Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  Danny stunt-coordinated scores of episodes of Rescue Me (2004–2011), an action-packed soap opera about family and firefighters. “We did a fight scene between two women, and it’s the most vicious fight I’ve ever seen,” he recalled. “A couple of women behind the monitor were crying, that’s how ferocious it was. Stuntwoman Stephanie Finochio took a real beating.”11 “That was a really fun fight,” Stephanie yelled. “The actress was beating me up!” That’s hard to believe, given that from 2002 to 2005 Stephanie was known as “Trinity,” a professional wrestler on the World Wrestling Entertainment circuit. She’s not the only stuntwoman who has climbed into the ring; Caryn Mower, Jwaundace Candece, and Elle Alexander have been there too. “Wrestling is like a big stunt,” Stephanie said. “Men often do crazier stunts than women, but they can pad up. We are in tank tops and heels—no pads. That’s the fun difference! I love the physicality of stunt fights. It’s probably why I got into wrestling.” Stephanie grew up on Long Island, where her dad owned a motorcycle shop, so she and her two sisters learned to ride early. Stephanie also Rollerbladed, raced Jet Skis, and did gymnastics and martial arts. Despite having three college degrees, she couldn’t decide on a career until a friend from California mentioned the stunt business. That sounded ideal—beat people up, rappel down buildings, crash cars—what could be better?

  Stephanie Finochio, the target of the ferocious fight. (Courtesy of Stephanie Finochio)

  In the “vicious” Rescue Me fight, Stephanie doubled Callie Thorne (playing Sheila Keefe). Her opponent was actress Brette Taylor (playing Debbie). “Sheila and Debbie had gone over to the other side for a while,” Stephanie explained, “a lesbian affair that turned sour.” The women were dressed in summer skirts, tank tops, and flip-flops—no pads. Because the fight was filmed in the foyer of a real home—complete with hardwood floors and a staircase—“they couldn’t rig it or put down pads for us to land on,” Stephanie said. “Sheila, the role Callie played, is girly. Her girlfriend, Debbie, is the tomboy. Sheila wants to end the relationship. Debbie screams, runs up behind Sheila, slams her against the front door, and suddenly they’re in a big fight.” The fight had been rehearsed, but then things changed. “In any stunt, I take my bumps and bruises, but the actress playing Debbie wasn’t a stunt person. Actors get so into their parts. She slams me into the door, grabs the back of my head, hammers on me, we’re flying around that small space, she throws me to the floor. I’m down, she slams my face against the floor, banging away.” According to Stephanie, it might have seemed more realistic than a Hollywood stunt fight “because it was quick and brutal in a confined space, very like a fight that could have happened in someone’s home.”

  Danny Aiello and Vince Cupone, co–stunt coordinator, take a break after the harrowing fight scene. (Courtesy of Chrys Cupone)

  Stunt performers—and actors—can get carried away, but not all fights are that grueling. Some are challenging in completely different ways. For instance, a comic fight on Mr. Deeds (2002) was short and sweet compared to the time and effort it took to create it. Stunt coordinator Mary Albee doubled Conchata Ferrell, and Dorenda Moore doubled actress Winona Ryder.12 “Conchata is a wonderful actress and rather large,” Mary said, “a good contrast with Winona Ryder, who is petite. We were not on a set; we were in a practical location. The coordinator, Gregg Smrz, brought his equipment to rig the pizza parlor for us to work. In the scene, Conchata wanted to protect Adam Sandler (Deeds) from Winona, and the fight was on.” Mary was wearing a wig, a full prosthetic face mask (because Conchata’s character had jowls), and a full body suit that added seventy-five pounds. “Then they dumped sixty pounds of birdseed in the boobs to make the weight jiggle right,” Mary said. “The problem doing the stunt wasn’t the fight; it was what it took for me just to move. My knees were at least a foot apart, walking or standing, and I had to sit down a lot because the suit was so heavy. Once we’re into the fight, it escalates fast. I was to lift Dorenda over my head, spin her around—she was on a cable that held her over my head—and then I threw her into a table. She picked up a circle of pizza dough and tossed it over my head. I had the fat suit on, the prosthetics, pizza dough over my face, and now I couldn’t see. At that point, Dorenda was to jump up, kick me in the chest, and send me backward into the tables.”

  The reaction to a kick or a punch can be crucial in a staged fight; it intensifies the ferocity of the attack. Mary was on a ratchet, wearing a full harness and a jerk vest attached to the cable. When triggered, the ratchet was supposed to jerk her back over the tables—a physical reaction to the kick in the chest. “By the time I put on the vest and zipped up the fat suit, the pressure . . . squeezed my carotid arteries,” Mary recalled. “I could stand up for only a few minutes before the lack of blood flow made me dizzy. On the first take, Dorenda did a flying stunt kick, but I couldn’t see it coming—pizza dough over my head—and with the birdseed boobs, the vest, the harness, the fat suit, I didn’t even know she’d done it. I was still waiting for the kick. When you get ratcheted, you have to know it’s coming to keep your balance, and her kick was the cue to start the ratchet.” Once they figured out how to make it work, Mary flew wildly across the tables and into the chairs. “Not your standard fight, but it was comedy, and comedy is great!”

  That fight worked because all involved knew what they were doing, but sometimes a crazy stunt turns out to be impossible to perform. Tall, dark-haired Shawnna Thibodeau was doubling Charlize Theron in fight scene for Hancock (2008) that was filmed underwater.13 “We’re in a tank, we go way, way down, breathing in a regulator,” she said, “and then they take it away because we had to look like we were flying through the sky. They didn’t want bubbles to show and wouldn’t take them out digitally. We’re fighting, spinning around, throwing punches, which isn’t really hard underwater. For some reason, we had to keep our eyes open. It didn’t bother me, but Will Smith’s double, his eyes were so red he couldn’t see the punches coming. It was all so freaky.” When it was over, Shawnna still had to make it to the surface, but wardrobe had put her in high-heeled, thigh-high boots that had filled up with water. “I thought, ‘Oh, man, I’m stuck down here.’ It was so hard to stay down with no air.” Finally someone noticed, and the safety divers pulled her out. That stunt didn’t get past the testing stage—and they did a lot of tests. It just didn’t work.

  Most fights work amazingly well, and stuntwomen have turned in some memorable brawls in The Matrix franchise, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, G.I. Jane, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, Wanted, and Transformers. But Quentin Tarantino’s two-part action thriller Kill Bill gave new meaning to the phrase “a couple of broads throwing down.”14 In Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) stuntwomen Zoe Bell (doubling Uma Thurman) and Angela Meryl (doubling Vivica A. Fox) have a violent and deadly fight inside a house. Thurman plays the bride who was shot at her wedding by Bill’s assassination squad. Once she recovers, she seeks revenge and begins with former squad member Vernita (Fox). Combat starts the moment Vernita opens the door of her pretty suburban home. Their ferocious battle wrecks the living room, rages into the kitchen, and returns to the living room—until Vernita’s young daughter comes home. Instantly, both women hide their weapons and turn into Mom and Mom’s friend. Murder takes a sedate time-out. The child goes upstairs, and the two enemies adjourn to the kitchen for coffee. Their chatty tone seems normal—until Vernita takes a cereal box from the cupboard, reaches inside it, and fires the hidden pistol at the bride. She misses, and instantly the bride flings a knife into Vernita’s chest.15

  For Angela Meryl, who began doing stunts in the 1990s, that fight was “the ultimate experience.”16 To prepare, she trained with Master Wu-Ping doing what she loves best: all-out action. “I had to jump backward over a couch into a glass coffee table, which was blown about 12 inches before I hit it. Of course, you have your eyes closed, but your equilibrium is a little off since you don’t know exactly when you’re going to hit it. If you don’t land right you can break your neck.”17

  In Kill Bi
ll Vol. 2 (2004) New Zealander Zoe Bell took part in another rugged and inspired fight—this time with Monica Staggs, a gymnast and dancer from Arkansas. She was a college student when she played a maid in the low-budget film Shelter. Stunt coordinator Gary Wayton was having a hard time finding stunt people in Arkansas, and it turned out that Monica was the same size as actress Brenda Bakke. “I was a passenger in a car that goes over an embankment. It required no skill, but it was scary and I had to be brave.” That made Monica eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild. “I was trying to get acting roles in little theater. I asked my agent if I should join SAG. ‘Oh, no, honey. How much is it, a thousand dollars? You buy yourself a nice dress.’ That was the mentality.” Monica joined SAG anyway. A few months later the coordinator offered her a job in Los Angeles—falling backward into a creek. “I’m best known for hitting the ground really hard,” Monica said. “I found that out in LA. I was a skinny five-nine, and a guy said, ‘I want you for this movie because I hear you do the big banger stunts nobody else will do.’” Once she moved to California, she gravitated to a gym because, as a college gymnast, “every gym was like home.” The stuntmen there taught her martial arts; she taught them gymnastics. “No one ever said I couldn’t do something because I was a woman. They expected me to do the job I was hired to do. I wanted to hit the ground as hard as a guy and make it look just as good.” Once, when Monica heard someone say she punched like a ballerina, she felt embarrassed. “My fear of embarrassing myself helped my career,” she said. “My dad was an architect, my mother was a teacher. She was strict, she demanded As, so I was performance based, which didn’t serve me until I got here. I did whatever a coordinator wanted, trusting they knew more than I did. Later, you may find out you’re working for idiots and have to stick up for yourself. Some people back out of a stunt. Even if I’m frightened, I’m more scared of embarrassing myself, and that got me through a lot of terrifying stunts.”18

  Monica Staggs, from raging stunt fights to stand-up comedy. (Courtesy of Monica Staggs)

  Around 2000, Zoe Bell was doubling Lucy Lawless on the TV series Xena, Warrior Princess (1998–2001) when she met Jeannie Epper and filmmaker Amanda Micheli.19 They had teamed up to make a documentary about two stuntwomen of different generations, Double Dare (2004).20 Amanda was “attracted to the idea of women who make a living putting their bodies in danger. Doing crazy things with your body, that’s drama right there, and then you put tits on that body, well, it opens up a bunch of other issues!”21 Zoe, the “wide-eyed newcomer,” joined Jeannie, the “seasoned pro,” in the documentary, which described their separate stories and how they both carried on the traditions of superwomen heroines. The film included lively comments from Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Lynda Carter, and others. “Quentin had all kinds of advice for us,” Jeannie said. “He remembers his days working in a video store and wanting to be a moviemaker. He gave us the last $60,000 to finish Double Dare.” About the film, Zoe said, “I got to meet Jeannie and Amanda, two stunning women . . . and I got to do Kill Bill.”22

  Monica Staggs called her celebrated cage fight with Zoe in the trailer in Kill Bill Vol. 2 “a huge brawl with all those gnarly thrasher stunts. We spent about six weeks doing it. I thought I’d broken my ribs and for a year and a half I didn’t know I had a compression fracture in my back.” She was in tremendous pain but didn’t want anyone to know it. Doubling Daryl Hannah as the venomous Elle Driver, Monica wore a black eye patch to match her skin-tight black leather outfit and boots; Zoe, again doubling Uma Thurman, wore white slacks and a blouse and was barefoot. In the movie, Elle has just killed Bill’s brother by putting a black mamba in the cash-filled suitcase she has brought to his dilapidated trailer. She gathers up the money, lifts a samurai sword, and opens the door. A pair of naked feet punch her back inside. The bride has found Elle. Having no weapon, the bride uses kicks and punches to prevent Elle from unsheathing her sword. Elle jams the hilt of it into the bride’s face and clobbers her with it. The bride rips out a TV antenna and whips it like a rapier, sending Elle crashing into some dishes on the counter. They lock together, inches apart, each holding Elle’s sheathed sword. Elle smashes her head into the bride’s nose, but the bride fights back with anything she can find—a pole, a curtain rod, a guitar, a can of bacon fat. With murderous kicks and blows, they bounce each other off the walls of the confined space. Then Elle grabs on to a ceiling beam, raises her legs, and sends the bride across the room into a couch; her face is bloody and she is semiconscious. Screaming for vengeance, Elle charges forward and lifts herself into a beautiful killer leap—one leg straight out, one knee bent—as she sails through the air to give the bride the coup de grace. Just in time, the bride rolls off the couch. Elle misses her mark and crashes feet first through the wall and into the bedroom. The bride comes after her, grips her in a choke hold, and rides her down to the floor. Their furious battle goes into overdrive until the bride is knocked out. A triumphant Elle strides down the hall to retrieve her sword. Whipped and groggy, the bride spies a samurai sword in a set of golf clubs, unsheathes it, and leaps into the doorway, renewed. At the end of the short hall, Elle is armed and ready. In classic samurai stance, they rush each other and engage, swords crossed, faces inches apart. The bride jabs two straight fingers into Elle’s one good eye. Shrieking, Elle falls to the floor as the ragged, bloody, barefoot bride holds the eyeball between her fingers. She drops it and paces down the hall, passing the hissing black mamba on her way out.23

  Every fight depicts different characters with different motives, action styles, and weapons of choice. Choreographing or performing a stunt fight is an art, but the argument persists that violent movies (at which Tarantino excels) feed the audience’s unwholesome appetite for savagery. But what’s a movie without conflict? Some spectators still object to women being punched out or thrashed with a TV antenna, but movies and action are no longer the exclusive terrain of men. For centuries, real-life women have been well acquainted with violence in their homes, on the streets, and in war; they’ve been raped, beaten, tortured, and murdered. Now, onscreen and off, women do not suffer in silence; they take action. The horrific movie stunt fights described here represent a blend of aggression and femininity, an equal match of strength and skill in combat that is both intimate and lethal as it destroys everything around them in the most satisfying way.

  15

  Car Stunts

  Basically, you stand in the road and get hit by the car!

  —Chrissy Weathersby

  When women began driving cars in the early 1900s, they didn’t have educational, financial, employment, or voting rights. However, the heroic female characters in silent movies implied the possibility of very different lives. By 1915, action-oriented women were famous for their driving skills. But when moviemaking became a real business in the 1920s, Hollywood’s short-lived egalitarian era bit the dust. Except for glamorous actresses with star power, women were pushed aside. In the decades that followed, stuntwomen performed as swimmers or riders; they did falls and occasionally some fights, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that they worked their way back behind the wheel of a stunt car. Today, like their silent movie predecessors, they jump cars over fences, hurtle them into rivers, and do power slides that stop inches from a ravine. They are full-fledged professionals. If something goes wrong, how a stuntwoman adapts to the misadventure reveals a lot about her courage, her skills, and her character.

  Tall, blonde Shauna Duggins grew up jumping off cliffs with her dad and her brother. Her mother, a pilot, told her she could do anything. When Shauna got behind the wheel of a car for a stunt in 2002, that maternal reassurance would be tested. “I did a car jump into a lake,” Shauna said. “It was to sink down about eighteen feet, and when the pressure equalized, I’d get out.” That’s what everyone thought, but when the car hit the water, the impact damaged the front end, and the doors and windows didn’t open. Shauna couldn’t see three inches in front of her in the murky water, and she wasn’t sure the five
cameras in the car would be able to record anything. “About a minute later I realized, ‘I’m going to die in this car.’ That’s panic, and when it happens, it’s good to know you’ve got what it takes.” She pushed the panic aside and went through all the “what-if” plans she’d made in case the stunt went wrong. “Being able to do that comes from survival instincts and from being a competitor when the stakes are high.” Plan A: get air. “I had an air tank,” she said, “but finding the ten-foot hoop line floating in the dark water was not easy.” Plan B: try the door and window again. “You keep going through your plans until you get out. Once I had air, I grabbed the steering wheel, used that and my body weight to press against the door until finally I broke the seal, cracked the door open, and worked my way out.” The safety divers were looking for her some distance away, and in fact, no one on land knew what was actually happening beneath the surface. “Dimly on camera, they saw me moving around in the car and felt it was perfect. Only I thought I was going to die in that car.” That stunt wasn’t part of a big movie; ironically, it was for an episode of Worst Case Scenarios, a 2002 TV documentary series, intended to show how easy it is to get out of your car if it ends up underwater.

  Tracy Keehn Dashnaw, a tough rodeo rider turned stunt driver, had learned the limitations of cables while doing a car stunt in Cherry 2000 (1987). Years later she was in Canada doubling Kim Basinger in a little horror movie called Bless the Child (2000), and that’s when Tracy simply insisted on saving her own life.1 The script called for her to drive a car through a guardrail on a bridge spanning a river. The back wheels were supposed to get stuck, leaving the front of the car hanging over the edge, nose down, 200 feet above the water. Ever careful, Tracy went to the special effects shop with stunt coordinator Matt Birman. “I requested three cables,” she explained, “independent of one another, attached to three different parts of the car, and I wanted each cable hooked to different parts of the bridge. Cable doesn’t stretch, it can snap. If one failed, we had the other two.” She also asked for a test run with the car, but when they finally got to her sequence, the producers wanted to do it right away. When the car was brought out, it had three cables on the places Tracy had specified, but all the cables led through one big ring attached to one part of the bridge. Tracy wanted to reattach the cables and do a test, but it was late, and everyone was in a rush. “I knew the ring would not hold,” she said, “so I got in the car, put my foot on it pretty good, going faster than I would have, barreled straight down the bridge, not through the guardrail. The ring snapped!” Tracy had proved her point. “That was pretty sobering for everyone. Even when the pressure is on, you have to stop and say, ‘Here’s what we need to do.’ If I had not, that would have been the end of me. You always need a safety, you always need backup. The next day I wanted five cables for my own peace of mind.”