Stuntwomen
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On the same underground tunnel set, Julie doubled famous movie star Ava Gardner as part of a desperate crowd trying to climb a ladder and escape the rising water. The person on the ladder ahead of Julie was supposed to step on her hand and cause her to fall about fifteen feet into the rushing water below. “Charlton Heston was not being doubled for this scene,” she said, “and he was below the ladder. The cameras rolled, the water began to rush in, the director yelled ‘Action,’ Charlton yelled at me: ‘Jump!’ But I couldn’t drop fifteen feet—the water barely came up to his knees, not high enough to buffer my fall, and I knew a six-inch curb ringed the base of the cement floor.” It was decision time: ruin the shot by not going on cue, or slam into the concrete? “The scene was in full progress and Charlton kept yelling ‘Jump!’ I hit the bottom, my legs buckled instantly, my knees hit the curb hard. I’d been cued too early, one of the greatest hazards of our business.” Soaking wet, she grabbed a bag of ice and hobbled painfully to the dressing room, where she was told Miss Gardner wanted to see her. Astonished, Julie tottered off to the star’s trailer. “Ava hugged me and asked, ‘How badly are you hurt, my dear?’ She poured me a shot of brandy. All I could think of was my knees hitting the concrete, and here was Ava Gardner insisting I drink brandy, which I welcomed.”
Earthquake almost ended Polly Burson’s career. Back in 1947, she and Lila Finn had been working on Unconquered on Paramount’s back lot when a gag drenched Polly with hundreds of gallons of water. Now they were both on Universal’s back lot, which was being demolished by Earthquake. Polly stood on the porch of a house, and special effects dumped 3,000 gallons of water on her. The porch collapsed. “The water was supposed to go somewhere else,” Lila said, “but it hit her and she hit the wall.”11 “I broke my left leg and some bones in my face and I decided it was time to quit,” Polly said.12 She later found out the water drop was only a test. “They weren’t even filming! What a waste.” Polly worked on a few more films, one of them aptly titled Last of the Great Survivors (1984). Then she indulged her wanderlust on a “salty old forty-two-foot gaff-rigged schooner,” sailing it to Hawaii and New Zealand. She and the friend accompanying her “had no previous sailing experience,” Lila said. “They took a ‘shakedown’ cruise to the Channel Islands just off California and headed for Hawaii!”13 They didn’t know anything about celestial navigation or, apparently, much else about sailing, but Polly could do almost anything. After all, she was a stuntwoman.
Along with female-driven TV action-adventures, the huge disaster movies of the 1970s changed stunts. Explosions were bigger, falls were higher; horses were out, cars were in. Yet some things remained the same: fights and car work were still considered guys’ work. Women had seldom taken the wheel like bandits on the lam since the silent movies. In the fractured, frenzied 1970s they began to make up for lost time.
Within a short period, three movies celebrating stuntmen were released: Stunts (1977), Hooper (1978), and The Stunt Man (1980).14 Hooper, Hal Needham’s jovial ode to stuntmen, was his generation’s version of Lucky Devils (1933)—highlighting the work that’s really more like play.15 One stuntwoman called Hooper “a whole lot of everything—fights, motorcycles, car races, chariot races” performed by about sixty stuntmen and eleven stuntwomen.16
The title character is aging stuntman Sonny Hooper (Burt Reynolds), who is challenged by his disintegrating vertebrae and by an eager young stuntman (Jan-Michael Vincent). Hooper’s vision of his future is epitomized by revered elder stuntman Jocko (Brian Keith), who tells Sonny, “You oughta drink more. Nothing hurts when you’re numb.” Unlike Lucky Devils, Hooper doesn’t blame women for causing their men’s trouble, although stuntmen and marriage still don’t mix. Hooper and his girlfriend Gwen (Sally Field) talk about marriage, but it’s a distant possibility. Other spirited, savvy wives or girlfriends are merely satellites to the action. At the stuntmen’s hangout, a fight erupts with a visiting SWAT team. Gwen is unmoved by the mayhem: when Hooper lands on the table, she merely shifts her plate and then breaks a bottle over a SWAT guy’s head. If stuntwomen are in the crowd, they’re not identified, but a beautiful babe at the bar does throw a solid punch. Then, outside, a car slams down the street, goes into a roll, and—surprise!—two women pop out of the upended vehicle, waving to the crowd. They were Janet Brady and Sammy Thurman. It was one of Sammy’s first stunts.17 “That car roll was on a wooden ramp,” Janet said. “You run the left or right wheels of the car up a ramp and you had to be very precise to roll a car from that. The guys were betting I couldn’t do it. That made me stubborn enough—man enough—to show them I could do it.”
Janet may have been one of the first women to roll a car, but she was not the first to recognize that her stubbornness was a boon to her stunt work. “In those days it was hard for the guys to accept girls doing car stunts,” she said. “The guys didn’t say anything, but I could feel it, and if you did one thing wrong, they’d want to stick a guy in the car while you’re saying, ‘Wait, give me another shot.’ Girls didn’t get another shot. They were tough on us.” Janet learned car work from an expert, stunt coordinator Alan Gibbs.18 “He was an incredible stuntman,” she said, “and his timing was so right on the money that he could actually tell you at what point to crank the wheel. If you followed what he said, you had no problem.” On the pilot for the TV series CHiPs (1977–1983), Janet did a difficult car roll up an embankment. “I didn’t realize motorcycles could go faster than cars. I was trying to stay up with a motorcycle that was supposed to make me go off-road. The timing was hard. I had to reach about seventy miles an hour to go up the embankment and get the car to roll. Instead of keeping the car straight, I had to go to the left at a forty-five-degree angle, then crank the wheel at the right angle and at the right time [to] roll the car. That was a ride.”
In Hooper, Janet Brady takes the wheel to start the car roll. (Courtesy of Janet Brady)
And she’s into the roll. (Courtesy of Janet Brady)
All through school Janet had trained in gymnastics, and then she became a hairdresser. She never thought of doing stunts until her brother-in-law, a stuntman, asked her to do a bit on Won Ton Ton, the Dog that Saved Hollywood (1976), because “they couldn’t find a girl small enough.” Janet was supposed to walk through a doorway as explosions went off and the walls of the building collapsed around her. This was quite similar to Buster Keaton’s dangerous stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), when the wall of a house fell on him but left him untouched, standing in a perfectly placed open window frame. If Keaton had moved a few inches in either direction, he would have been crushed.19
Janet wound up marrying her driving teacher, Alan Gibbs, who was also president of Stunts Unlimited, the group that had split from the Stuntmen’s Association in 1970. Likewise, stuntwoman Kitty O’Neil married Stunts Unlimited member Duffy Hambleton.20 It’s not surprising when stunt people marry each other, but it was surprising when Gibbs, Needham, and stunt coordinator Bobby Bass proposed Janet and Kitty for membership in the all-male Stunts Unlimited in September 1976.21 “I never thought of being a member,” Janet said. “Some guys didn’t want a woman in the group and it was probably as hard on them as it was on me. I had to earn their respect.” Kitty and Janet were called the group’s “token women,” which they were. Although they benefited from having the inside track, Janet and Kitty were also skilled professionals.
Years later, looking back, a few stuntwomen wished they had reacted differently to the conflicts of the 1970s. “I would have been a lot stronger,” said Janet Brady. “For a long time I was the only woman in Stunts Unlimited, but they put other women in spots they should have offered me as a member. I didn’t tell them how much it affected me personally, and my career. Today the guys are like my brothers. Back then I told myself I was lucky to be in Stunts Unlimited, lucky to be working, that was all that mattered, and I let it go. If I had it to do over, I’d speak up.” If Janet’s and Kitty’s admittance to the group had opened the door to other women, the history of stu
ntwomen might have been very different.
The late 1970s has been seen as a turning point in stunts. Accidents increased, and safety became an issue; nonunion crews were inexperienced, and the crucial trust among stunt people began to crack. African American stuntman Jophery Brown (Morgan Freeman’s regular double) remembered Hooper as “a watershed.” He had followed his brother Calvin (Bill Cosby’s stunt double) into the business. Other than Cal, Jophery had no mentors, he said, “until I met Hal Needham. Hal took me under his wing,” and Alan Gibbs and Bobby Bass taught him “finesse.” “After Hooper,” he said, “so many came out here wanting to be stunt people,” and they were listed as stuntmen “when they didn’t have a clue. Also, you had ‘briefcase production companies’ that would do their movie and leave. They wanted to hire their friends, like the director’s brother’s son or his daughter’s boyfriend, and put them in our spot. You can’t take somebody out of college, put him in a fire-suit and light him up. That guy doesn’t know what to do or how to move. It’s like, ‘What do I do when I get hot?’ When you get hot, it’s too late—you’re dead! You have to anticipate it and hit the ground so the guys can put you out. A guy like that gets everybody in trouble because it’s a snowball effect . . . and it’s unsafe for everyone. That’s what we lost. We lost that comfort zone of knowing who’s around you.”22 For this reason and others, stunts became riskier, but many failed to notice the critical changes in the business. As a result, one stuntwoman working on King Kong narrowly escaped injury, only to be hurt on her next stunt.
In 1976 Dino De Laurentiis decided to resurrect King Kong.23 Acrobat Sunny Woods had done trapeze work with and without nets, but she was new to stunts when she doubled Jessica Lange (Dwan) on the remake of the giant gorilla movie. To film scenes of Dwan clutched in Kong’s hand, a huge mechanical arm had been constructed that, suspended from a crane, could be lifted at least thirty feet from the ground. De Laurentiis, his staff, and executives from Paramount filed in to see the apparatus in operation. Ronnie Lippin covered the event for American Way: “In the trial run, the hydraulically controlled hand reached out and picked up a few large wooden boards, the enormous fingers closed around them and . . . crushed them into a thousand pieces.” For the next shot, Sunny was in the gorilla hand. “With the film rolling . . . the fingers closed gently around her slim body, the arm moved and Sunny was lifted high above the ground. The monster seemed to stare at the delicate blonde girl who was pretending to struggle in terror. And then, without warming, the mechanism broke. The hand suddenly tipped over backwards and, with Sunny’s head aimed directly at the ground, the monster’s enormous fist smashed into a large pile of rocks on the set. Everyone thought Sunny’s head had been crushed.” But luckily, one of the gorilla’s knuckles had “caught on a rock, twisting the hand slightly” and saving Sunny’s life. She squeezed out, “visibly shaken, crawled around the rocks in time to see the terrified studio executives rushing out the door. Only Kong producer, Dino De Laurentiis, waited to make sure Sunny was not injured before he left the set.”24 She even had the guts to climb back into the unpredictable motorized paw for a second take.
Sunny had had a close call, but she wasn’t as lucky on an episode of The Bionic Woman. Rita Egleston had fallen backward dozens of times on that show without incident. “Long before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon reintroduced being ‘flown’ in a harness, it was a circus thing,” Rita said. “Sunny was a really good aerialist, but the design of the stunt on Bionic Woman was—iffy. She was to fall from a theater balcony into breakaway tables, but they were not constructed as breakaway tables. She landed on them and crushed both her heels.” That’s how fast everything can change. Sunny recovered, but her stunt career was over.
Creating and shooting a stunt can involve many experts in different departments doing different tasks. The stunt coordinator, who bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of a stunt, works with the second-unit director, the special effects and prop departments, and others. But people make mistakes, especially when a stunt is considered simple or easy. In Sunny’s case, she was new to stunts and just assumed the tables were breakaway, but no one checked to see that they were made of balsa wood or some other flimsy material that would collapse on impact. Perhaps someone in the prop department, too new to know better, simply brought the wrong tables. It was a costly mistake. That’s why Jeannie Epper’s dad had advised her to learn about everything, “be involved in all aspects of stunts, the ropes, the mechanisms” and to question everything: “why use a hand-held camera, which lens, why it’s being shot this way.”25
Other factors can complicate stunts as well. They are usually the last scenes to be shot at the end of the day, when everyone’s tired. The shots may be rushed, especially on TV shows, which often don’t have time for rehearsals. For instance, a well-designed and safe car stunt can become perilous if no one realizes the road is icy or if no one considers the effects of blinding lights on the driver. Or disaster can ensue if someone changes a tiny part of a stunt after rehearsal, just minutes before filming. That’s what happened to one stuntwoman working on a Jaws sequel.
Jaws decimated the competition in the summer of 1975. In its unforgettable opening sequence, a young woman splashes into the ocean for a moonlight swim. As she treads water, her body suddenly jerks violently, and she disappears beneath the surface; she pops up again, eyes wide with horror, as she’s wrenched through the water from side to side by something unseen. Then she vanishes. The beauty gulped down by the shark was Susan Backlinie. According to Rita Egleston, “Beneath her in the water, a stunt diver yanked her down by a rope tied around her waist. That’s how Susan said it was done.” When she resurfaced, the underwater diver began swimming back and forth, pulling her sideways as if she were in the grip of the great white shark’s powerful jaws.26
On Jaws 2 (1978), six-year stunt veteran Jean Coulter was alone in a wooden V-bottom boat when the mechanical shark attacked. “Jean hurled gasoline cans at it, spilled gas on herself, fired a flare gun that ignited her costume and the boat, which finally exploded. ‘That was a pretty good gag,’ she said. ‘My wig caught fire, I lost my eyelashes and brows. But they cut out my best close-up where I’m in flames and tears are streaming down my face. They said it was too morbid.’”27 On another take, a different problem wormed its way into the stunt. “The mechanical shark was to hit the boat hard enough to make a hole in it,” Jean said. “In rehearsal, when the shark hit the boat, everything was fine, but then someone moved the boat closer to the shark. No one told me. The shark hit the boat really hard, jerked me to one side, my foot got wedged in the bottom of the boat, I tore the cartilage in my knee, and the boat almost went over.” She ended up in a cast from the waist down. She sawed it in half so she could take it off for the rest of her shots.
Janet Brady, Jean Coulter, and Glory Fioramonti were among the new stuntwomen who proved themselves in the 1970s. Glory was not a trained acrobat or swimmer, but she was daring. She once asked her dad, a location manager at Warner Bros., if he ever thought she’d become a stuntwoman. Then he reminded her of a pony ride when she was about five years old. While riding one of the supposedly docile animals around in a circle, Glory said, “my pony broke free, darted out of the gate, and galloped down the yellow line on the road that had a few cars going both ways. My parents were running after me so fast that my mom lost her shoes. I was having the time of my life, yelling, ‘Go pony, go!’” When the pony headed into the woods, Glory thought it would be a good idea to stop riding, so she just jumped off. When her parents caught up to her, she was sitting on the ground grinning. From that auspicious beginning, Glory found a place in stunts.28
In 1972, after college, she was training young horses that, according to Glory, “were trying to kill me on a daily basis.” Her father told her they needed someone to double Ann-Margret “and ride next to John Wayne for three months in Mexico.” Not impressed, Glory wanted to know what it paid. Her father told her she’d get into SAG, but at the time, Glory had n
o interest in movies. “Then he told me SAG’s rate was $125 a day. I was making $50 a week.” Because she’d been riding “those rank horses,” Glory was hired and got to ride next to Wayne on The Train Robbers. “It felt like a family because Wayne carried the same crew with him on every picture.” Glory had planned to be a psychotherapist, and she said, “My degree in psychology helped my new career a lot because this is a game of personalities and egos more than stunts.”
Even though anything can go wrong, most performers go into a stunt confident that it has been set up correctly and safely. But that’s not always the case, as Glory found out in Texas while performing a stunt for Soggy Bottom U.S.A. (1980). “About eight of us were hanging onto the back of a Model T pickup truck,” she said. “The driver was Tony Epper, a big man who had to cram himself into the cab. We were to careen down this hill, jump the embankment onto a ferry that was floating on the swampy water about thirty to forty feet off. Once on the ferry deck, Tony would stop the truck, but in case it was hard to stop, they had set up a bunch of props—boxes of live chickens, bales of hay, a parked truck—to slow us down. Maybe Tony came in too fast or the brakes went out, but we barreled right through all the props, off the end of the ferry, and sank like a rock. It had to be hysterical to watch, like a Mack Sennett comedy. Suddenly we’re all in the water trying to figure out what the hell is going on, swimming for our lives, wondering where’s Tony, because he’s so big he’s hard to miss. He almost didn’t get out of that truck. That was not funny.” Glory paused. “I have to mention one of the towns we were shooting in was called Uncertain, Texas.” In this case, no one could have guessed that all those props wouldn’t stop the truck.