Needham, Bass, and Nickerson were all top stuntmen. They knew the Aston Martin had severe problems; they knew the dangers inherent in rushing to get the last shot. The stunt had several obvious warning signs: the rush to avoid losing the light, the lack of seat belts, and a change in the stunt without a rehearsal—Needham’s direction for Nickerson to weave in and out of all five cars.23
Another change had been made to the stunt, but that didn’t come to light until later. Conrad Palmisano replaced the hospitalized Jimmy Nickerson, and a fairly new stuntman told Conrad that in earlier takes, he’d been driving the van off the road onto the dirt shoulder. But fearing the van might stick and flip over, they had switched the van for another vehicle—a station wagon. Afterward, the young stunt guy thought the wreck might have been partly his fault because in that millisecond, Nickerson could have been confused. “Hal Needham was pushing to do it faster,” Conrad summed up, “but on the next take the station wagon and the van had swapped positions, and the driver’s going, ‘Do I go left? Do I go right?’ I know in the mind of a stunt person when things are coming at you, closing in at sixty miles an hour, you’re clocking the cars—the station wagon, the van—and one moment of indecision is enough to cause a wreck. A last-minute change can cause a real problem just because two stunt guys are trying to help each other out. Generally, it’s not one thing, it’s a series of events that turn a situation sour.”
Heidi’s terrible injury hit the stunt community hard, reverberated in the press, reinforced the inherent danger of stunt work, and highlighted the risk of using an inexperienced performer even on a “little” stunt. Annie Ellis, an expert horsewoman who became a stunt driver, knew the risks. “When you’re new, you figure, ‘Oh, I’m just riding passenger in this car,’” Annie said. “I tell the new people they have to watch everything going on around them. Many times in a car chase, there might be a collision, or something comes through the windshield. You’ve got to be ready for anything even when you’re ‘just a passenger.’”
Ultimately, stunt people are responsible for saving their own lives. If they’re lucky, they learn that early in their careers. When rodeo champ Marguerite Happy married stuntman Clifford Happy, she joined a family of stunt performers and became a stuntwoman herself. Each time Marguerite left for work, her father-in-law, Don, a stunt veteran, reminded her: “Don’t let them set a trap for you.” He meant that even though a show had a stunt coordinator, “it was up to each of us to watch our own back.” The value of that advice came home to Marguerite on the set of Throw Mama from the Train (1987), which was coordinated by Vince Deadrick Jr. While doubling actress Ann Ramsey, Marguerite wore a harness hooked onto a T-bar to secure her inside the compartment of the train. Marguerite said, “I was hanging half in and half out of the train while Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito were fighting over me. On the next stunt, the train went across a trestle on the bridge. I looked at the trestle, it seemed narrow, and I asked Vince if there was enough space for my body hanging outside the train to clear that. He said, ‘Yeah, there is, but we’ll measure it.’ Sure enough, there wasn’t enough space. If I hadn’t asked, it might have been a horrible wreck. That’s [what Don meant by] ‘don’t let them set a trap for you,’ and it’s the sign of a good coordinator who does everything to make sure we’re safe.”
Heidi Von Beltz accepted her role in her accident: “I was the one who had wanted to work on the movie,” she said. “I considered it a privilege, and I had loved every second until I stepped into that car. I was an adult, a paid stuntwoman, and I knew that stunt work could be dangerous. I had agreed to do the stunt in the Aston Martin mock-up. In fact, I had begged to do it. Maybe I should have asked more questions or insisted on having seat belts in the car. Maybe I should have left the scene to a more experienced stuntwoman. But the stunt coordinator and everybody on the set, the pros, told me the stunt wasn’t a big deal and that it certainly wasn’t dangerous. I believed them.”24
In the thick of it, Marguerite Happy doubles Jane Seymour in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. (Courtesy of Marguerite Happy)
Jimmy Nickerson also acknowledged his role: “If I’d said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that,’ I would have been home,” he said.25 Three years after the accident, in a pretrial deposition, Nickerson said, “If we all had seat belts, ladies and gentlemen, we all wouldn’t be sitting here today. I would have dusted myself off and we would have got a new car.”26 In 1980 seat belts were not a contractual requirement in producer-supplied stunt cars.
That summer, however, stuntwomen got their act together. To communicate the biases they faced on the job and to improve their position, they had to be united. That was a difficult undertaking in a group of competing individuals, but they had allies: Norma Connolly, a polished stage and screen actress and a SAG board member, and former SAG president Kathleen Nolan, who had initiated the guild’s first Stunt Committee. On August 19, 1980, they announced the new Ad Hoc Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee. “YOU WANT WORK—MONEY—RESPECT—ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF YOUR UNIQUE SKILLS,” declared a fact sheet distributed by Connolly. “As a community of stuntwomen—FIGHT for it—nobody else will! United you stand—divided you fall. SIMPLE. Come and express this at your union and at your committee meeting.”
In 1980 SAG’s membership included 85 stuntwomen and 544 stuntmen.27 Twenty-nine women showed up for the December meeting, where Rita Egleston was elected chair and Julie Johnson was elected cochair of the subcommittee; Jadie David, Mary Peters, Janet Brady, and Stevie Myers were at-large members.28 The agenda: to add clauses to contracts preventing men from doubling women and to require equal pay, more opportunities to coordinate stunts, and more access to nondescript work.
Another issue that was rarely mentioned in public (but soon would be) was sexual harassment. In a report by the SAG Women’s Committee, Connolly stated, “The amount of sexual harassment has been unbelievable. Women bring their complaints to the Stunt & Safety Committee [of SAG], but the people who hear them are the ones that hire them so they [stuntwomen, actresses] are punished either on the job or by not getting hired.” Connolly suggested that stuntwomen bring their complaints directly to her, not to the male-run committee. She would then submit them to the board, without mentioning names.29 The guild had also set up a twenty-four-hour hotline to deal with any problems, including sexual harassment. But in this case, the women were up against an unregulated system over which they had no control. “The stuntmen dictate who will work,” a Stuntwomen’s Fact Sheet stated, “because the Screen Actors Guild and the AMPTP refuse to adopt the necessary rules and regulations to protect us.”30 Women had to work without complaint for stuntmen—their employers. Thirteen years later, in 1993, Jeannie Epper repeated, “Every time you talk, you don’t work. We’re in a Catch 22.”31 Julie Johnson’s take on the situation: “Keep your mouth shut and you might work.”
“A lot of stunt guys had been working since the cowboy movie days in the 1950s,” Dave Robb said, “and some of them had that John Wayne attitude, you know, we’re white men in America and we’ll do whatever we want. A lot of them were employers.” Stuntmen put on wigs or were painted black not because a stunt was “too hard for girl” or they couldn’t “find any black stuntmen.” They wanted to keep the work for themselves or their friends—and they did.
There was another excuse to exclude women. Off the record, one stuntman revealed that the Stuntmen’s Association didn’t allow women because “they’d be hooking up with people.” If the group didn’t have any female members, then “the men wouldn’t have to explain things to their wives.” Brianne Murphy, the first woman admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers, knew firsthand the difficulties faced by women in a field dominated by men. She once asked a male colleague why the guys didn’t want women running the camera. His response: “It’s very hard for us to go home and tell our wives we work for a woman, because we’ve convinced them we’re top dogs, we do a very difficult, complicated job. How would we ever explain that
to our wives? They would never understand it.”32 Was that a good enough reason to shut women out? What if a woman did the job as well as a man? What if a stuntwoman could roll a car as well as or better than the guys? Stuntwomen who were just trying to make a living faced the same challenges as other women in the industry, but the stuntwomen’s conditions were much harder to change. That’s what they set out to do, with help from SAG.
Julie Ann Johnson knew her protests about unsafe cars and her visible role on SAG negotiating committees had made her decidedly unpopular with some stuntmen. She had been tagged as a troublemaker. Julie was a hot, in-demand stuntwoman, but she declined to do stunts when “my instinct told me to turn them down,” she said, particularly if “I didn’t trust the stuntman who asked me, or I didn’t like his tone. I didn’t take melees because someone in there could be designated to hurt you.” She did work on Raging Bull (1980), even though it involved being part of a crowd rampaging around a boxing ring. Martin Scorsese directed and Alan Gibbs coordinated the stunts. “I put on pads and a protective vest,” she said, “but just before the shot Gibbs looked at me in a way I’d never seen him do before, like ‘it’s your turn in the bucket.’ I knew I was in trouble. I was trampled. It felt like every stuntman there was tromping on my head, my feet, and my back. Martin Scorsese saved me because he began screaming, I could hear the panic in his voice, ‘STOP! STOP! CUT! CUT!’ Oh, I was so grateful to him.”
After failing to be rehired to stunt-coordinate Charlie’s Angels, Julie had tried and failed to talk with producer Aaron Spelling. She had asked SAG to intercede with Spelling, but after several months a SAG staffer told her, “‘We can’t reach Mr. Spelling either. Sorry, that’s all we can do.’ I was angry and amazed. I mean, when was she going to tell me?” Then Julie made a decision that would alter her life. She contacted attorney Gloria Allred, who advised her to go immediately to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), because her time to file a complaint had almost expired. “The EEOC was one of our main allies,” Julie said. “SAG told us to go there when all else failed.” At the EEOC offices, Julie told a clerk her complaint involved Spelling-Goldberg Productions. “The clerk stepped back, put her hand to her mouth, and said, ‘Oh, no.’ I asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘You’re the seventh one in the last few weeks.’ I told her I didn’t feel so bad now.” But filing with the EEOC began what Julie called a “thirteen-year trek through no-person’s land.”33 Eventually, Julie’s daring legal actions gained almost as much publicity as the rollout of a much-anticipated movie.
10
Breaking the Code of Silence
As time went on, stuntwomen found that if the injuries didn’t get them discrimination would.
—Julie Ann Johnson
During the 1980s, big, brash, stunt-filled movies “redefined the very nature of screen entertainment,” Stephen Farber and Marc Green wrote in Outrageous Conduct, “placing the emphasis on massive special effects, graphic violence and apocalyptic horror.”1 These forces would detonate in the summer of 1982.
In February of that year, the activist Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee elected Julie Johnson chair and Lila Finn cochair. Their advocate and supporter Norma Connolly repeated her warning: the history of stuntwomen had been “one of divide and conquer. It is time to put aside competition. The strength of this group can become enormous, but as individuals there is no strength at all.”2 Meetings at SAG and in the stuntwomen’s associations were stuffed with grievances about unsafe stunts, unequal pay, coordinators hiring their girlfriends rather than professional stuntwomen, and being shut out of nondescript stunt work. The men’s power to hire ignited friction, divided loyalties, and pitted women against each other. At work, the atmosphere “became jungle rules, which meant no rules,” Julie Johnson said. “Everything and everyone was fair game, and the game was dirty.” Norma knew all about the stuntmen’s code of silence—don’t complain, don’t sue—and the punishment if it was broken—loss of work, even blacklisting. She reminded members of the subcommittee to keep what was said in the meetings confidential “so that individual grievances can be aired without fear of retaliation.”3
Norma and Julie met privately, and Norma insisted that the bickering in the subcommittee had to stop. It kept them from “getting the facts about their working conditions” and identifying where “the problems really came from.” She suggested a perfectly logical way to report their work experiences: a survey of stuntwomen in Los Angeles and New York. When the idea was presented to the subcommittee, the members voted in favor of the survey. Looking back on the rugged terrain of that year, the survey stands out like a diamond chip in an empty field. But it turned out to be a volatile issue.4
The subcommittee had sixty-four members. Most were aged twenty-five to forty. Julie was forty-two, and Lila Finn was seventy-one and still swimming vigorously. In a business that valued good looks and youth, Lila didn’t work much, but director Robert Aldrich wanted an older woman to do a stunt in a boxing ring on All the Marbles (1981). “There were three girls in the ring,” Lila said. “I come out of the audience, get into the ring, they throw me against the ropes, I bounce off over and over, finally fall down and crawl out.” She went to some of her best friends, who were stuntmen, for advice. They told her, “As you hit the ropes, you check yourself just a little, you grab the rope, lock it in, and then you bounce off. If you don’t grab the rope, you can really hurt yourself. It keeps you from going out of the ring. That was the key to the job.”5
Along with Lila and Julie, Leslie Hoffman would take part in an upcoming drama within the Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee. When Leslie (from Saranac Lake, New York) first arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, she had looked up “stunts” in the phone book. By 1982, she had worked on Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Private Benjamin, and The Fall Guy, and her commitment to the stuntwomen’s efforts to achieve equality had already drawn her into the sizzling politics of the guild. Leslie was even contemplating a run for the SAG board, which for years had included only stuntmen. In 1984 she would become the first and only woman to play slasher bogeyman Freddie Krueger on Nightmare on Elm Street. “They were filming the scene with the body bag,” Leslie said. As Nancy, the heroine played by Heather Langenkamp, runs down the hallway, she knocks Leslie to the floor. For the next shot, Leslie’s pretty hands were outfitted with razor-like claws. Director Wes Craven told her, “I want you to say, ‘Hey, Nancy, no running in the hallway,’ and then do a sinister laugh.” As Leslie said, “Everyone wants to be remembered for being in a special movie. I didn’t expect mine to be a horror cult classic.”
Leslie Hoffman, a new stuntwoman in town. (Courtesy of Leslie Hoffman)
“Lila and I were members of SAG committees,” Leslie recalled. “I didn’t know her well. She was pleasant, demure, rather quiet. I do not remember when we began to think Lila might be telling the stuntmen what we discussed. We were finalizing the survey questions, and one dealt with sexual harassment. Lila said she’d never been sexually harassed. Maybe not, but in the meeting I felt it was a blanket statement that [it] couldn’t happen to any woman.” Later, some of the women heard that members of the Stuntmen’s Association had been talking about the women’s discussion of sexual harassment. “After that,” Leslie said, “some of us felt [Lila] might have told them what we said and who said it.” Two other subcommittee members said they thought Lila might have told the stuntmen about their discussions, but they didn’t recall any repercussions. Another said she didn’t remember much about the meetings and wasn’t sure who had talked to the stuntmen; for all anyone knew, someone on the committee could have told her boyfriend. But Julie Johnson also thought it was Lila. “She kept her cool,” Julie recalled, “but she didn’t seem to believe the problems we discussed existed, like sex harassment. I don’t think she understood that.” “Maybe Lila thought she was doing right,” Leslie said, “but the survey was a way to improve our working conditions. Lila was from another generation, men were the authority, what they di
d was right, and if she heard something detrimental about them, she’d tell them.” The SAG-sanctioned survey was also supposed to be anonymous. The women were concerned about any breach of confidence because the stuntmen in charge of hiring could replace or even blacklist those who had created a survey about drug use, sexual harassment, and other sensitive matters.
A confident Leslie Hoffman goes right out the window. (Courtesy of Leslie Hoffman)
During this time, Julie told both the Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee and the group she had cofounded, the Society of Professional Stuntwomen, that she planned to file a lawsuit against Spelling-Goldberg. “Jeannie Epper was very concerned,” Julie said. “She said I had to stop pursuing it, that they’d been told if they associated with me, they were not going to work. I asked her who was telling her that? She said something about guys. I wanted to know which guys—Spelling’s people, guys at Unlimited, who? We were both getting angry. I said I didn’t want anybody to lose work because of me . . . but I have to continue with this. My rights were violated.” So Julie left the group and pursued her suit. If she had dropped the lawsuit, she might have salvaged her career.6 “I was afraid Julie was going to ruin herself in the business,” Jeannie said. “I remember talking to her back then, because I’d been trained that you never, never sue and you never turn anybody in. It was a mind-set my dad gave me when I was a little girl.” But Julie’s dad had taught her that when she saw something wrong, she shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. Julie broke the code of silence. “She spoke out,” Leslie said, “and she really paid for it.”
In April 1982 subcommittee members were finishing the survey and, of course, doing stunts. On May 6, 1982, the Screen Actors Guild mailed the survey questionnaire to eighty-five stuntwomen in Los Angeles and New York. Responses were still being received in July. By then, a time bomb was ticking.
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