Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  Jean asked her, “What’s that mean, he had the last of the Coca-Cola?”

  “No, Jean, coke.”

  “Oh, now I get it.”

  “Bobby sped back to the filming site real fast,” Julie said, “got into position, and the director on the walkie-talkie yelled, ‘Action!’” According to Jean, “Bobby floored it.” Both she and Julie shouted at him, but he ignored them. The jump point was only a quarter of a mile away. “We were supposed to start out at 15 mph, then drop back to 10 or 12 miles per hour,” Julie said. “Howard was to give us the cue to jump, but we got a hesitant cue.” She felt the car’s speed decrease a little and saw that Jean was ready to jump. But as Julie crouched on her seat, one hand on the door handle, the car sped up. “That threw us totally off.”11 Julie and Jean looked at each other, and despite the speed of the car, they decided not to spoil the shot. Jean jumped first, then Julie. But as they tried to make their exits, “we were pinned between the heavy doors and the ground,” Julie said. “I pulled up my legs so the wheels wouldn’t run over them. Bobby hadn’t waited for us to get out before he stepped on the accelerator.” Jean told Julie that the instant she opened the door, she knew “the car was going three times the speed we were supposed to go, not the way we rehearsed it at all.”12

  The stunt was over in seconds. “After I jumped, I thought I was going to die,” Jean said. “I went up into the light. It was dead quiet.” She started running. “Cheryl [Ladd] grabbed me because I did not know what I was doing. I saw Julie on the ground in convulsions, lying face down on the dirt. I thought she had been very badly injured.”13

  “They said I was flopping like a fish,” Julie said, “and in my mind I guess I felt like I was continuing my work of getting up and running. . . . I do remember a heaviness about me and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, I broke my back.’ I wondered why can’t I get up? I realized someone was on top of me to keep me from violent jerks that can really injure you.” Ron Rondell was holding Julie down. Neither Jean nor Julie knew what day it was or even their own names. There was no nurse or other medical personnel at the airstrip. Ron commandeered a station wagon to take them to the hospital in town. “When Jeannie and I got into the back seat, we said, ‘What happened?’ Then there was a pause and we both said, ‘He sped up instead of slowing down.’ We were both in shock, physical shock.”14

  “Bobby did not do what he was supposed to do,” Jean said. “This was the reason we were hurt.”15 They both had concussions, but no broken bones. Julie also had a hairline fracture in her neck. The emergency room doctor advised them to go home, but they returned to the airstrip to complete the scene. As professionals they knew “it was important to do the last shot of us getting up and running to a car.” That’s part of the stunt code—finish the scene, don’t complain about injuries unless you can’t walk. In other words, real stuntwomen don’t cry.

  The crew was on a lunch break. Jean and Julie hadn’t eaten for hours, so they got in line at the buffet. Julie noticed Bobby in line. “I thought I’d go up to him, but he turned, looked at us, turned away real fast. He looked depressed and glazed . . . and as he looked away he sneered.”16 Jean recalled, “Bobby . . . didn’t even come over to ask how we were and this was not like him.”17

  At about three o’clock, Jean and Julie were waiting to finish their scene after Bobby Bass spun out a car. “I mean, anybody can spin a car,” Jean said, tartly. “He’d done it before, but he couldn’t do it. Ronnie Rondell got in the car to show him how! I couldn’t believe it. I mean, that was terrible, Bobby should never have been working. To this day I can’t imagine why he’d put us in that position. But he wasn’t jumping out of the car, we were.” She sighed. “What a mistake. At least we’re alive.”18 According to Jean, no one talked to her about reporting her injuries; nor did she know whether Spelling-Goldberg Productions investigated the “circumstances that caused” the accident.19 Julie and Jean completed their scene and went home.

  The next morning, in a screening room at Fox Studios, Julie, a few production people, and assistant director Blair Gilbert watched the footage shot the day before. Aaron Spelling was there too, which was not unusual.20 Julie knew the footage wouldn’t show her jump from the car. “I wanted to explain to them . . . especially to Blair,” Julie said. “She still insisted I would be seen. ‘You have a low camera and a high camera,’ she told me. I said, ‘I’m on the other side of the car. You’re on Jean’s side of the car.’”21 Julie was right. Jean saw the footage later. “At the very end of the video taped sequence,” she said, “the person lying on the ground in the center of the screen was me. Julie was on the other side of the car. She was not seen in the film.”22 On Julie’s side of the car, only the open door was visible. Julie apologized to Spelling. “He only said to me, ‘Who was driving the car?’ He said it very emphatically. I said, ‘Bobby Bass.’ He sort of grumbled, got up and walked out.”23

  Every bone and muscle in Julie’s body ached, and she was angry. She had asked Ron Rondell to stop by her home. “The footage was bad, the cameras were not placed right, and I wanted to mention what I’d heard about drugs.” She was nervous about speaking to him, and their meeting was short. “I said, ‘I have to tell you what I saw and heard,’ and he said, ‘What?’ I told him and he said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ I told him that Jeannie and I were almost killed, that I didn’t mind losing my career, but if I had to lose it over someone’s cocaine use, that was pretty sad. Ron said he would look into it.” As he was leaving, she asked “if it was known in the industry about cocaine, did he realize what would happen to all of us if it got out? If one goes, everyone goes. He said, ‘Oh, I know, I’ll take care of it.’”24

  At that time, television series went on hiatus from March to September. Julie was invited back to stunt-coordinate the fourth season of Charlie’s Angels, which ran from September 1979 to March 1980. She broke down the stunts in scripts, devised ways to do them, organized the work, hired the stunt people, and doubled the actresses in some episodes. March 24, 1980, was the last day of shooting for that season. It started with “a big second unit sequence—five stunt people to drive five cars, near misses, sideswipes, maybe some crashes. No acting, just action,” Julie said. “I was driving a car, Jean Coulter, Regina Parton, and two stuntmen were in others.” The Fox Hills location was a few miles south of the studio. Everyone was there at 8:00 a.m., but there were no cars. They all had to be back at the studio by 3:30 p.m. to finish the last shot, a car turnover by Regina Parton. When the cars were finally delivered at 11:00 a.m., Julie and Ron found that three had no seat belts, no brakes, and no emergency brakes—they were junkers. In a production meeting a few days earlier, Julie had asked the head of transportation to make sure the cars were properly equipped for the stunts. Of the cars delivered that morning, only two could actually be used in the scene, “which made Ronnie even madder,” Julie said. “He decided to park three of the cars, have Regina do some sideswipes with them, ‘and then we’ll just improvise from here on.’ That’s what we did. We improvised from there on.”25 Jean Coulter said this was a common problem: many times “we’d go out to do a driving job and the emergency brakes weren’t working . . . there were no seat belts . . . I’d tape myself in or get a rope and make do with that.” Jean didn’t get a car that day “because there wasn’t one of them good enough to drive.”26

  Back at the studio at 5:00 p.m., daylight was going, and the pressure was on to finish the scene. Julie checked the car Regina was supposed to use for the turnover. It didn’t have the five-point harness needed for a turnover, but special effects had already started drilling to put one in. Regina didn’t have a helmet or her wig, either. Julie checked on those and then went to the set, where she found that the “special effects [guy] was still not set up with his explosion stuff, and he was working fast to try to pull it together. The ramp [for the car turnover] was not totally lined up either. Ron was out there eyeballing it and the greenhouse that the car was to turn over on.” Julie was afraid that everyone w
as “rushing too much,” which can cause accidents. She wanted to do the shot the next day, since there wasn’t enough time to prepare the equipment and do the stunt properly. “But it costs money, a few thousand dollars, to go back a second day. In my opinion it doesn’t cost that much compared to what can happen if something goes wrong. Naturally you’re a hero if you get it in on time—wow, you saved us half a day! They don’t know we went through hell to save half a day.” Regina was under a lot of pressure, even though “her stunt didn’t require that much skill,” Julie said. “No one else was involved in it, just her and the ramp, and as soon as she hit that ramp she had no control anyway. The ramp props up the car and gives her a nice landing.”27 Regina was an expert driver, but this time, Julie had to push her. “She seemed afraid to drive the car she was given,” Julie said, “and she delayed the stunt, which wasn’t like her. Later she denied it. I know she felt rushed, and she was, but she was kind of blanking out. I didn’t know why.” In the end, Regina turned the car turned over, the explosion went off as planned, and it all worked out. Years later, Julie learned why Regina had hesitated: she was pregnant.28

  That was the last stunt of the season, but Julie wasn’t celebrating. She went off to find Bob Thetford, the head of transportation. She took him aside and, out of earshot of the other men, criticized the condition of the cars. She reminded him she’d asked for better-equipped cars in the weekly production meetings. He said, “Belts and brakes are expensive.” Julie lost it. “I spun around and said, ‘You’re telling me belts and brakes are expensive? My God, what’s that compared to a day’s shoot, compared to a person’s life?’ I wanted us to talk to Aaron [Spelling] right then, but Bob was in a hurry, so I said, ‘Okay, we won’t go now, but things had better change for next season with this car situation.’” Right after that, she went to the production office to speak with Kim Manners, the unit production manager. Kim and Bob were good friends, but according to Julie, “We were all friendly. I mean, you live with all these people on a show like that for four years and you are all very close.” She apologized for chewing out Bob, but the day’s events had affected everyone. “I felt there was no excuse, and I wanted some changes for next season,” she explained. Manners didn’t say very much. “He sat back in his chair and threw his pencil on the desk.”29

  Production of Charlie’s Angels went on hiatus, and six weeks later, Ron Rondell told Julie she would not be rehired as coordinator, although she was welcome to come back and perform stunts. Stuntman Gary Epper, Jeannie Epper’s brother, was the new coordinator. On long-running TV series, stunt coordinators tend to come and go, but Julie wanted to know why she wasn’t being asked back. Ron told her, “The producers said I’d overpaid, and something [negative] about the work. ‘How can I overpay? I don’t control that.’ He said, ‘If it was up to me, you’d still be there.’” Julie learned that one of the producers on the show, Elaine Rich, had had the “heaviest hand” in the decision, and Julie wanted to talk to her. “Ronnie said, ‘Go ahead. Maybe it will help.’” In a meeting with Rich, Julie asked how she had overpaid for stunts. Rich replied, “No, I can’t go into it, it would take too much time. It’s just that we thought you were too high, you overpaid.” Julie pointed out she didn’t control the budget, but Rich said she couldn’t go into it. When Julie asked about her work being “substandard,” Rich said, “Some of the shows are just not good.” Julie asked for specifics, but Rich said she “couldn’t go into it.” Julie asked her “to consider what . . . it will do to my career.” Rich said, “There’s nothing I can tell you. That’s it.”

  Julie then called Norm Henry, the supervising unit manager for Spelling-Goldberg Productions, and asked about her rate if she returned to the show as talent: would she get the weekly SAG rate or the lower daily rate? He said, “You’ll only come back when Gary wants you to come back.”30 Next, she wrote letters to Henry and to Spelling. The latter responded that if she had creative differences, she should settle them with the producers. Julie wrote back several times but got no reply. In the summer of 1980 she asked the Screen Actors Guild to help her reach Spelling, and SAG agreed to try. “After that, I tried to hang in there at SAG and hammer at the problems of the women, regardless of how devastated I felt about not being with Charlie’s Angels.”31

  The Screen Actors Guild became a real center for action. The rising toll of injuries caused the Stunt Safety Committee to draft new proposals for contract negotiations, and the press picked up on the increase in stunt-related accidents. Issues that had simmered for years in the stunt community boiled over in the early 1980s. How dangerous had stunt work become? “When SAG sanctions someone to do a stunt,” Rock Walker, president of the Stuntmen’s Association, told reporter Dave Robb, “they don’t care if you can fly a 747 or roll a car. All they want to know is if your dues are paid. It’s possible to have a complete production crew who knows nothing about action films, a stunt coordinator whose only qualification is that he’s a friend of the producer, and a stunt man whose only credits may include 22 speeding tickets. And the first thing you know, you’re reading that another stuntman’s been killed.”32 As the nation’s premier union representing actors, SAG had a long history in the American labor movement. It had stood up to the studios in the 1940s and continued to fight for artists’ rights, but now stunt players felt that SAG didn’t grasp the enormity of the safety problems they faced.

  Amazingly, the contract between the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) included few safety provisions for stunt work. Stunt players were trying to make the unregulated system safer. For instance, the people who drove stunt cars—notorious for being nothing more than “buckets of bolts”—wanted contracts to specify that producers were to supply cars in “good working condition.” In addition to safety, stuntwomen and minorities were equally concerned about the blatant discrimination that often truncated their careers. The only rule that even came close to addressing affirmative action stated: “women and minorities shall be considered for doubling roles and for descript and non-descript stunts on a functional non-discriminatory basis.”33 That wording was nonspecific, noncompliance carried no penalties, and efforts to strengthen the rule had been postponed or rejected.

  The procedure for adding a clause to a contract was rigorous. SAG was a bureaucrat’s dream, studded with members’ committees and layers of executives that, some groused, guarded the board and delayed action. A motion to add or change a clause had to be written, voted on, and passed by a committee before it was sent to the SAG board. If approved, it then went to the Wages and Working Conditions Committee, where it might eventually become a demand in contract negotiations with producers. These negotiating sessions could be daunting. From 1977 to 1982 Julie Ann Johnson, representing the Society of Professional Stuntwomen, served on negotiating teams. “We weren’t talking to producers, we were talking to attorneys, rows three-deep of attorneys around a table that ran a mile. Talking about our concerns as stuntwomen in front of all those men, it wasn’t easy.” Only when the AMPTP and SAG agreed on the final wording of a clause did it become part of the contract and thus an enforceable principle. Rejected motions languished for three years, the term of the next negotiating period. Given the long, drawn-out process required to make changes, stunt players were frustrated. They felt that SAG didn’t recognize their needs, and “nothing ever happened.”34

  Two years before Julie and Jean were injured in the Charlie’s Angels car stunt, twenty-nine-year-old Vic Rivers had died while doing a stunt. “Vic had been part of the coordinating team on Grand Theft Auto,” stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano said, “but on High Riders Vic coordinated himself. He jumped a car into a lake, but he didn’t take an air canister with him. He got stuck in the car and he drowned.” Conrad was a member of the SAG Stunt Committee, which met every three years when a new contract was being negotiated. After Rivers’s death, Conrad convinced SAG to transform the Stunt Committee into a full-time, year-round committee and t
o add the word “Safety” to it. Chaired by Conrad, the Stunt and Safety Committee devised and pushed hard for a new system to rate stunt people based on their experience. “There are no qualifications whatsoever to be a stuntman,” he said. “If you have a Screen Actors Guild card, you’re as qualified as Lassie. I had one fellow tell me he was a stuntman, and all he’d done was a voice-over on radio.”35

  The committee’s proposal was known as the A, B, and R classification system. An “A” rating denoted a fully qualified stunt person, including anyone who had stunt-coordinated in the past; a “B” rating applied to a stunt person with at least three years experience; and an “R” rating was given to a new stunt person, who was eligible to work only when a class A stunt person was on the set. But because the system was based on the number of days worked per year, many women and people of color, who had fewer credits, felt it was unfair. Both the stunt community and SAG had mixed reactions to the ratings system, and in the 1980 contract negotiations, the producers turned it down because the proposal had not been finalized.36

  “Unless something is done to regulate the qualifications required before a person can become a stunt coordinator,” stuntman Henry Wills wrote, “many who carry the title are actually walking accident-makers.” In Wills’s first thirty years of stunts, only six people were killed, but from 1967 to 1984, “over twenty stuntmen, new members or actors, [were] killed, and an untold number of life-time, crippling injuries [occurred]. Intelligence and knowledge-through-experience is the answer to safety. Know the people who are placed in control of lives!”37 “They treat race horses better than us,” Julie Johnson stated in 1981. Changes should be made “immediately, not two years from now . . . all we want is a system and the producers are standing in the way.”38

  The ratings system was only one of many efforts to make stunt work safer. But a related and more dangerous threat had been growing throughout the 1970s. Few talked about it, but it soon became clear that the stunt world had taken a disastrous turn.