Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  Marguerite Happy’s exciting times in Remote Control (1988). (Courtesy of Marguerite Happy)

  The 1980s ushered in greater danger and somewhat wider opportunities for stuntwomen. In many ways, the stunt business held fast to old restrictions, but the attitudes and ambitions of these rookie stuntwomen set a standard that women in the 1990s would expand. As these stunt performers were gaining experience, however, the career of a great stuntwoman who had started twenty years before them—Julie Johnson—was coming to an end.

  12

  Julie Johnson’s

  Day in Court

  Julie Johnson is history.

  —Anonymous stuntman

  Julie Johnson wasn’t the only stunt person to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she wasn’t the only one to sue her employer. However, most stunt performers’ lawsuits dealt with injuries suffered on the job. Julie, a stunt coordinator, was suing for wrongful termination.

  Julie’s pretty face gave no sign of her steely determination. She had known her complaints about unsafe working conditions and drug use might bring reprisals, but that did not stop her from speaking out. By 1984, she had filed three lawsuits. Two were eventually dismissed, but her suit against Spelling-Goldberg Productions, charging discrimination and unlawful firing, had legs. The press avidly followed her legal maneuvers. Columnist Heidi Yorkshire reported that Julie had lost her house in 1984 and “was not optimistic about how she will survive the three to five years the lawsuit is expected to take.”1 Julie was in “no-person’s land,” as she called it. It got worse when an ominous voice on the phone told her, “‘There’s a bullet with your name on it.’ Each time I walked out the door,” she said, “I felt the scope of the rifle on my head. Sometimes I wished they’d hurry up and get it over with. Other times I thought I’d catch the bullet in my teeth and spit it back. One of my lawyers said he was surprised I hadn’t been found dead on Mulholland Drive.”

  From about 1983 to 1987, when she wasn’t alternately dreading or welcoming sudden death, Julie was dealing with lawyers. “They became the bane of my existence. Sixty-eight attorneys interviewed me; four separate firms took my case, then dropped it. On the eve of my trial, one said the Mafia had told him to get off the case. The judge gave me thirty days to find another attorney.” She was hoping to find a firm that had already represented a plaintiff against Spelling-Goldberg. In courthouse archives she found Simke, Chodos, Silberfeld and Anteau, and five days before the deadline, she met with one of that firm’s best attorneys, Richard Grey. “I felt numb,” she said. “He was my last hope.”2 Grey wanted to win the case on the merits; Julie wanted to reclaim her career and her integrity.

  Julie Ann Johnson faces the conflicts ahead. (Courtesy of Julie Ann Johnson)

  On the afternoon of August 11, 1987, seven years after she had been dropped as stunt coordinator of Charlie’s Angels, Julie Ann Johnson v. Spelling-Goldberg Productions began in the Superior Court of Los Angeles. The trial turned into an introductory course about the stunt business, taught by experts. It lasted more than three weeks, and twenty-four witnesses were called. Whether testifying for or against Julie, they described how stunts are set up and performed, and they sometimes revealed inside information about the traditions of the stunt community. Collectively, the testimony showed that stunts are deeply embedded in the film industry’s production process and that the creation of successful stunts requires the input of professionals of all kinds; directors, writers, producers, designers, special effects experts, camera operators, and specialists in wardrobe, transportation, and props all contribute to the onscreen magic. The tradition is as old as The Perils of Pauline. This time, Julie’s career was the cliffhanger.

  The handsome defense attorneys, William Koska and Kenneth Anderson, represented Spelling-Goldberg. Julie sat at the plaintiff’s table with pleasing poise as her attorney introduced her as a cofounder of the Stuntwomen’s Association and the Society of Professional Stuntwomen. Grey said her 400 film and TV credits read like a “prime-time catalog,” and he told the jury that although her case might resemble a TV soap opera, it was a true-life drama “about a woman who worked for nearly 20 years in the stunt field, a person we contend was wrongfully terminated as the stunt coordinator . . . who was too outspoken, too critical, too visible on safety matters.” Then he cited budget issues—the pressure to “get the job done quickly and don’t go over budget” was balanced against the desire to “get the job done safely and make the stunt look thrilling.” Grey’s third point was problematic—drugs. He told the court that Julie and another stuntwoman had been in “a very dangerous predicament . . . their lives were at risk because of someone else’s use of illegal drugs in the performance of that stunt.” Koska, the lead attorney for Spelling-Goldberg, jumped to his feet. “I object to this, your honor.” Judge Leon Savitch overruled his objection. Still, drug use would be hard to prove. Grey had to link Julie’s complaints about drugs and safety to her being labeled “a troublemaker, a person to be gotten rid of. . . . To terminate somebody’s employment in retaliation for speaking out about safety would be considered a very serious violation of the California public policy,” he said.3 That charge was the key to Julie’s case. Before the trial, Grey had decided to eliminate the sex discrimination complaint. “It detracted from the strength of the case,” he said, “which was whistle-blowing, complaining about safety or drug use, and retaliation for those things. Sex discrimination was iffy—did they do this to Julie because she was a woman? But you can see cause and effect when she complained and then was not renewed as stunt coordinator.”4

  Julie Johnson’s attorney, Richard Grey. (Courtesy of Richard Grey)

  The Spelling-Goldberg legal team charged that, among other faults, “Miss Johnson’s work as a stunt coordinator was mediocre,” she had “a problem understanding how to place cameras,” and she overpaid stunt performers. “Lastly, the evidence will show that Miss Johnson developed an attitude problem during the time she was coordinator.”5

  This would be a tough endurance test for Julie, sitting in court day after day and listening to Koska tear apart her career. Trials are theatrical dramas staged by players on both sides of a high-stakes contest. Witnesses in this trial would include producers, an assistant director, and a director of photography of Charlie’s Angels, as well as second-unit directors, stunt coordinators, stunt players, and SAG board members, many of them well-known actors with substantial stage and screen credits.

  Actress and SAG vice president Norma Connolly described Julie as “one of the most respected women in the stunt community.” Connolly testified that Julie and other stuntwomen had approached her about their employment problems. She did not name the other women “to protect them.” She told the court, “Men were doubling for women, causing less employment for the women. They were deeply concerned about safety conditions on the set. As an officer of the guild I was on the stunt committee to represent stuntwomen, to be a voice for them.” Grey asked her about the minimum qualifications for a stunt player. “Only [to be] a paid-up member of the Screen Actors Guild,” Connolly replied. He asked whether Spelling-Goldberg had any minimum requirements for the stunt players it employed, or whether a person had to have a certain amount of experience to qualify as a stunt coordinator. She knew of no such requirements. He asked Connolly whether Julie and the other stuntwomen who had approached her in the late 1970s were concerned about reprimands. “Yes, Julie was very concerned about her own employment as were all the other women.”6

  Joe Ruskin, an actor for thirty-seven years, was vice president of the SAG Hollywood board and had cochaired the Stunt and Safety Committee from 1977 to 1982. He “knew something about stunts,” he said, but when Grey asked him if he’d ever performed stunts in his acting career, Ruskin answered, “No, I always sit down and say, ‘Where is the [stunt] man?’” Ruskin knew Julie from SAG committee meetings. “The stunt community was developing a rating system for stunt people in an attempt to guarantee safer stunt
work in the industry,” he testified. Julie wanted to require “equipment—rolling stock, cars, or trucks used in a stunt—to be in good shape . . . safe to work in.” According to Ruskin, she “felt the cars were dangerous and that’s what she wanted fixed.”7

  In his pretrial deposition, Ruskin talked about situations involving drug use that did not come out in court. In meetings with stuntmen, he’d heard references to drug or alcohol use, such as, “‘Well, crap, he was stoned again,’ and someone else said, ‘Cut it out. You don’t know that.’ They were referring to [the] TV show The Dukes of Hazzard,” which was notorious for alleged drug use on the set. He added that in committee meetings, “Some of the women were complaining that it was very difficult to get work unless they were willing to be the girlfriend on location.” It took the women a long time, he said, “to screw up their courage to talk about what was wrong.” Ruskin also expressed Julie’s safety concerns more clearly in his deposition: “She thought the actors would be put in danger. She told me, ‘The actors are going to get badly hurt sooner or later and it is happening too much, too often.’ Conrad Palmisano, a stunt coordinator, called her a pioneer, saying words to the effect that she is now suffering as many pioneers do.” Ruskin said that he and Palmisano thought Julie was right to make safety demands and that even the industry was now admitting her demands were correct.8

  When Aaron Spelling appeared in court with his entourage, the press turned out in force. To Julie’s attorney, any case that put Aaron Spelling on the stand was a “David and Goliath adventure. I love those cases.” Spelling testified that not even the “stars” of the series had “run-of-the-series” contracts. The decision not to rehire “Miss Johnson” as the stunt coordinator of Charlie’s Angels had been made in February or March of 1980, after the fourth season had been filmed. The program’s ratings had dropped; the network had rescheduled the series for a different night and was aiming for a younger audience that would be looking for more exciting stunts and more action. The producers “were of the opinion that the plaintiff [Julie Johnson] was not able to produce the desired level of stunt work and wished to hire a new stunt coordinator.” Spelling denied that retaliation had been a factor in their decision.9

  “Aaron Spelling was a challenging witness because he was—Aaron Spelling!” Julie’s attorney said. “He was a celebrity with a mixed reputation, a producer of many popular TV shows, and he was viewed as a wonderful person. I knew the other side of him. I wanted to bring him down a peg. On the stand Mr. Spelling’s attitude was, ‘I treat everybody fairly, I’d never do anything I’m being accused of here, they were never brought to my attention.’ He testified Julie was on a one-year contract, renewable annually; they decided her work wasn’t up to standards, so they didn’t renew. That was the big defense. They hadn’t violated the law because ‘we have the right not to renew her . . . contract, and she didn’t have the right to continue.’ In cases of unlawful firing,” Grey emphasized, “the defense always falls back on ‘her contract was terminable at will, end of discussion.’ But when we can bring in the legal protections, they can’t hide behind the ‘we-can-terminate’ argument. If retaliation against a whistle-blower was the real reason she was let go, it’s unassailable. That’s when the legal protections kick in and take over. That’s what we were trying to prove in Julie’s case.”

  Assistant producer Elaine Rich and second-unit director Ron Rondell were important witnesses. On Charlie’s Angels, Julie had worked for Rondell, and he had worked for the producers, including Rich, who was one of two female producers on the series. She testified she had supported Julie as stunt coordinator because so few women had a chance to do the job. Rich described the accelerated pace of TV productions and the time required to turn a script into a filmed episode. She said there were usually seven working days to prepare for an episode of a show, then seven days to film that show. Preparation for the next episode began on the first day of shooting the previous episode. According to Rich, it cost about $800,000 to produce one episode.10

  Ron Rondell, a respected professional, had been an actor and stuntman in the 1950s and a stunt coordinator and second-unit director since the 1970s. In court, he summarized the complicated job of a stunt coordinator: he breaks down the script; isolates action sequences; talks with art directors, special effects, anyone “involved in the stunt sequences”; gets “the director’s input, how he’d like the sequences to work . . . makes a general stunt budget for the show, and basically puts it all together.” But a stunt coordinator’s biggest responsibility, Rondell said, “is to make sure he could do the sequence the director requested. Safety was always a major factor to determine whether the stunt can be pulled off the way the director requests.” Coordinators are always under a lot of pressure, and Charlie’s Angels was no exception. The first-unit director was “concerned with getting the words out of his actors, getting them ‘off the clock,’” Rondell said. That meant the stunts were delayed “until the actors are finished. Then, when they have an hour left, they apply pressure to . . . get the stunt people in, get the job done, and get out.”11

  A great deal of contradictory testimony swirled around the episodes of Charlie’s Angels that Julie had performed in and stunt-coordinated. One, a double episode shot in Vail, Colorado, in the fall of 1978, supposedly showed Julie’s “attitude” problem. A witness claimed she had stomped off to a snowcat to sulk; Julie said she’d been sent there to wait until they were ready to shoot the scene. There was a more lengthy examination of Julie and Jean Coulter’s jump from a moving car in January 1979. Both Rondell and Rich testified about the car jump, as did Julie and Jean. The two stuntwomen’s version of events conflicted with other accounts, such as whether the performers had taken a break that morning, who controlled the speed of the car, whether the stuntwomen did the jump properly, Julie’s differences with the director of photography, and whether drug use had contributed to the accident. Jean and Julie said that during rehearsals, the driver of the car, Bobby Bass, was not paying attention; “he was kind of not there,” Jean testified.12 They swore that, for safety reasons, they had all agreed the car would be going twelve to fifteen miles per hour, but when the scene was shot, Bass was driving twice as fast, which was why the women had been injured. Others testified they were hurt because they hadn’t jumped correctly. Julie and Jean insisted that during a short break just before the stunt, they had heard that Bass and others might have used drugs. No one else recalled taking a break or anyone using drugs.

  Bobby Bass and Julie Johnson both began stunt work in the mid-1960s, and both started to stunt-coordinate in 1978; he later became a second-unit director. Car work was one of Bass’s specialties, “spinning cars around in reverse 180’s, doing forward 180’s, 90-degree slides left and right, performing stunts from a car.” At the trial, he delivered a short course on the subject: “To get the noise, burn of rubber, screeching and other effects, you must know the surface. On a standard street surface, you’d use chlorine bleach or W.D.-40 on the tires, put the car in gear, push down the accelerator, and it will smoke and make the tires squeal.” To spin a car in a forward or reverse 180, he said, speed is important, but the deciding factor is the composition of the ground and whether it is flat or slanted. The easiest surface is standard asphalt or street paving; the most difficult is gravel or dirt. He admitted that Julie had regularly criticized the cars supplied to the show by Spelling-Goldberg as “buckets of bolts.” After citing his solutions for missing or inoperative seat belts, Bass noted that some passengers might not use seat belts if they “wanted to climb out when the car was moving.”

  About the 1979 car stunt, Bass testified that he had driven “very slowly . . . to accommodate the girls at a comfortable speed [so] they felt capable of jumping out of the vehicle.” He said that Jean Coulter hadn’t done this kind of jump before, so he told her the best way was to “get herself in position where she could stay as low as possible and parallel to the ground, to look in the direction we were driving . . . [because] if
something went wrong she could pull her legs in.” Bass testified that Julie had been planning to step out, turn her back, and do a rear roll, but he thought that was unsafe. He denied that they had agreed beforehand on a particular speed, claiming he had left it up to Julie to tell him how fast to go. He had slanted his rearview mirror to see the angle of the door “in case Julie Ann came out and something happened I could either apply the brakes or do a swerving action and not run over her or crush her legs or drag her.” “Isn’t it true,” Grey demanded, “that you and other stunt players were all aware that the camera would be under cranked so you could drive at a slower speed and it would appear that the car was going faster than it actually was going?” Bass denied knowing that.13

  Roy Harrison, a supervising stunt coordinator for Spelling-Goldberg, had been driving the car chasing Bass. Harrison testified that he saw “both ladies exit the vehicle.” He reiterated Bass’s advice that the right way to fall out of a car “is facing the direction you are going. The momentum takes you forward . . . I felt both ladies exited wrong, wrongly, because . . . they were facing the wrong way.” He estimated the car had been going about fifteen miles an hour.14

  After Julie and Jean returned from the emergency room, the crew was having lunch. Jean said, “Bobby . . . didn’t even come over to ask how we were and this was not like him.”15 Bass’s recollection of the lunch break was different. “I was already in line with some of the stunt people,” he said. “They came back from the hospital or wherever they went and they—wait a minute—we just went over to them right away and asked them how they were and all . . . we were concerned.”

  “Who was ‘we’?” Grey asked.

  “The stunt people like Howard Curtis, perhaps Roy Harrison,” Bass said. “I went over to see how she was and if she was okay.”