he’d found a great stuntwoman. For him to gush about a stuntwoman was unheard of.” Chris, doubling
for Cathy Bach (Daisy Duke), was supposed to drive a truck through barricades of hay bales. Just before the stunt, Chris saw a police car parked beside the road. She told Paul’s nephew it made her uncomfortable, but he assured her that no one would see it. “We did the stunt, I slammed into the hay bales, broke through the first barricade, but as I went through the second one, hay and straw made the road slick as ice. I went around the corner and the car hydroplaned on the straw. That would have been okay, but I hit the police car—not a huge wreck, but not pretty. I managed to control it, drive out of the shot, and save it.” For Chris, that was another career-changing moment. “Paul went into a tirade, ‘You can’t trust stuntwomen,’ and on and on. It was awful. All the months on that show and on other shows for years after that, I’d seen the boys wreck boats, wreck cars, and nothing happened. But I go from hero to zero. ‘See? You can’t trust stunt girls, got to wig the guys.’” Chris’s work for Baxley fell off sharply, but he was soon forced to rehire her because she had grown up on a skateboard, and there were almost no skateboard experts in stunt work. “After all those wasted hours of my youth skateboarding,” she crooned, “I finally went to work with my board under my arm and made money.”
Baxley was stunt-coordinating In God We Tru$t (1980), a film written and directed by comedian Marty Feldman, who also starred in the movie, playing a monk. Chris was going to double Feldman and was supposed to teach him enough skateboard basics for his close-ups, which turned out to be almost impossible. “They made a curly wig,” Chris said, “a mask of his face that wasn’t prosthetics, a brown friar’s robe, and shoes that looked like sandals with painted toes on them. He and I were the same size, and I strapped down my little bosoms.” In the relevant scene, Feldman’s character tangles with a paperboy on a skateboard and winds up riding the board down a hill while being chased by six motorcycles, two limousines, and a crowd. He then crashes into the back of a boat mounted on a trailer attached to a parked truck. As the truck starts to pull into traffic, Feldman (doubled by Chris) stands up on the skateboard, holding on to the water-ski towline, and races through the streets of Los Angeles—a water-skier on asphalt. Eventually, the truck and the boat go one way, and Chris on the skateboard whizzes the other way. “I go through a parking lot and hit a wall. Marty and I thought it would be cool to hit the wall with my arms out in that crucifixion look. That was the kind of stuff I was into. It wasn’t just about doing the stunts; it was about the artistic connections. Take one of the scene was too slow, so on take two, I really whipped it. Halfway through I knew I was going way too fast. Arms out, I smacked into that wall hard.” It’s one thing to see a woman in a bikini take a header off a building. To watch her willfully slam face-first into a concrete wall is unforgettable. At least the crazy gag didn’t break Christine’s nose. “I was very proud of doing that whole sequence,” she said. “Another kid in the business skateboarded, [and] he might have been able to do it. I thought it was pretty cool for a woman to pull it off.”
“You’ve got to have an attitude to do stunts,” said May Boss. “I always love it when the guys brag, ‘I’ve never been hurt.’ If you’ve never been hurt, you haven’t done much. You try not to get hurt, you try to save your life. You can’t be a coward mentally to do stunts. The attitude is, ‘We’re going to get on with it.’”
Before doing a stunt, the performers go over the moves they plan to make. They dream about it. No one speaks about being afraid; they talk about a stunt that “gets their attention.” “Stuntmen have been broken from neck to toe,” said Sherry Peterson, a novice stuntwoman in the late 1970s. “When the guys get hurt, they get a card, the stuntmen’s groups make sure their bills are taken care of, and they mentally and physically help them, but when the girls get hurt it’s like everybody flees from us.”18 Stuntwomen don’t want to let anyone know they’re injured because they don’t want to be replaced. That applies to stuntmen, too, because there’s always a line of guys behind them ready to move in. The 1970s and 1980s were times of both peril and opportunity. But the injuries kept mounting.
7
Disaster Movies and
Disastrous Stunts
You’re not supposed to kill the stunt people either. We’re all supposed to go home.
—Conrad Palmisano
Television offered action shows of all kinds, and disaster movies (aka event films) bristled with victims and mighty male stars. Any catastrophe anywhere would do—on land, at sea, in the air, even meteors from outer space: The Poseidon Adventure, King Kong, Logan’s Run, The Hindenburg, Apocalypse Now, 1941, The Black Hole, Meteor.1 Ape and airport themes were especially popular throughout the 1970s.2 A disaster movie could be a blockbuster, but not all blockbusters were disaster films. Jaws and Star Wars were blockbusters with zeitgeist.3 Most of these movies generated elaborate stunt gags in search of bigger box-office receipts. The combined pressures of profit and peril raised the odds of mishaps, culminating in the terrible stunt accident that occurred during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982, which forced everyone to stop and rethink (see chapter 10).
In particular, 1974 was a blowout year for stunt-heavy movies: Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, Airport 1975, even the rowdy Blazing Saddles.4 Stunt coordinator Paul Stader hired more than seventy stunt people for Towering Inferno.5 The thrilling elevator sequences were shot at the Fox ranch or in downtown Los Angeles. As the fire rages in the doomed high-rise, one scene depicts the slow descent of an external glass-paneled elevator bearing a fireman, eight frantic women, and a child. Rocked by violent explosions, the elevator jerks to a stop, while inside, the women are tossed around like dice. Lisolette (played by Hollywood star Jennifer Jones) clutches her child. A glass panel behind her falls away, and one of the other women grabs the child just before the stuntwoman doubling for Jones takes what looks like an eighty-story fall. Accounts vary about who the stuntwomen in the elevator were, but most agree that the one who took the fall was new to the business. Glynn Rubin, an appealing blue-eyed blonde, was one of the two stuntwomen in the elevator. “I think the rest were extras,” she said. “The elevator hung from cables above a concrete parking lot in downtown LA. The Hollywood Reporter said the fall was eighty feet—so not true! It was about two stories into the airbag. The other stunt girl hadn’t worked much, but she took the fall—young, pretty, and scared to death. When we were cued for the fall, she didn’t go, and finally I pushed her out.”6
Giant disaster movies needed lots of “extra bodies,” and that’s how stunt people of all kinds got their start. Sandra Lee Gimpel said, “Towering Inferno was my real introduction to the stunt business.” Later she became a fourth-degree black belt, a stunt coordinator, and a second-unit director.7 On Inferno she was one of five people hired to do “a little swimming” when the high-rise’s glass elevator blows and water pours into the dining area. She recalled, “I brought my eight-year-old daughter to the set to see that mommy’s stunts were not dangerous. Five of us were on a platform in front of the elevator. The assistant director said, ‘When the elevator blows, you guys jump off the platform and make sure you’re in front of a camera.’ Underwater cameras had been set into the floor to film us struggling in the water. The glass elevator blew and the water literally knocked us off the platform and into the air. We weren’t thinking about the cameras, we were trying to save our lives. Later they admitted they ‘kind of blew in too much water.’ Oh, yes. That was the last stunt my kid saw me do for a long time.”
Earthquake reportedly hired 141 stunt people—more than ever before for one film.8 They were hit by cars and dropped into cracks in the earth, narrowly escaped drowning (or not), were enveloped in flames, fell from rooftops, and ran for their lives. Evelyn Cuffee vividly recalled “the feel and the sound of the effects they created—scary, just like an earthquake.”
Acrobat and dancer Paula Dell returned to stunt work in the 1960s.9 In her long career, she had been afraid only a couple of times—once on Earthquake. Pointing out the dangers of stunt work in disaster
movies, she said, “Usually, if we needed something to make a stunt safer, we knew the prop and special effects people would fix things for us, but these big movies hired many nonunion, inexperienced people. In one scene, the crews were supposed to throw things off a roof to make it look like the building was falling apart, but some guys up there were throwing real rocks. They thought it was funny because we were down on the street and we were supposed to be dead! All this stuff came down on us and we couldn’t move. That was scary.”
Veteran stuntwoman Sandy Gimpel, age sixty-six, practices her kicks in preparation for an upcoming workout video. (Courtesy of Sandy Gimpel)
Regina Parton and Julie Johnson were among the many “victims” caught in a “flooding underground sewer” that was actually a long tunnel constructed on Universal’s back lot. It was open on top and about thirty feet deep. The water came from a nearby lake. “At one end, a gate could open to release thousands of gallons of smelly lake water on us,” Julie said. “At the other end, a gate would close so the water backed up to fill the tunnel.” Regina, an expert swimmer, doubled actress Genevieve Bujold as the rising waters washed away a dozen people. “The film crew was positioned on either side of the drain, unaware that a gate had failed to operate and the water was spilling over the sides toward the power outlet. Regina was alert, traced the power source and forced the electrician who was numb with panic to pull the plug.”10 Her quick action averted what could have been a disaster. “At first it was true Regina was hired because of her dad [stuntman Reggie Parton],” Rita Egleston said, “but she was a legitimate working stuntwoman, and so were others who got those breaks—they were good stuntwomen. In the stunt community the kinds of shows you worked sort of depended on your specialty. There were the cowboys and the non-cowboys. Usually they don’t mix, but in the 1970s the cowboys were learning how to drive cars and how to swim. Regina was really good with cars and underwater work.”
Stuntwomen Page 11