Stuntwomen
Page 17
Indian Dunes, about forty miles north of Los Angeles, was a popular location site for film productions. On July 23, 1982, at about 2:30 a.m., director John Landis, best known at the time for his raucous comedies Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), was preparing to shoot the last scene of his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), which featured a spectacular explosion.7 Everyone was exhausted. Landis ordered the pilot of a helicopter containing a camera crew to fly lower than planned over actor Vic Morrow as he ran across a shallow stream with two small children. When the explosive blast went off, it threw up debris that blew the tail off the hovering helicopter, sending it into the path of Morrow and the children, killing all three.8
The catastrophe stunned America and the movie industry, and previously suppressed calls for safety turned into screaming front-page headlines. Speaking up for stunt safety became respectable because Morrow and the children had died during what was, essentially, a stunt. “Someone put actors and children where they shouldn’t have been,” said stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano. “Afterwards, people were saying that Morrow and the kids ‘should have been stunt performers.’ We are there to take the risks. However, you’re not supposed to the kill the stunt people, either. We’re all supposed to go home at the end of the day.”
Groups of all kinds “demonstrated their concern through a time-honored Hollywood ritual—they had meetings,” Michael London wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers hosted a joint labor-management committee instructed to ‘review, investigate, interpret and give recommendations on safety.’” Cameraman Bob Marta, outspoken chair of the safety committee for Local 659, weighed in passionately about the new safety committee at the Directors Guild of American (DGA), which had “refused to even acknowledge that a safety problem existed.”9
The DGA agreed to “look into the Twilight Zone incident and formulate safety policies for the future,” according to Farber and Green’s definitive book on Twilight Zone. “The Screen Actors Guild participated in hearings before the California legislature for the purpose of introducing legislation [to] safeguard its members. James Nissen, safety director for the Screen Actors Guild, noted in dismay that the maximum fine for a safety violation was only five thousand dollars. ‘Producers spend more than five thousand on coffee and doughnuts!’ he said bitterly.”10 As everyone scrambled to be on the right side of safety, the A, B, and R rating system for stunt performers took on a new urgency.
Unfortunately, meetings and hearings often blunt momentum and dissipate the sense of urgency following a crisis. The dangers highlighted by the accident on Twilight Zone were already well known. “Only rarely does anyone on a set have the nerve or authority to challenge a headstrong director about the hazards of a proposed scene,” Farber and Green wrote. “To understand why Morrow took the risks he did, one must apprehend the particular desperation of an actor over fifty who fears that every job could be his very last chance to prove his mettle and recoup his standing.” As Morrow had said about an earlier risky scene: “That’s the way John [Landis] wants it. And I want to give him as much as I can.”11
At the time, Dave Robb had recently started reporting for Variety. “People said that if they’d been using a stuntman it wouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t Vic Morrow’s fault, he was just doing the job, which was carrying those kids across the river, but when the situation changed so drastically, he wasn’t prepared as a stuntman would be to see that something was wrong and to change with the situation.” A stunt double might have reacted differently, but essentially, the helicopter pilot had been ordered to fly too low, about 25 feet, and too close to the explosions, which sent it into a spiral that caused the death of the children and Morrow.
Two weeks later, on August 5, there was an incident on the set of The Thorn Birds, a TV miniseries based on the best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough. One scene involved a fire around the family homestead. “The director [Daryl Duke] and the producers wanted actors rather than stunt doubles to participate in the sequence,” wrote Farber and Green. “‘We felt it would be more effective if we could get the principal players close to the fire,’ producer Stan Margulies explained. ‘We had checked out all the problems beforehand.’”12 Stunt coordinator Kim Kahana had hired Julie Johnson to double Jean Simmons and a new stuntwoman, Irene Lamothe, to double Rachel Ward. Both stuntwomen were ready on the set. “Then the director wanted the actresses to do it,” Julie said. “The wind whipped up the flames around them. The director said the fire wouldn’t get out of control, but it did. Rachel Ward’s hair was singed; the actresses were scared, and I didn’t blame them. What were they doing in there? As stuntwomen we knew how to handle it. Kim and his crew walked off the set. We backed him. We went to SAG about it. We had warned the director and producers of our concerns, but they were trying to save time and money because when an actor does the stunt, the adjustment fees for the job do not have to be paid to the stunt people.” According to actor Richard Kiley, “The problem was if a director said to an actor, ‘Look, I can get a stuntman to do this, but we’re really going to be able to see your face,’ nine times out of ten the actor will say, ‘I’ll try it.’ In a way, it’s a kind of unfair seduction of the actor. It’s also a kind of macho challenge.” Many believed that was why Vic Morrow had agreed to do the stunt that killed him.
Stunt safety collided with the growing authority of directors, some of whom were young and inexperienced. In the 1980s Hollywood was betting on big budgets to attract audiences, and “hot” directors often overruled producers, who no longer wielded the power “to rein them in” and thus avoid dangerous situations. “You have to operate with the idea that what can go wrong will go wrong,” said seasoned director Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa [1985]). “So you have to be like a judge in a courtroom, deciding whether or not to approve the stunt.” The director should take the advice of the stunt coordinator, but “in the deepest ethical sense, the one person ‘answerable’ is the director.”
Leslie Hill had been the only female member of the camera crew the night Vic Morrow and the two children died. A few days later, she was at a union meeting when cameraman Stephen Lydecker said he had warned Landis “that the explosions coming off the cliff might damage the helicopter. Landis’s flip reply: ‘We may lose the helicopter.’” For Leslie, that’s where it all “coalesced, the impression we had that this really was a man who didn’t care.”
People all over Hollywood dissected the parallels between Twilight Zone and Heidi Von Beltz’s injury two years earlier on Cannonball Run. Some crew members had worked on both films. The scene that paralyzed Heidi had also been the last shot of the day, and just before the car crash, someone had yelled “Faster! Faster!” According to Farber and Green, cameraman Lydecker was the one who had pulled Heidi from the demolished car. “When he went to work on Twilight Zone, he was still bitter about the dangerous conditions that precipitated her accident. In his mind, the fatal helicopter crash was a consequence of the whole pattern of recklessness that he’d seen overtaking Hollywood in the previous decade. ‘It’s always cheaper to shoot real than to shoot illusion,’” he said. “The Twilight Zone case, coming so soon after Cannonball Run, was really the coup de grace.”13
The Twilight Zone accident underscored a concern that many had felt for years. “Before Twilight Zone we were dispensable commodities,” stuntwoman Glory Fioramonti said. “We were just stunt people, and if we got hurt, they’d get another one. Safety is better today, but that wasn’t motivated by what we told SAG about the unsafe conditions. It was motivated by lawsuits. They realized safety measures could save money, not that they could save lives. Very sad.”
In June 1983 the Los Angeles County grand jury indicted director John Landis, associate producer George Folsey Jr., production manager Dan Allingham, special effects coordinator Paul Stewart, and pilot Dorcey Wingo for involuntary manslaughter. The case dragged on for the next five years, culminating in a long, contentious trial i
n May 1987. All five men were exonerated of the charges.
Accidents had been piling up even before Twilight Zone, and they continued to do so afterward. In 1981 the Screen Actors Guild had 74 accident reports, according to the minutes of the Stunt and Safety Committee.14 In 1982 SAG recorded 214 accidents involving actors or stunt players. On July 28, 1982, stuntwoman Victoria Vanderkloot, a fireman, and another stuntwoman were burned on an episode of Fantasy Island. On May 13, 1983, a police car in Blue Thunder blew up, catching two cameramen in the fireball. In February 1985 SAG reported “that of the 596 injuries from January 1, 1982 to December 31, 1984, 316 were suffered by stunt persons.”15 Those figures were not the complete picture. Reporters Deborah Caulfield and Michael Cieply wrote, “Movie and TV veterans claim that such accident statistics are seriously misleading, because stuntmen observe a ‘code of silence’ that prevents many from reporting injuries.”16 The code of silence was carved in stone: don’t complain about cars with no brakes, unworkable stunts, or being hurt. The code was (and still is) based on pride, on tradition, and on machismo: finish the job, even though you broke your shoulder. One stuntwoman explained: “When I walked on a set, the guys said, ‘You want to be a man? You’re going to be a man on this stunt.’ They meant I was going to hit the ground pretty hard and I better be tough enough to take it—like a man.” Unless injuries were very serious, they were not reported. They were dealt with in other ways, at little cost to the production.17
By August 1982, as the industry scrambled to respond to the Twilight Zone calamity, the stuntwomen’s survey results were in. Norma Connolly met with subcommittee members Stevie Myers, Jadie David, Leslie Hoffman, Jean Coulter, and Julie Johnson to discuss tabulating the results and releasing them to the press. They all recognized that the survey was an eye-opening documentation of the realities of working stuntwomen—what they had seen, experienced, or knew to be going on. Norma asked for a sacrificial lamb. “Who is going to fall on her sword?” Silence. Just filling out the survey could get a stuntwoman blackballed.18 Julie had already traded her career for the stuntwomen’s battles and her suit against Spelling-Goldberg. She had nothing left to lose, so she raised her hand. “Norma wanted me to help write the final report, sign my name to the survey, and help get it distributed.” In short, Julie agreed to take all the heat.19
Of the eighty-five stuntwomen who had received the survey, forty-four responded. The thirty questions covered their career hopes, their annual incomes (most were in the $11,000–$20,000 range; a few earned $30,000–40,000), safety on the set, drug use, sexual harassment, and SAG’s value to them as stuntwomen. Nineteen felt they had a real future as stuntwomen; eighteen checked “not enough work for women as it is,” and eleven doubted their future, citing “coordinator control” as a reason; nine complained about the “industry not really caring if we exist or not.” When asked about the most frequent causes of accidents, twenty-nine checked “rushing the shot,” fourteen cited “improper equipment,” sixteen selected “misunderstandings,” and eighteen cited “untrained safety personnel.” Many revealed they had been on sets or locations with inadequate safety or medical personnel.
Most respondents felt that drug abuse was increasing; most had been offered drugs on the set and had worked with people under the influence of drugs. One noted, “Some people who do drugs also do dealing on the set. They think they’re making friends and getting more jobs.” Twenty-seven said they’d been sexually harassed on the job, and most of them had lost a job because of it. When asked, “Do you feel the SAG Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee is a waste of time,” most answered no. But one wrote, “Men control the stunt business and if we [the subcommittee] push, we don’t work at all.” A New York stuntwoman responded: “Stuntwomen were told [by the SAG representative] that they do not belong in the stuntmen’s meetings [during contract negotiations]. The women were told not to try to attend any meetings.” Other comments included the following: “Women don’t stick together, so nothing is accomplished.” “I feel the men keep us apart. I don’t know why men fear us when we are together, but I hope we will make it as a team.” “The men . . . if they know you’re part of the subcommittee, it’s one more reason not to hire you. I know this is true.”20
In late September the survey results landed in front of the SAG Board of Directors. Subcommittee members hoped that once board members read the report, they would take steps to stop “what is happening to stuntwomen.” But the board was absorbed with the Twilight Zone disaster, and it was tackling a merger with the Screen Extras Guild. SAG told Leslie Hoffman that it would “like to help the stuntwomen, but they had all these other problems. But some stuntwomen’s careers were on the line. We expected our union to help. That didn’t happen.” The survey bounced around SAG for a month until information director Kim Fellner sent a memo to the board: “The survey deals with [a] wide range of job related issues . . . the results provide a very provocative view of work as a stuntwoman. The question has now arisen over whether the survey results should or should not be publicized. The stuntwomen themselves are not in agreement and the executive staff felt that because of the sensitive nature of the survey, the decision should rest with the Executive Board.” Fellner added that the responses related to drug use had been leaked to TV entertainment reporter Rona Barrett.21
Ultimately, the board decided to release the survey. “Safety, Discrimination and Drugs Hot Topics in Survey of Hollywood’s Stuntwomen” appeared in Variety on November 12, 1982, followed by “Stuntwomen Don’t Agree on SAG Results of Survey 1982” on November 26. Reactions to the survey flew back and forth in letters to the editor. Lila wrote that she was “aghast” at the survey. Julie fired back, “Mission accomplished,” stating that the survey was intended to raise consciousness and to educate.22
In the midst of all this, Leslie Hoffman became the first stuntwoman elected to the board of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild.23 “Being the first caused a lot of problems,” she said. “The stuntmen did not like my being elected. Had I been an independent stuntman elected to the board, they probably would have voted me into the Stuntmen’s Association, but I was a woman so they decided to blacklist me. Technically, what happened to Julie and to me was criminal, and the Screen Actors Guild did nothing to protect either of us. Yet stuntwomen today benefit from the things we did at the cost of our careers.”
Meanwhile, three lawsuits were inching forward in the courts, adding to the industry’s turmoil: Heidi Von Beltz’s lawsuit for the horrific injuries she suffered on Cannonball Run, the mammoth legal action involving Twilight Zone, and Julie Johnson’s suit against Spelling-Goldberg for non-payment of residuals, sex discrimination, and unlawful firing. In an unrelated development, EEOC investigators from Washington rode into town in 1984 to study charges of alleged discrimination in the entertainment industry, specifically, “the hiring and promotion of women and minorities,” Robb reported in Variety. “Many in Hollywood feel the problem of discrimination is still very much alive.”24 TV Guide covered it, too: “‘There is an idea out there that women can only write and direct certain things; they can’t do car crashes, football games or bar brawls,’” screenwriter Carol Roper said. There were no women on the writing staffs of St. Elsewhere or Remington Steele, two series with major female roles. There were no minority writers, either. Leonard Goldberg, a producer of Charlie’s Angels, rebutted these charges: “Listen, this business has nothing to do with social consciousness, unless it sells. If Aztec human sacrifices sell, then that’s what we’ll make.”25
The TV Guide article cited a prime example of a person who spoke up and saw her career go south: “Julie Johnson . . . four years ago [1980], openly complained that studios and production companies all over town were taking away work from minority and women stunt people by putting wigs on stuntmen [to] do women’s stunts, and ‘painting down’ white stuntmen so that they could look black. She filed a class-action suit against the Association of Motion Pictures and Television producers, the Screen Actors Guild and th
ree stunt associations. Julie Johnson has not worked since.”26 Julie’s audacious class-action suit, filed “on behalf of all stuntwomen,” alleged that “qualified stuntwomen are denied employment solely on the basis of their sex.”27 Julie knew the risks. “I didn’t want to bite the hand that fed me, but when it starts feeding poison, you must bite back.” Years later she summed it up: “It was, simply, the right thing to do.”
A Los Angeles newspaper reported in 1984, “The Screen Actors Guild routinely recommends [that] prospective employers hire stunt persons and stunt coordinators from members of the three main professional organizations—Stunts Unlimited, International Stunts Association and the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures.”28 The year before, Robb had reported the hiring link between stuntmen’s organizations and SAG, which was supposed to represent all stunt people. SAG had instructed its “Station 12 (that helps put producers together with actors) not to recommend the stuntmen’s groups to producers seeking stunt performers,” Robb wrote. “SAG affirmative action officer Rodney Mitchell said the guild felt it was inappropriate to refer producers to stunt organizations ‘because they don’t cover the full range of our members.’ Nevertheless, as late as last week, a producer told Daily Variety he had called SAG’s Station 12 seeking stuntmen and women and he was referred to either the Stuntmen’s Association (SAMP) or to Stunts Unlimited.”29 Deliberately or not, SAG’s inside referral system perpetuated the industry’s institutional discrimination.
Blacklisting can effectively slap a lid on people who are clamoring for change. At least three stuntwomen were blacklisted in the 1980s.30 A memo written by an assistant of Julie Johnson’s lawyer stated that, in his opinion, two stunt coordinators “are primarily responsible for all of the blacklisting that has occurred. Julie, Jean [Coulter] and Leslie [Hoffman] have had run-ins with these guys . . . and [they] have sent the word out to the industry that these ladies are not to be hired in any stunt related work.”31