9
Danger, Drugs, and Death
You don’t want to toss up a Hail Mary to get a stunt done. The goal is to work, not end up in the hospital.
—Rita Egleston
As stunt people continued the battle to expose the lack of safety regulations, a stream of fights, falls, crashes, and burns jazzed up many 1980s film productions. These included action comedies, which delighted an increasingly young movie audience. In Airplane! (1980), two stuntwomen—Sandy Gimpel and Paula Moody—delivered a fight of lasting popularity.1 “Sandy Gimpel is one of the stuntwomen who has a DGA card,” stunt coordinator Mary Albee said. “She’s a second-unit director. We call her ‘The Midget.’ She’s five feet tall, about sixty-five years old now, and a black belt.” Six years after Sandy’s frantic swim on The Towering Inferno set, she and Paula let loose for the “Girl Scout fight” in Airplane! “Paula and I were both short,” Sandy said, “dressed in the uniforms, our hair in pigtails, our boobs flattened—Girl Scouts! We’re playing cards in the bar and bang! We go into a knockout, drag-out fight and we had so much fun bashing it out.”
“We wanted a unique fight that looked like the kind guys do,” said stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano—a movie buff who’s particularly fond of westerns. “I wanted that fight to be an homage to the Dietrich-Merkel fight in Destry Rides Again, so I designed it from what I recalled—in 1980 we couldn’t rent videocassettes of old movies. We needed to find two petite girls that were tough as nails and could take the punches. They weren’t all padded up, either.” Sandy tosses Paula over a banister; she lands on a table and smashes it. Paula gets Sandy in a chokehold, breaks a bottle over her head, and then they pound each other with punches. “In the middle of the fight,” Conrad said, “I wanted real punches like John Wayne’s haymakers, a sort of ‘Wayne meets Dietrich’ fight. We have an expression: ‘can of peas off the shelf.’ You reach back, grab the can, and hurl it at a guy’s head. Well, Wayne pulls his arm back, shows you the punch coming at you, and wham!—that kind of real fight. And those girls delivered!” When Sandy flings Paula onto a bar lined with sullen drinkers, she sails past them on her belly, head-first, straight into the jukebox. Conrad laughed. “Who knew the fight in Destry and the Girl Scout fight would end up on YouTube?”
That fight had few dangers, other than the usual ones, but some larky comedies provided rafts of perilous scenes. In hindsight, these unfettered free-for-alls and high-spirited, wacky romps represented a kind of fiddling-as-Rome-burns folly. Instead, the guilds should have been dealing with matters that would deeply affect the pattern and progress of the athletic art of stunts.
On the slapstick comedy Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), skateboard wizard Chris Baur was driving a car, along with a dozen others.2 In rehearsal, they were all going very fast, and she was worried about doing her stunt: a guy slides in front of her, and she swerves around him and does a 180. “We go back for the take,” she said, “they call ‘Action!’ and suddenly they turn on big arc lights and rain machines. We’re speeding around trying to make our moves, but we’re literally blinded by the light and rain. I couldn’t see anything. That scared the hell out of me. No one was hurt, but I don’t know how we did it.” It’s not always possible to rehearse with wind and light effects, but someone should have told the drivers what to expect. Fortunately, Chris’s stunt driving on Dukes of Hazzard had seasoned her. That TV show—known for its car stunts—had a reputation of prioritizing “spectacle over safety, creating hazardous working conditions [on] dysfunctional sets.”3
Now, a new danger had been added to the risky business of stunts: drugs. The seemingly benign recreational drug use of the 1960s had morphed into the more hard-core drugs of the 1970s and the cocaine-riddled 1980s. Slurred speech and forgotten lines were annoying and wasted time, but stunts were different. One stunt person said, “When the drug stuff started,” Dukes was “a terrible work environment. Everyone was on cocaine—scary times—because we’d be doing car work with people who were high as kites.” In these years, that description could apply to any number of productions.
While Honky Tonk tore up the road, The Blues Brothers (1980) busted up the Dixie Square Mall, setting the tone for irreverent, wacko mayhem and dark humor buried in a riot of action and music. John Landis directed, and Gary McLarty stunt-coordinated.4 Stuntwoman Janet Brady was part of the melee that took weeks to film inside the shop-lined mall.5 Speeding cars crashed through plate-glass windows, and glass flew everywhere—very dangerous. “They even did a rollover in that mall. We destroyed that mall,” stuntwoman Jean Coulter said gaily. “John Landis was directing, so anything went.” After a day’s work, the scuttlebutt was all about big parties and “bowls of coke.”
Drug use in Hollywood was one of the worst-kept secrets in the world. In early 1981 TV Guide printed what many insiders already knew but the public did not. “Coke was all over the place, directors, writers, producers, everyone,” a top network official told Frank Swertlow, writer of the two-part article. “It’s horrendous.” Tension, late nights, bone-deep fatigue, pressure to rush the shot, and screaming directors were not new in Hollywood. Drug dealers on the set were new. “In many cases, the producer said, the pusher was a technician who set up shop in a corner of a sound stage. ‘It’s very easy,’ he said. ‘It’s dark. A pocket is opened and one hand passes the money and another drops the coke.’ On other occasions . . . dealers blended into a production by simply putting on a T-shirt with the name of the show written on it.”6
Cocaine had become a currency of exchange. Another producer said, “You might not be able to pay a writer or an actor or a director a bonus, so you pay him in cocaine.” And when someone wanted to be paid in drugs, failing to do so had consequences. Swertlow quoted one producer who had refused: “‘You see, the way the intimidation works is that if you don’t play, you are cut out. A guy like this will tell his boss the rewrites of the script were not good enough. He can do that at any point, so you really are at the mercy of these executives.’” Refusing to negotiate in cocaine could cut anyone “out of parties,” where “plenty of deals are made.” Thousands of dollars for cocaine were buried in budgets under the headings of “miscellaneous or food or entertainment. One studio head joked about his creative bookkeeping. ‘There are three kinds of costs: above-the-line, below-the-line and cocaine-line,’ he said.”7 One producer’s reaction to the news that an actor was stoned: “So what?” he screamed, “we created the show stoned, we cast it stoned. He fits right in.”8 In Hollywood, fitting in is essential. Everyone counts on relationships and coworkers for cooperation, for favors, even for employment; it’s a time-honored exchange that gets the work done and builds careers. Cocaine created an inner circle within industry groups and within stunts.
After “snow” had already “kidnapped the industry,” the Los Angeles Police Department formed an Entertainment Squad in 1985 to investigate narcotics use. One undercover detective estimated that 80 percent of the people contacted—from “top management” to individuals at all levels of production—used cocaine.9 Variety later reported that 35 percent of all people working in motion pictures and television had substance abuse problems; of those, 75 to 80 percent worked in below-the-line jobs.10
The press reported the drug use of actors, producers, executives, and directors—but not stunt performers, even though that’s where drugs could do real damage. When a writer who is high on coke is talking script changes with a producer who is high on coke, “That’s not a meeting,” one said, “it’s bedlam.” But the writer’s job doesn’t involve driving a car, missing a stunt person standing in the road, and crashing into another car. “When you mix high-risk explosives, car crashes, and drugs, you’re going to have a bad result,” reporter Dave Robb said.
The pervasive use of drugs worked against stunt performers’ efforts to impose better safety measures. It may have been the real reason behind Jean Coulter and Julie Johnson’s car accident on Charlie’s Angels. “Many people were so lost in cocaine they di
dn’t know how to relate to anyone,” Julie said. “If you can’t communicate with them on a set, you’re in trouble.” And drugs were very easy to get—just show up for work. That’s what Julie did in January 1980 when she was doubling Farrah Fawcett in a trap-door sequence on Charlie’s Angels. Outside the sound stage, which was close to the front gate of Fox studios, Roy Harrison, a stunt coordinator on that series and other Spelling-Goldberg shows, offered Julie cocaine from his van parked nearby. She declined.11
In addition to the combustible combination of stunts and drugs, there was another layer of influence. The studios and audiences both exhibited an increasing appetite for movies that glorified thrills. This increased corporate demand, intensified pressure, complicated stunts, and strained trust.
The bond of trust among stunt people had been unraveling since the 1970s. “Trust is everything,” said Loren Janes, cofounder of the first Stuntmen’s Association. “When you’re doing a stunt, you’ve got to trust the other guy’s going to do it right. May Boss or Polly Burson, if they had to land there, you could always trust them to do that. When someone’s on dope, that trust is gone. A lot of people hired guys on dope because they were on dope themselves.” But drugs alone did not fracture the trust among stunt performers. “There are so many elements in trust,” Jeannie Epper said. “It relates to who you are, who you work for, and who you work with. A few times I got that gut feeling that I had to be really, really careful.” She never walked off a set, but sometimes she insisted on making changes to a stunt, even when everything had been checked. When she stepped up to do a stunt, she waited for a complete peace to come over her. “If I don’t feel that, I step back,” she said. “I won’t do it or I’ll change something. It took me years to get to that place. Trust is a big issue, but things can go wrong.” For a long time, stuntwomen avoided doing or saying anything that might disturb that implicit trust among stunt people, including speaking up about sex discrimination or unequal pay and even when their instincts warned them that a stunt didn’t feel right.
Stunt people are not daredevils. They are, according to John Baxter, “hard-thinking technicians who squeeze between the apparent danger of their situation and an infinitesimal margin of safety they built into it.”12 The erosion of trust narrowed that margin of safety, but when accidents occurred, there was usually not one cause but several. Whether those factors included unfamiliarity with colleagues, drug use, lack of safety regulations, the inherent danger of stunts, or simply stunts that “went wrong,” more people were being badly injured and even killed in the 1980s.
On November 14, 1980, forty-year-old Odile “Bebe” Astié, a preeminent stuntwoman from France, was killed while doing a stunt for the CBS children’s show The Treasures of Althea Alpheus Winterborn.13 Like other stunts that have ended tragically, it was supposed to be a simple one: a roll off a steeply pitched roof onto an airbag twenty-five feet below. Glory Fioramonti reported the fatal accident to the new SAG Ad Hoc Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee in December 1980: “An 18 × 20 × 5-foot air bag had been placed on the ground, ample for a fall of that height. Boxes were placed to fill in around the air bag. The problem of the gutter at the bottom of the roof was anticipated.” Removing the gutter or filling it with sand had been considered, but “Bebe felt fine about leaving the gutter as it was.” Someone suggested that the stunt might be safer if it were done in two shots: “have her come down the roof, then cut and do the high fall onto the pad.” But in the end, it wasn’t done that way. The hard plastic tail-bone pad Bebe was wearing got caught on the gutter. “She hit the ground between the airbag and the boxes. It is not clear if the boxes were tied to the air bag or if there were qualified safety men to catch her.”14 Her death had nothing to do with drugs or rushing the shot. It showed how easily something could go wrong.
Other injuries and deaths could be attributed to the lack of industry safety measures. Three camera assistants were killed in 1980–1981: Rodney Mitchell was crushed to death when a car overturned on him during a scene for The Dukes of Hazzard. In December 1980 Robert Van Der Kar was killed on the set of Magnum P.I. Two months later, in February 1981, a driverless stunt car killed Jack Tandberg on the set of The Five of Me.15 “How can safety standards improve when a director wants you to stand behind a camera as a car comes flying off a ramp toward you at 80 miles an hour?” asked Bill McCreary, a former cameraman on the TV series CHiPs. “You just cross yourself when they say ‘action’ and get ready to run in case something goes wrong. You’re helpless. They have guys from the Humane Society out there to protect dogs and horses, but they don’t have jack crap for us.”16
Brianne Murphy, the first woman admitted to the cameramen’s union, and two other cameramen formed an Ad Hoc Safety Committee of Local 659 in association with Stunts Unlimited and the Stuntmen’s Association. According to a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, it was “the first time that camera and stuntmen have joined forces for a common goal.” On February 23, 1981, they placed a notice in the trades: “DEAD . . . Due to a total lack of common sense, three of our people are dead . . . There is no shot worth a life.”17
One of the worst stunt-related injuries had occurred a few months earlier. The Cannonball Run (1981), starring Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, and Farrah Fawcett, tracked a coast-to-coast race jammed with cars and stunts. Veteran stuntman Hal Needham directed; Bobby Bass coordinated the stunts.18 Beautiful six-foot-tall Heidi Von Beltz, a gymnast, model, and champion skier, had grown up in the movie business, helping her actor-father, Brad, learn his lines. Bobby Bass and Heidi were an item, and according to her autobiography, he wanted to marry her. Heidi had acted in a few television shows, including Charlie’s Angels; she aspired to produce and direct, but she had little stunt experience. Bobby had taught her the fundamentals of the car work she had used on Cannonball! (1976) and Smokey and the Bandit II (1980). “The trick,” she wrote, “is to create the illusion of danger, without exposing the stunt people to real danger, and most of the time it works.”19 For Heidi, the danger became reality on June 25, 1980.
The production team was on location in Boulder City, Nevada. Heidi had just finished a car stunt—a 180-degree spin—and she felt pumped, so she asked Bobby what else she could do. The only person he needed was an extra to ride as a passenger in a car chase, and he had already hired newcomer Eurlyne Epper (Jeannie’s daughter) to do it. He suggested that Heidi go back to the hotel and enjoy the sun and the pool, but she wanted to be part of the action. Bass gave in and called Eurlyne. “I was supposed to ride passenger in the car,” she said, “but Bobby told me he had it covered. So I didn’t go.” The stunt was big enough, but it wasn’t considered complicated. An Aston Martin—like the one James Bond drove—was supposed to speed down the highway, chased by the bad guys. A switch in the car turned on a device to make smoke pour out the back and blind the pursuers. The smoke was also supposed to fill the interior of the car, making it hard for the driver to see and causing him to swerve all over the highway to avoid oncoming traffic. Jimmy Nickerson, a stuntman for fourteen years, was doubling Roger Moore in the Aston Martin. Heidi doubled Farrah Fawcett, but at six feet tall, she must have had to squeeze herself into the small car. Hidden on the floor of the backseat was special effects man Cliff Wenger, operating the smoke machine. Nickerson had practiced with the Aston Martin, which had many problems, including a “faulty suspension [and] smooth tires.” The steering didn’t work, and neither did the clutch; “it had no speedometer, and no seat belts.” The car was sent to the mechanic. “The next day we got the car back and the steering was fixed to only a bare minimum,” Nickerson said. “They told me the parts from L.A. had not arrived and they had had to ‘make do.’”20 It still had no seat belts.
It was late in the afternoon, so the light was fading. It was the last shot of the day, and everyone wanted to get back into town. Take one: Nickerson accelerated to about thirty miles per hour, but the car “handled like a truck.” Needham didn’t like what he saw; the action was too slow, and there wasn’t e
nough smoke. He wanted Nickerson to “double his speed,” do more “side to side action,” and weave between each oncoming car instead of just one. Nickerson told him he didn’t think the car could handle it, but he went ahead and tried anyway.
Take two: Heidi braced herself, left hand on the dashboard, arm stretched out. With the cameras rolling, someone on the radio in the car was yelling, “Faster! Faster!” Nickerson was cursing, struggling against the steering, but he got “up to a speed of 45–55 miles per hour. He made it past the first on-coming car, but when he tried to cut back in to weave past the second car, the front end went to ‘mush’ and, in trying to abort the stunt, crashed head-on.”21 “The impact,” Heidi wrote, “slammed the engine toward us with the force of a freight train.” She described what happened next:
Jimmy, Cliff and I kept moving forward until we were stopped by the pieces of the fragmenting car. A jagged shard of glass or metal tore free and sliced into Jimmy’s head, scalping him and splashing us both with hot blood. Cliff shot stiffly out of the back as if fired from a cannon, and he rolled across the ground to a stop. . . . The force continued through the dashboard and into the hand I had braced there, driving my straight left arm like a pool cue into the vertebrae in my neck. When the top of the long humerus bone struck my spine, two vertebrae shattered like china cups and my shoulder jerked viciously out of its socket. The impact traveled up my leg and snapped the heavy bone in my thigh, popping the femur. My entire body shut down instantly.22
Heidi was paralyzed from the neck down. In addition to his head wound, Jimmy Nickerson had a shattered hip, a compound fracture of the left arm, and numerous lacerations. Even though Cliff Wenger had been thrown from the car, he suffered no serious injuries. Stuntman James Halty, driving the van that hit them, had a few cracked ribs and other minor injuries. He had been wearing a seat belt and harness.
Stuntwomen Page 15