Backward or forward, 15- to 50-foot stunt falls have been done by just about everyone: gymnasts, acrobats, high-divers, and martial artists who are “good in the air”; riders or drivers who aren’t so good in the air; and rank amateurs.2 Only a few have done falls of 90 to 1,500 feet. These dangerous stunts can make awesome contributions to a movie, but even little falls can cause big injuries. Jeannie Epper’s daughter, Eurlyne, was thirty-seven when she suffered a severe neck injury in a four-foot fall. “She has a plate in her neck and never really regained her career,” Jeannie recalled sadly. “I don’t like to call it the luck of the draw, but our business is not safe. For a major stunt, every safety precaution is taken. The whole crew and cast seem to be in sync and you can feel the energy on the set, but on small stunts no one thinks a four-foot fall can cause a bad injury. Eurlyne was just going over a railing in a little fight, but she landed on her head. If she’d been doing a forty-foot fall, she’s so good in the air she would have been able to turn over and land right. But at four or six feet, you can’t turn. You just fall.”
Two talented women—Melissa Stubbs from Canada and Sophia Crawford from England—developed their skills and their grit before coming to America in the 1990s. Melissa Stubbs’s first stunt was a two-story fall from a window in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I had no plan of how I was going to land. I thought I’d figure it out on the way. I’m sort of like a cat, I save myself. But I had to wear a dress, heels and carry a purse, and that sure threw me off. I’m not a dress-heels-purse kind of girl.” In high school Melissa worked as an extra in the Vancouver film industry. She knew Betty Thomas, a stunt coordinator and second-unit director who, with her husband, owned Thomas FX—a special effects company.3 Melissa kept stopping by Betty’s office to ask for advice, and one day Betty hired her to jump out that window, doubling Donna Mills in The Lady Forgets (1989). “I’d never done a high fall, but I’d done every sport possible and I was fearless. My attitude was ‘Give me anything, I can do it.’ Betty really helped start my career.” There were more female stunt coordinators in the dynamic Canadian film industry than in the States, and in the 1990s, to avoid rising costs in Hollywood, American productions flocked to Canada.
Melissa Stubbs. (Courtesy of Melissa Stubbs)
Melissa has presence—she’s calm, competent, and enterprising. She started her own stunt equipment business “long before we did wiring and rigging.” She was twenty-three when second-unit director Michael Joy gave her the chance to co-coordinate the 1994 TV movie Snowbound: The Jim and Jennifer Stolpa Story. Glenn Randall, “a legend,” engaged her stunt equipment company and hired her to double Mia Sara on Timecop (1994), the Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie.4 “Glenn made me his co-coordinator. I was by no means ready, but he backed me.”
Showing up in Betty’s office had worked, so Melissa tried it again. Fresh from stunt-driving school, she heard that the likable, witty stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano was in Vancouver to set up Carpool (1996). “I walked in, said, ‘Hi, my name is Melissa Stubbs, I’m a stunt driver, you need drivers, and I’m your girl.’ He smiled. I was probably the age of his daughters and I hadn’t really done any stunt driving. He said, ‘How about I make you one of my special skills drivers?’ I didn’t know what that was—it’s basically a background car—but I learned a lot from Rick Seaman, Betty Thomas, and other great stunt drivers.” On Carpool, Melissa doubled Rhea Perlman as the meter maid on a scooter. “Any movie is hilarious with Conrad,” she said, laughing. “It was probably more fun to make than to watch.” Since 1995, Melissa has stunt-coordinated movies and television shows. In 2004 she became a second-unit director, a route few women have traveled.5
Melissa always knew what she wanted, but Sophia Crawford did not. She did not set out to learn martial arts, high falls, or wirework, and her journey into stunts was a remarkable one. Born in London, Sophia was one of triplets, plus she had an older brother and sister. Her mother died when she was twelve, and her father, a well-known economist and journalist, commuted to London from their home in Kent every day. “He left at seven in the morning and didn’t come back until midnight,” Sophia recalled. “We had so much freedom, no direction or discipline, and we got into trouble. I was expelled from four or five schools. In the mid-1980s I was sixteen and knew if I stayed in London I’d go down the wrong path.” To avoid that, Sophia and her sister Ingrid embarked on a bus trip to India that retraced the route taken by “hippie” buses in the 1960s. The idea was to see how much had changed in twenty years. From India, the sisters went on to Thailand, where Sophia taught English, worked as an extra in American films being shot on location there, and met film crews from Hong Kong—a burgeoning production center that churned out pictures filled with flying fists and feet and plenty of falls. There, in the Hong Kong–based film industry, “I finally found something I felt I could do well—action.” Sophia had no martial arts skills, but she applied herself and trained with members of legendary Jackie Chan’s stunt team. Her first years in Hong Kong were rough. The city was undergoing major social, political, and cultural changes. Sophia recalled:
Hong Kong was a British colony, everyone knew the lease was up, and they felt empowered. Toward me the team had two faces. Sometimes I went to karaoke bars with them, but as much as I practiced martial arts and studied Cantonese, on the set I felt quite segregated. No one would talk to me; it wasn’t the right thing to do. I was the gweilo—white ghost. The pay was crap, no union, no adjustments, no overtime, but I was thankful to be there. I trained hard and I learned. The girls fascinated me, Yukari, Moon Li, Sibelle Hu—I wanted to be like them. I didn’t care if people were unfriendly. One director screamed in my face, swearing, spitting. They were hard on us gweilos. I was so new they lost patience. Why did they bother with me? A director told me I didn’t have the best technique, but I had heart, I fought with passion. In a fight you have to get into that moment just as a good actor gets into the moment of the scene. Over those five years I improved dramatically. I was tenacious, I stuck it out.
Sophia Crawford. (Courtesy of Sophia Crawford)
Female action star Yukari Oshima (Story of Ricky, Fighting Madam) invited Sophia to join her all-Asian stunt group, Yukari’s Funky Action Crew. “She was a real stuntwoman and she inspired me,” Sophia said. “She created her unique fighting style out of her personality and taught me a combination of martial arts, stunt skills, and acting.” Sophia became known for her fights, but she did plenty of high falls, too. “The Hong Kong action teams used an early form of wirework. The equipment we now have was not available then,” she said. “We used ropes, leather harnesses, and a very thin aircraft cable. It couldn’t carry a lot of weight; it often snapped in a fight or fall, and there were a few bad accidents.” But Hong Kong stunt performers were creative—what they didn’t have, they improvised. “In the early 1990s they brought better cable from the U.S. and the newest harnesses marketed by AMSPEC in California.” The rest is history. The wirework invented in Hong Kong changed movies and stunts around the world. For Americans, the best-known example is probably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
Sophia performed in more than thirty Hong Kong films, including “girls with guns” action flicks such as Yes Madam. But she had no idea that these films had been exported to the West or that some of them had a cult following. When she arrived in Los Angeles in 1993, her modest manner gave no indication of her fast, ferocious fighting style of runs, jumps, and combat moves. Her skills got attention, however, and martial artist and stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt asked her to join his stunt team on the TV series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (1993–1996). In 1998 she doubled TV star Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Drawing on her Hong Kong experience, her vigorous martial arts moves became Buffy’s fighting style in at least 300 fight and stunt scenes. “Jeff Pruitt and I pushed hard to give the action sequences more of a Hong Kong style, sometimes at the expense of pissing people off. As the seasons progressed, Jeff was able to create a figh
ting style for each character that worked well, though we still wanted a little more artistic expression.”6
One stunt in an episode of Buffy (“Phases”) was not planned as a high fall, and Sophia’s training and strength saved her. Falls usually start on top of something; they don’t involve being hurled up from the ground and then down into a fall. Sophia described the stunt: “In a forest, Buffy stepped on a capture net that was supposed to fold up around her and lift her about six feet off the ground.” The special effects team worked to rig the net, but the production crew ran out of time, and when they got to the gag with the net, they had to shoot the rehearsal. “The net was made out of rope, big squares woven together. I stepped into position, the net captured me, then, like a slingshot, flung me with great power over and beyond the camera on the crane.” She had one elbow hooked inside the net, but her body was outside of it, and she had been hurled fifty feet into the air. “I saw treetops below me. If I hadn’t grabbed onto the net as it was coming down, I don’t know how I would have landed. It was terrifying.” Too late, the riggers realized that the sandbags providing the counterweight for Sophia’s 110-pound body had been left outside in the rain. They were too heavy, and as a result, she had been flung into the air like a rag doll. Unfortunately, the shot wasn’t good enough. “My woolly hat flew off. They couldn’t use any part of the shot,” Sophia said. Suffering from whiplash, and shaking from head to foot, Sophia had to do it again. She went into her trailer to compose herself, and stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt, who seemed even more shaken than she was, followed her. He asked her to marry him. She said “yes,” coolly walked back to the set, and did the stunt again.7
Sophia Crawford’s jump kick at Buffy stunt coordinator Jeff Pruitt. (Courtesy of Denise Duff)
Sophia Crawford survived her unintended high fall, but others weren’t as lucky. The movie Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) starred Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett; Wes Craven directed, and Alan Oliney, Murphy’s double on Beverly Hills Cop II, stunt-coordinated. Oliney hired almost every stuntwoman of color working at that time—Kym Washington, LaFaye Baker, Sharon Schaffer, and Sonja Davis, who doubled Angela Bassett.8 Thirty-two-year-old Sonja, a member of the United Stuntwomen’s Association (USA), had only about three years’ experience, but she was considered the up-and-coming African American stunt performer. She’d done a high fall from a Ferris wheel in Beverly Hills Cops III. “Sonja was a perfect size, great to get along with, had high morals, and was in top shape,” said Bonnie Happy, president of USA. The young performer was ambitious, and she wanted to be written into Bassett’s contract as her regular double. Any stunt person with career aspirations is willing to take risks, and Sonja was no exception.
On November 14, 1994, Sonja’s mother and brother were in downtown Los Angeles to watch her do a backward high fall from a ledge near the top of a four-story apartment building. She was supposed to land in an alley between two buildings, but the alley was only fourteen feet, ten inches wide—a narrow space for a fall and a big problem. The ledge Sonja stood on jutted out from the building about a foot, using up precious inches she needed because “a falling body tends naturally to drift out a few feet before landing.”9 She couldn’t simply push off the ledge; she had to “melt” off it, being careful to fall safely within the limited space of the alley and landing in the bag positioned on the ground below. “Typically, the rectangular bag would be positioned so that Davis would fall into it lengthwise,” Holly Millea wrote for Premiere. “The bag procured was fifteen feet, more than an inch too long to fit in the alley. It had to be placed so that Sonja would not fall into its length but into its width, which was only twelve feet.”10 Disastrously, the bag was set against the wall of the building from which Sonja jumped. That left three feet of exposed pavement between the far edge of the bag and the adjacent building. Anyone familiar with high falls would have questioned that placement, but no one did. The bag was pressed against the wrong wall, no boxes or pads covered the bare pavement between the far edge of the bag and the other wall, no safety spotters were in place, and none of the required drop tests or practice jumps were done.11 At the time, techniques were changing, and some high falls were done using wires—descenders—that can make falls safer. The Vampire in Brooklyn production team decided not to use safety wires.
According to Kym, at one point, she was supposed to do the jump. “I wouldn’t have done it,” Kym said. “It’s like, why do I have to go off backward that high? A lot of guys in the business won’t do those [falls]! You can’t be afraid to turn something down.”12 At the last minute, Sonja asked if she could do a different kind of fall. The director declined; he wanted a backward fall.13 The cameras rolled, the director called “Action!” and Sonja dropped into empty space. The back of her head hit the cement alley eight inches beyond the edge of the airbag. A nurse was on set, but there was no ambulance or doctor. In that Los Angeles alley, surrounded by lights and camera crew, Sonja Davis suffered the injury that caused her death thirteen days later, a calamity that still resonates today.
“Most people like to keep their feet on the ground,” said stuntwoman Nancy Thurston. “I like to be airborne.” Nancy, who began working in 1994, quickly became an admired high-fall performer. “It’s important to have the right people on the ground,” she told Inside Stunts, “people you trust to set the bag the way you want it. Measure the distance from the wall to the bag and fill in the gap with boxes.” High-fall specialist Jon Epstein said that anyone doing a fall “has to be able to coordinate his own high fall. He’s got no business doing it if he can’t. A stunt coordinator is just an extra pair of eyes on the ground.”14
Like Nancy, Leigh Hennessy, Jill Brown, and LaFaye Baker started doing stunts in the 1990s.15 They did not have family in the business, but they all excelled at sports, high-diving, trampoline, and gymnastics. Gymnast Lynn Salvatori had no industry connections either when she began in the late 1980s, but her independence and adaptability suited stunt work. Since her father worked for Conoco, she had grown up all over the country, eventually graduating from a college in Colorado with a degree in physical education. She had appeared in a commercial as a student and got her SAG card, which helped her pick up work in Los Angeles on low-budget horror flicks such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1989). “I thought of myself as the B-horror stunt queen,” she said. “High falls always get your attention. On a Honda commercial, I was to jump off the roof of a building, but when I scouted the location I saw the telephone wires were about ten feet below me and about ten feet out from the building. I went home to practice off the eighty-foot tower set up in my backyard. I worked to keep myself as vertical as possible for the first part of the fall before positioning myself to fall into the bag. People don’t realize in high falls your body will go out a few feet and then down. It’s physics.”
The type of high fall dictates where the bag below should be positioned. The week before Sonja’s accident, Lynn had used the same airbag for a backward fall from about forty-five feet on the TV series Earth 2. “I set the center of my bag twelve to fourteen feet out from the building because I knew how far out I normally go. If I’m doing a header, which is a forward somersault to land in the bag on my back—that puts your head closest to the building. Therefore, to protect my head, I move the bag in toward the building. If I do a back fall, take off backwards from the building, I’ll land in the bag on my back, but my head will be farther from the building, so I move the bag out from the building. For those falls, I usually set the center of the bag about fourteen feet from the building. Sonja fell into an alley that was less than fifteen feet wide, next to impossible to do.”
On another stunt, Lynn fell off a balcony.16 Again, she couldn’t jump or push off; she had to step off just enough to “sit down” and keep falling. “Even doing that, I was still twelve feet out when I landed. If you’re going down vertically, lengthwise, and land twelve feet out without pushing off, and the space between buildings is only fifteen feet, your head is going to hit whatever is not pa
dded on the ground. Sonja had practiced backward falls off a trapeze board into a net about fifteen feet below, but that wasn’t the forty feet she had to go, and no one measured how far out she went.”
Known as the “high-fall girl from Peoria,” Nancy Thurston grew up watching Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels. “Those strong women inspired and encouraged me,” she said. Nancy trained as a gymnast, rode horses, dreamed of being a jockey or a stuntwoman, and taught herself how to dive. “My dad was a retired colonel in the army, and he’d challenge me: ‘If you learn a two-and-a-half forward pike off the three-meter, I’ll take you to Six Flags in St. Louis.’” Each summer she learned a new diving skill and went to Six Flags, where she saw the high-diving show and told her dad, “I can do that.” Her college coach helped prepare Nancy for her interview with the U.S. High Diving Team. “When I was hired, my dad looked at what I’d be paid, added up the costs of living in LA, and kept shaking his head. ‘You’re not going to make any money—but you’re going to have a lot of fun!’” High-diving and gymnastics led Nancy into stunts. She doubled Kathy Long, five-time world-champion kickboxer, in Knights (1993) and worked with high-fall experts Jon Epstein and Bob Brown.17
From her experience on The X-Files (1993), Titanic (1997), and the TV series Charmed (1998–2006), where she doubled Holly Marie Combs for eight years, Nancy learned the “tricks” that are often thrown in at the last minute to make a fall different or exciting. “First they say it’s a twenty-foot fall. Great. Then they throw in the curveballs. ‘We need you to jump out a window.’ Fine. ‘You’re going to be barefoot, or naked, or on fire when you go through glass.’ Why not blindfold me, too? It’s not just the fall, it’s all the things that come with it. Then there’s wardrobe—skimpy. Stuntwomen know that going in. They accept it or get out. You can’t complain.” Her parents didn’t always like what she did, but they never said, “Don’t do that.” They would say, “‘You like getting hit by a car? You want to be lit on fire?’ Yeah, it’s great!”
Stuntwomen Page 22