In other situations, stunt people’s instincts tell them that something is wrong. This can save them—if they pay attention. If they ignore their instincts and squeak through, the experience becomes part of their stunt wisdom. On the TV series Lancer (1968–1970), Jeannie Epper was standing in for a young actress trapped in a burning building while clutching a doll. The director had told Jeannie, “Whatever you do, don’t let go of the doll.” Before the house was set on fire, she felt like something wasn’t quite right with the gag. “As the cabin began going up in flames, beams started falling all around her. ‘When I woke up in the hospital, all my hair was burned off,’ she said, ‘but I still had that doll in my hand. You should have seen that doll, too. It was all fried up. We both were.’”29 After that, Jeannie became much more careful. “When you’re young, you just crash and burn, crash and burn. But you can’t keep slamming into the ground forever without getting hurt.”30
Experienced stunt people listen to their instincts; they assume nothing. But sometimes even a veteran can be talked into a gag. Jadie David had “slammed into the ground” for five years without being seriously hurt—until Rollercoaster (1977).31 The big Universal “Sensurround” movie was being shot at several locations, and Jadie’s stunt was taking place at the Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, Virginia. Three cars on the roller coaster were supposed to derail and toss out the vacationing joy riders. “We were to jump off one of the cars,” Jadie said, “but we weren’t comfortable with the way the stunt was set up.” Some of the stunt players were to jump into a breakaway building with pads in it, while others, including Jadie, were supposed to land in the sand. “I often think about that stunt. The women didn’t really want to do it. They felt it wasn’t safe. I understood that we had decided as a group not to do the stunt, but then the company renegotiated with us. Three men decided to do it and so did I, but two women would not do it the way it was set up. I was stubborn enough to say, ‘Oh, you know, if the guys can do it, I’m going to do it,’ which wasn’t very bright. That was probably the most difficult stunt I ever did because I don’t think it was physically possible.” One car jumped the track and “sailed into a balsa wood building.”32 Jadie and stuntman Diamond Farnsworth were thrown from another car, jumped to the right, and hit the sand hard. “Farnsworth ended up splitting his pelvis,” Jadie said, “and I broke my back.” They were out of work for months, but they healed. The next year Farnsworth worked on Deadman’s Curve, and Jadie was supposed to double Madge Sinclair, driving a big rig on the truckers’ revenge movie Convoy. But according to Jadie, unlike the stuntmen on the show, “I was not given the chance to get my CD [commercial driver’s] license, so a stuntman in a wig replaced me.”
Later, Jadie David did a burn without injury, but as this magazine cover shows, these gags can be very tricky. (Courtesy of Garry Brod)
Debbie Evans’s skill on motorcycles was well known, but she was comparatively new to stunts in 1978, and while working on The Jerk (1979), she let herself be talked into a job she didn’t feel right about.33 Conrad Palmisano, an actor and stuntman since 1970, was stunt coordinator for the film, as well as Steve Martin’s double.34 Conrad’s relaxed air of experience comes with a jovial sense of humor. He recalled that “Carl Reiner was a wonderful, creative director to work for. Debbie did the motorcycle stuff and played a girl in a circus act that crashed through a wall of fire. She was wearing some kind of Styrofoam shark fin thing on her helmet. She didn’t have a lot of clothes on.” The wardrobe department had dressed Debbie in a bizarre outfit—a one-piece bathing suit, fishnet stockings, a helmet crowned by that “shark fin thing,” gloves, and boots that came up past her knees. Her shoulders and back were bare for her motorcycle ride through a wall of fire. She was supposed to break through a wall made of thin pine slats that were attached on either side to two other walls that held the crash wall upright. She didn’t know the crew had stapled the crash wall to the main frames. When she asked if they were going to score the wood, or partially cut through it, she was told, “Oh, no, you’ll break right through that.” Debbie thought the pine would bend rather than break, so someone finally scored part of the crash wall. She then asked if she could wear Nomex, a fire-retardant fabric. “Oh, no,” a crew member said, “you can’t because they’ll see it. Do you want us to get a guy to do it?” She knew the guys had been doing it in nylon jackets at thrill shows all week long. She recalled, “I was new and I thought maybe I was making a bigger deal out of this than it really was. I thought they probably knew better.” However, she did get a Nomex hood that hung beneath the helmet, and she applied flesh-colored makeup gel to protect her throat and chest.
Conrad Palmisano, stunt coordinator and second-unit director. (Courtesy of John Stephens)
Next, Debbie was rigged up to a “ratchet,” a device that would make it look like she was thrown off the motorcycle while inside the wall of flames. Under her costume she wore a jerk vest that was attached to the rig by a cable. On cue, the ratchet would yank her into the air. “That was the gag,” Conrad said. At one time, doing a stunt with a ratchet could be quite dangerous. “They called them nitrogen jerk ratchets,” Debbie said, “and they could jerk your head off. You have to have your chin tucked into your chest, and you have to be pressed back against the cable. Today, a ratchet isn’t exactly dangerous, but it takes training, timing, and the stunt person has to know when to lean back just before she’s catapulted into the air. They say they are ‘going for a ride.’”
Just before the stunt was shot, the crew distributed hay in a circle around the wall supports, doused it with diesel fuel, and lit it up. “I revved up the bike and went for it,” Debbie said, “but when I crashed through the wall, a couple of slats broke, the rest pulled out of the frame, all bent, and the staples popped right out. I was through the wall, but the burning frame was all around the motorcycle and me. I saw smoke coming from my back and thought I had a piece of it on me. I couldn’t push it off, so I bailed off the back of the motorcycle and rolled.” Conrad added, “We were told that Debbie’s costume had been treated with fire retardant, but sadly, the foam shark fin had not been done sufficiently. Debbie paid the price when it caught fire and caused her burn. I should have tested it in advance. She was then and is now one great performer, her gender never mattered—except the girls almost always have far less to wear. It’s easier to do [a stunt] yourself than to put friends out there running around like they’re burning to death,” he said. “They’re acting, of course, but where does the performance end and reality begin? It’s a blurred edge. As a stunt person, we all care for each other. When it comes down to it on the set, it’s a very tight-knit community. Between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’ we’re all brothers and sisters.” Debbie spent two awful weeks in a burn ward and didn’t work for two months, but she learned an important lesson. She would never again let anyone talk her into a stunt she didn’t feel right about. Later in 1979, Debbie tied for second at the CBS Sports Spectacular stunt competition, where she was the only female competitor.35
In the risky world of stunts, women pushed to “get wigs off men,” blacks challenged the bulwark of discrimination, and everyone pressed for safer stunts, driven in part by the escalating rate of accidents. These complicated uphill efforts came to a head in the 1980s—at the Screen Actors Guild, on the set, and finally in the press.
8
Stunt Safety and
Gender Discrimination
What’s that mean, he had the last of the Coca-Cola?
—Jean Coulter
Performing stunts well is the key to professional success, but coordinating them confers more prestige and control. Not all stunt performers are cut out to stunt-coordinate; in addition to stunt experience, it requires the ability to create and set up stunts, knowledge of cameras and special effects, and good people skills. It’s an important job with major, sometimes life-and-death, responsibilities.
In the late 1970s, more than two decades after Polly Burson coordinated stunts in Westward th
e Women (1951), a few other women began to coordinate, including Donna Garrett, The Streets of L.A. (1979); Julie Johnson, Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981); and Sandra Lee Gimpel, Mrs. Columbo (1979–1980).1 On Mrs. Columbo, Sandy managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. “On the third or fourth episode we couldn’t finish a big car thing,” Sandy said. “I was called to the office and told they were hiring ‘Bob Someone’ through the DGA [Directors Guild of America]. ‘You know the show, you’ve been on it, he hasn’t so we want you to help him through.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ They looked at me like, ‘What do you mean, no?’ I said, ‘I want to direct second unit and if you don’t want to let me do it, then let him do it, but I won’t come in that day.’” Sandy then left the office, got in her car, and began to cry. “I figured they’d tell me not to come back. An hour later the production manager called. ‘Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, Black Tower, sign your contract, they’re buying you the DGA card.’ Then I really cried.” Among other duties, a second-unit director designs and films a show’s stunt sequences. The job requires knowledge of camera work (decisions involving lighting, angles, and lenses), the character of the actor’s role in the stunt, and how the sequence being shot tells the story, as well as ensuring that the stunts are exciting. The next day, Sandy met with Universal’s head of production. “He asked if I had my shot list. I did. ‘You have eight hours. Make sure you get everything you want and they want.’ I guess I did pretty well. Best of all were the guys I had worked with who always helped me, like Charlie Picerni and Mickey Gilbert.”
However, the stunt business was still a man’s world, and a stuntwoman was still considered to be doing a man’s job, especially when she worked as a stunt coordinator or second-unit director. “You had to know how to talk to them [the men],” Sandy said. “If you didn’t, you were going to be eaten alive. You could not alienate them. If someone had a suggestion, you listened to it, said ‘thanks very much,’ and if you didn’t like it, you did it your way. So much of our business is politics. Most of life is.” To prove they could handle the job, women walked a thin line between leading and following; they could not tackle the work the same way their male counterparts did. “There were absolutely no role models for us,” said Beth Kennedy, a director of information systems and the first female executive on the back lot of Universal Studios. “The models we followed were the guys we worked with in the divisions. Sometimes they’d yell, but they didn’t like it when a woman yelled at a man.”2 Early in her career, producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator [1984], Aliens [1986], The Hulk [2003]) realized that to be successful, she had to be “strong, better prepared, and less emotional [than men] so that I wouldn’t be judged or dismissed as a female. I saw the way men interacted—they were tough, forceful and firm. If they got emotional, they didn’t cry or apologize. A lot of men were not prepared, but they were men, they knew the lingo, they were part of the boys club, and they could get away with it. As a woman, I could not.”3 Stuntwomen who wanted to coordinate needed all the usual skills plus others that had little to do with stunts.
Ron Rondell was the Spelling-Goldberg supervising stunt coordinator and second-unit director for Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981). The son of Ronald Rondell Sr., a respected actor and second-unit director, Ron was handsome and outgoing. He had been a skilled gymnast at Hollywood High School and started doing stunts in the 1950s. He quickly became known for his agility and daring, such as his stunt on Kings of the Sun (1963): He clung “to the top of a flaming 50-foot ladder as it was pushed over, rode it down until unseen wires caught it half-way to the ground. He continued on, crashing through the thatched roof of a hut.”4 In 1978 Ron hired Julie Ann Johnson as assistant coordinator on Charlie’s Angels. Julie was one of several women who regularly doubled the lead actresses on the series (others included Jean Coulter, Jeannie Epper, Darlene Tompkins, and Hilary Thompson).5 When Julie became a stunt coordinator, the press took notice because Charlie’s Angels was a top-rated TV series. From that high point, no one—certainly not Julie or Ron—could have imagined what was to come.
Participants at the show’s weekly production meeting dissected the script, which included a breakdown of all the stunts. Julie was worried that the cars supplied by the Spelling-Goldberg production company frequently had no seat belts or brakes; she’d “had words” about other safety issues with the cameramen and directors. In addition to being new to the job, she was the first female stunt coordinator on the show, and her forthright manner was not in sync with the way women were expected to behave. Jean Coulter, who worked with Julie and often doubled one of the Angels, said, “In our business, when a woman came in to coordinate, it was like you were not supposed to be there. Julie called talented people to work for her, she was alert on set, stood right by the camera, and cared about the safety of everyone. I saw no difference between the way she did the job and other coordinators I worked for.” Jean knew the business: she came from an industry family. Her grandfather had been Claudette Colbert’s chauffeur and lived on her estate; her father, Russell Menzer, was a commercial artist and art director at Warner Bros. for forty years and helped design the Disney Worlds in France, Japan, and Florida; her sister, Lori Martin, had been a child star on the TV series National Velvet (1960–1962). Jean was an athletic horsewoman and scuba diver, as well as being a very pretty blonde who had won her share of beauty contests. She “fell into” stunts in the 1970s, and she did some rugged ones, including the pilot of Flamingo Road (1979). While doubling for Morgan Fairchild, Jean was stranded in a small boat sinking in choppy waters. A rescue helicopter hovered overhead, with stuntman Glen Wilder hanging off the last rung of a ladder suspended from the aircraft. “I grabbed onto his belt,” she said, “pulled myself out of the boat, climbed up and over his body to his hands, grabbed the ladder, climbed over the rest of him as the helicopter took off, shimmying and shaking. To bring up your body with your arms takes strength. I think we did that stunt five times. What a tough show.”6 But Jean and Julie were about to be involved in another stunt that didn’t go so well.
The “Angels” Jean Coulter doubled: Tanya Roberts, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd. Inset: Coulter and Ladd. (Courtesy of Ray Marek)
Filming a stunt successfully and safely takes the cooperation of everyone involved—director, unit manager, first assistant director, camera operators, crew, stunt people, and actors. The women who were hired to coordinate had solid stunt experience, but as one of them said, “She got the job of coordinator. Now she has to find a way to be allowed to do it.” For instance, for one stunt on Charlie’s Angels, Jean Coulter was supposed to climb a six-foot ladder, grab a rope, and “bulldog” a man—fly through the air and knock him down. “We had to fall quite a distance on to a marble floor,” she said. “Julie insisted we have a pad. The director didn’t have time. He said to her, ‘You’ve told me what you want, now go over there and sit down. We’re going to shoot this.’” Safety problems can arise when a director won’t listen to the stunt coordinator, but that’s not what happened in January 1979.
Jean and Julie were in the backseat of a car on a dirt airstrip near Magic Mountain, thirty-one miles north of Los Angles. Julie, doubling for Farrah Fawcett, sat on the left side behind the driver; Jean, doubling for Cheryl Ladd, was on the right. Simultaneously, they were supposed to jump out the rear doors of the moving car. The driver, Bobby Bass, was an experienced stuntman and coordinator; in the passenger seat, stuntman Howard Curtis would cue the women when to jump.7 Each time they drove around the track, Jean prepared for the jump; the car doors were very heavy, she recalled, and her seat right next to the door barely gave her enough room to launch herself out of the car. Rehearsals were mainly to set the speed of the car—ten to fifteen miles per hour. They didn’t feel safe jumping at higher speeds. “During the rehearsal Bobby was kind of in a daze,” Jean said later. “I don’t know what the problem was but he wasn’t reacting to what I said to him. . . . I’d worked with Bobby before on many jobs. He was very good in cars.”8
They took a break at 10:30 a.m., and Bobby and Jean left the car; Julie stayed inside and worried about the camera placement. The shot was supposed to show both women leaping from the car’s back doors—a dramatic sight—but earlier, Julie had argued with first assistant director Blair Gilbert and cameraman Richard Rawlings Jr. that the cameras were not correctly placed to film both sides of the car.9 “Blair was standing next to our car before we did the stunt,” Jean said. “Julie was upset and said to Blair that she was doing the stunt for nothing. . . . The cameras were on my side of the car, so I knew the camera would not see Julie jump out. There was no camera on the left side simultaneously filming the action with the camera on the right side. I am absolutely positive of this. . . . The cameras were not changed.”10
During a later break, Julie, still in the car, heard the walkie-talkie squawk: “Where are you guys? Get back here!” From different directions, Jean, Howard, and Bobby hustled back to the car. As Jean got in, someone passed the driver’s side of the car. “I heard him say, ‘Bobby got the last of the coke this morning,’” Julie said.
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